Dr Jillian Spencer calls the Queensland government to urgently stop gender interventions

November 14, 2024

The child psychiatrist implores Health Minister Tim Nicholls to remember his speech to parliament last year

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Jillian Spencer has called on the new Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicolls to stop harm being done to children by the Queensland Children’s Gender Service.

Spencer was stood down last year by the Queensland Children’s Hospital for questioning gender interventions for children. https://www.binary.org.au/dr_jillian_spencer_makes_formal_complaint_to_human_rights_commission

In a passionate and respectful plea, Dr Spencer reminds Tim Nicholls about his speech to parliament last year and asks him to take action now that he is the minister for health.

So we know our new health minister fully understands the danger to children from the affirmation model which is the model that was used in the UK and is used in an identical way here in the Queensland Children’s Gender Service.

I call on Mr. Nicholls to decommission the Queensland Children’s Gender Service and return services for children with gender distress to mainstream children and adolescent services which can provide psycho-social interventions for gender distress and evidence based treatment for any co-morbid, mental health, or developmental conditions.

The Queensland government is to urgently stop the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children in Queensland.

Below is an excerpt from Tim Nicholls speech to parliament on the 13th June 2023. Please contact Mr Nicholls and respectfully ask him to follow through and safeguard children from dangerous ‘affirmation’ treatments and interventions.

Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill

The effect of the alteration of a child’s sex in the relevant child register is that the child becomes a person of the sex as altered for the purposes of a law of Queensland. We have significant and genuine reservations about permitting a child to alter their sex descriptor. Children under the age of 16 are often ill-equipped psychologically to make such a large and life changing alteration to their sexual identity and we should go down this path, as I said in my very early introduction, with caution and consideration.

Young people suffering gender dysphoria often have complex emotional issues. It has been clearly commented on that they often fail to appreciate the long-term consequences of their actions and decisions. We have only recently seen a series of articles in national media that have highlighted the very serious concerns of parents about the effect it has on children in relation to being able to make that decision at a young age without careful thought. That is not to say—and I do not say—that people make this decision either flippantly or quickly, but there does need to be a serious amount of consideration in relation to allowing it to go ahead, particularly without parental consent for children 16 and under, because it is well documented that the brains of young people do not fully develop until they are well into their twenties.

Children are often heavily influenced, as we know, by social media and peer pressure and can be reactionary towards parents and authority figures. Anyone who has children knows that to be the case; science and research show that to be the case. The experience of numerous clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock in the United Kingdom was that many of the children accessing that service were vulnerable and distressed and that rushed assessments of their needs led to woefully inadequate care and inappropriate treatment. They found that many of these children were dealing with a multitude of other issues, including anxiety, depression, traumatic backgrounds, a high incidence of autism—and in any research of the material, concerns in relation to the high incidence of children with autism seeking to change their gender comes through— homophobic bullying—equally disgraceful—and sometimes very chaotic living conditions. 

Further, the clinicians could not agree on what they were treating: were they treating children distressed because they were trans, or were they children who identified as trans because they were distressed, or a combination of both? Many of these children needed psychotherapy, but GIDS is not funded to provide that treatment. Consequently, if they met the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, which they invariably did simply by self-identifying as trans, they would proceed down the medical pathway—that is to say, they were referred for medical intervention involving puberty blockers before, in some cases, proceeding to irreversible treatment.