One Nation Senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts are calling for an inquiry into gender affirmation practices for children. Both Senators have raised serious concerns about medicalising children’s confusion and note that medical experts are questioning the legitimacy of such practices in light of clinical evidence that indicates it is not best practice.

The motion is yet to be debated. Senator Hanson called out the Greens and Labor and any others who oppose her motion stating they will be responsible for the horrors of what is currently being inflicted upon children in the name of gender ideology.

You can add your name to a petition calling for an inquiry here. 

I have included the speeches of both Senators here in full as they are worth reading in their entirety. 

Senator Pauline Hanson:

Last week, I asked for the Senate to inquire into the following:

(a) whether children are being rushed into gender reassignment treatment, as has been suggested by University of Queensland Law Professor Patrick Parkinson;

(b) whether psychiatrists, such as Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior staff specialist in the Queensland Children's Hospital's consultation liaison psychiatry team, who question the use of puberty blockers without an appropriate mental health assessment, are being silenced;

(c) whether children are being over-diagnosed with gender dysphoria without proper consultation or mental health assessment;

(d) whether Australia should follow the United Kingdom and many European countries in adopting a more cautious approach to the prescription of puberty blocking drugs, amid concerns the evidence base for their efficacy is lacking;

(e) whether the Commonwealth should take a greater oversight and regulatory role in the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children, following the admission from the Federal Government that it has no idea how widely the drugs are being prescribed off-label for gender dysphoria

Debate on this referral will resume when parliament returns after the winter break, where it will then be put to a vote.

Concerned parents contact my office about this every week and I believe there is strong evidence to back up their concerns as to how this issue is being handled in Australia.

A growing chorus of experts in Australia are speaking out against it, at great risk to their jobs and reputation, and are revealing the harm it causes to children.

A growing number of Australian parents are feeling completely powerless against it.

A growing chorus of experts overseas are warning of its consequences.

Countries held by the Australian left to be progressive, like Sweden and Finland, are restricting it.

After a broad inquiry which found little evidence supporting it, the United Kingdom has virtually stopped it.

The rapid increase in Australian children being prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria deserves an comprehensive inquiry by this Parliament.

Last year, a freedom of information request revealed the alarming increase in this phenomenon.

It revealed a 10-fold increase in Australian children enrolled in public adolescent gender clinics from 2014 to 2021.

It revealed more than a seven-fold increase in adolescents receiving cross-sex hormone treatments over the same period.

And of greatest concern, it revealed a more than 100-fold increase in children being prescribed puberty blockers.

These were just the public figures.

The numbers are certainly much higher when children being treated by GPs and private clinics are included.

This controversy has been raised recently by Queensland paediatrician Dr Dylan Wilson, who has called for an immediate halt to these treatments by the Queensland Children’s Gender Service.

He’s called for an independent investigation into the process of diagnosis and treatment at the clinic.

In a letter to the chief executive of Children’s Health Queensland, Dr Wilson noted “the evolution of the treatment of gender-questioning children over the last three years has been exponential”.

He said that despite these developments, the service “continues to operate in the same manner it has always done with little or no regard for the evolution of information in the area of clinical practice.”

He said that in doing so, the service was “conducting poor quality medicine, lacking evidence base, that is causing harm to children”.

Just sit back and absorb that for a moment: a leading paediatrician is saying these treatments are harming children.

This man is not an idealist, a politician, or a media commentator.

He is an expert on children’s health.

He has said, and I quote: “There is no evidence of benefit for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender-questioning children, and there never has been”.

The Queensland Children’s Gender Service has almost a thousand kids on its books, and has the nation’s highest rates of cross-sex hormone prescriptions.

These are being given to children as young as 14 despite conclusive clinical evidence they cause permanent long-term health impacts such as:

• osteoporosis;
• impaired fertility and sexual function;
• negative impacts on brain development; and
• increased risks of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity, high cholesterol and diabetes.

I also refer to an article published this month in The Australian newspaper by Professor Patrick Parkinson.

Professor Parkinson is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland and former chair of the Family Law Council.

He has called this rapid rise of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ a public health crisis caused not by a disease, but by a social contagion.

He noted that anyone who raises concern about this issue is shouted down and vilified.

He’s absolutely right, because that’s exactly what happened to me when I raised this matter in the Senate last year.

He notes that it’s true a very small number of people genuinely suffer gender dysphoria, which is resolved only with cross-sex hormones and risky surgery.

He also noted that this fact has been seized and used to build an intricate web of lies and falsehoods, such as:

• the disproven notion that there are more than two genders;
• that it’s possible to change sex or be ‘non-binary’; and
• that every child has an innate gender identity that awaits discovery.

It is this web of lies that effectively forms the basis for the so-called gender-affirmation approach that is followed by children’s gender clinics across Australia.

It’s nonsense, and it’s not supported by the scientific or clinical evidence.

Professor Parkinson also noted that politicians have embraced this new faith without evidence.

The usual suspects in Labor, the Greens and the Coalition proved that last year in rejecting my motion for an inquiry.

Politicians in this country have actually passed laws supporting this new faith, effectively criminalising any other approach to supporting vulnerable children and even preventing parents from trying to help their own children in other ways.

As the professor pointed out, fashionable but unsupported ideas about gender don’t really matter if they do no harm.

But this is causing harm.

Children are being harmed, and families are being torn apart.

Earlier this year I met with some mothers who had gone through this with their children.

It’s been a wrenching, traumatic process for all of them.

They’ve seen their children influenced by teachers, their peers, social media into believing all their problems will be solved by switching genders.

This gender-affirmation ideology has all the hallmarks of a crazy cult – capturing impressionable minds, isolating them from their families, and ultimately destroying their lives.

One mother’s tale bears repeating.

She took her young teenage daughter’s gender-questioning very seriously, and sought all the psychiatric and psychological help she could.

These experts couldn’t compete with the indoctrination this poor girl was getting in her classes, in the schoolyard and on the internet.

The girl – aged only 14 – decided she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and demanded gender-affirming treatment.

Her mother did all the research she could, consulting with the same experts she asked to help her daughter.

Life at home became unbearable as her daughter grew increasingly estranged as she underwent appalling changes to her body thanks to cross-sex hormones.

Now 21, this young woman has completed her transition although she is bound to a lifetime of cross-sex hormone treatments.

And she is bitterly unhappy.

She is now so depressed about how she looks she only leaves her home a few times a year, deeply disguised.

Her family has been torn apart.

And I ask you: how was she any different from the generations of Australian teenagers who have been depressed or confused as they enter puberty?

How was she any different from them in seeking the approval of her peers and society at large, from seeking the attention all teenagers need as they approach the daunting prospect of adulthood?

She wasn’t.

The difference was she’s part of a generation that is being used to push a political agenda that is supported and promoted by many senators in this chamber.

As Professor Parkinson and Dr Wilson have said, this issue deserves the closest public scrutiny.

They have been joined by no less than the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists in calling for an inquiry.

Families which have been caused to suffer by this cult deserve the opportunity to tell their stories.

If Labor and their allies oppose this, then they are a science denier.

If they oppose this, they are deliberately ignoring experts who know a great deal more about it than you do.

If they oppose this, they are telling these Australian families they don’t care about their trauma.

They will be telling these families they don’t care about their children.

They will be telling these families they care more about a political agenda than the wellbeing of the most vulnerable people in Australian society.

If they oppose my inquiry then the question should be asked, what are they afraid of?

The answer is simple, Labor are you afraid of the evidence that will emerge to expose this cult for what it is.

They're afraid they will be exposed as complicit in the experimentation which has been proven to destroy lives.

Mark my words: if the Labor, the Greens and others in the Senate, deny this inquiry, those responsible will not escape accountability.

History, and the Australian people, will condemn you them.

Let us act now, in the best interests of Australian children and families, and make sure healthcare in this nation is based on clinical evidence rather than ideology and political agendas.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support Senator Hanson’s motion to refer the issue of treatment options for young people with gender dysphoria to an inquiry. It’s a simple fact that the model of gender affirmation is completely experimental, and that’s at best. More likely, it’s mutilation and debasement of children. Gender affirmation treatment is putting children who feel confusion about their gender at a young age on the pathway to life-altering hormone blockers and irreversible surgery. It’s butchery when children need something else.

People seem to have difficulty accepting this, but some feelings of confusion are completely normal as teenagers make their way through puberty and experience many new changes to their bodies. Left alone or dealt with by counselling and therapy—and love, in the severe cases—these feelings almost always resolve themselves. That is fact. Children need love, compassion, support and respect.

I have a relative who had gender dysphoria much of her life. She contemplated gender surgery. She decided to start the process. She made the decision, and, before doing so, she decided she would not adopt chemicals or surgery. She and her doctor wife came to accept her dysphoria. They are now proud parents of a lovely young child, and we accept and love her regardless of her decision. I have a friend who did change gender the opposite way, from male to female—another lovely person. These people need to be accepted, but children need support, counselling and love, not chemicals and scalpels.

As I said, the alternative to this gender affirmation is leaving kids to work through their issues lovingly, with support, counselling and therapy. The alternative is gender affirmation. Gender affirmation involves telling children that sex is just an arbitrary concept—that’s a lie—and that you can choose to be a boy or a girl whenever you want; with a click of the fingers, you can change teams with little to no consequence. Introducing this idea around the time of puberty and of other feelings of confusion is a dangerous, risky cocktail. Right at the time children are feeling most confused, they’re told that nothing is real and that everything will be fixed if they simply switch teams. The gender affirmation witch doctors won’t tell children that fully committing to pretending to be a boy or a girl, if they weren’t born that way, simply isn’t simple. Basic biology gets in the way.

The only way to try and eventually effect this change is through a potent, permanent and dangerous cocktail of drugs, they are told, often prescribed off label in addition to permanent, irreversible surgery to lop off bits of people’s bodies. Gender affirmation advocates claim these treatments are reversible. That is a lie. Many children who were pressured into the gender affirmation pathway are coming to regret those choices as adults. De-transitioners are a growing community of adults who now find they will never fully embody their target gender yet are unable to return to the gender they were born due to the irreversible effects of gender affirmation drugs and surgeries. Instead, they’re left dependent on expensive cocktails of gender hormone drugs for the rest of their lives.

The real winner out of the gender affirmation pathway is big pharma, being delivered waves upon waves of medication-dependent consumers for life. It’s worth billions of dollars, despite the small number of people. The victims of the gender affirmation pathway, though, are left destitute, with no accountability for the outcomes that extremists in the gender cult pushed onto them from an adolescent age—extremists like senators in this chamber—for whatever reason.

It’s important to keep in mind the issue that’s trying to be fixed here: feelings of confusion or stress in children going through adolescence. There’s no longitudinal evidence that the gender affirmation pathway leading to gender reassignment fixes the core issue. There’s much evidence that it does not and that it does enormous harm. In fact, the transgender community is at the highest risk of suicide of nearly any community in the world. Why? Because so many young people come to regret their change and are trapped—trapped for life, in being unable to change back to their birth gender, which they’ve come to accept. They are trapped for life, unable to have children themselves, unable to live a normal life and regretting their decision for the rest of their life because they made their decision as an impressionable child. Whether they’re simply predisposed to psychological distress or that distress is created or compounded by the failed gender affirmation pathway is difficult to say. What can be said, however, is that if reassignment surgeries and drugs are meant to be a cure for psychological distress in children, they have absolutely and obviously failed. They’re failing many, many children.

The truth is that putting children on the gender affirmation pathway is a pathway to butchering people for no healthy clinical outcome. Many medical whistleblowers have raised these concerns. I’ll say that again: many medical whistleblowers have raised these concerns, yet have been shouted down by the powerful big pharma and transgender cult that holds power at the moment. The United Kingdom has seen this problem and lived this problem. After whistleblowers blew the lid on medical abuse happening at Tavistock gender clinic, the entire clinic was shut down—the entire clinic that was once held up on a pillar and treated as a god. Now it’s facing class action suits and people are recognising the hideous crimes that they have committed.

At the very least, these issues need to be referred to a committee for inquiry. Those who support the gender affirmation pathway shouldn’t be afraid of the truth through an inquiry. What’s wrong with knowledge? If I’m wrong, then an inquiry will prove you right. Of what are you lot afraid? Greens use labels. Labels are the refuge of the ignorant, the dishonest or the fearful. They support big pharma. Please stop demonising children with gender dysphoria and those who have a different view. I suspect the gender cult knows that the truth is not on their side and that’s why they’re running scared of looking underneath the hood on this issue—an issue affecting children.

One Nation will stand against sending children down a path of drug dependency and body mutilation to appease the gender cult. I’m never caught up in gender, race or national heritage. Every human, regardless of skin colour, for example, and regardless of heritage, has red blood running through their veins—every single human.

We are one. I am very, very pro-human.

Send this to an inquiry and get to the facts and find out what will actually help children. Until then, leave our kids alone.