00:00We're talking about the care of people, young people, with gender dysphoria and gender dysphoria
00:07is where somebody is psychologically distressed and unhappy because the gender they feel they
00:15have is not the sex that they were assigned to when they were born.
00:20And it can be really major and cause lots of trauma to that person's life.
00:25And we're talking about two different kinds of treatment.
00:28There's a lot of focus on puberty blockers.
00:31Puberty blockers are actually not the main story here.
00:35It's actually quite rare for a child to get puberty blockers.
00:38This is where the child that qualifies for puberty blockers is often a boy and they've
00:45identified as a girl since early, as long as their parents can remember.
00:51And then when the secondary characteristics, as puberty starts and they start to look more
00:56like a boy, they get very distressed.
00:59And after a lot of consultation with the parents and assessment and so on, a small proportion
01:05of boys get the, well, it could be a girl as well, get puberty blockers which stop puberty
01:11going any further in terms of the secondary sex characteristics.
01:15The bigger, and so it's a tiny number, although people get worked up about it, the bigger
01:20issue is sex hormones in adolescence.
01:23And this is often in girls.
01:26And the thing here is it is complicated because girls often go through a period of gender
01:31fluidity.
01:32It seems to be a part of development of adolescent girls and questioning their sexual identity,
01:38not necessarily gender dysphoria.
01:41And so they need to be, but their social media gets wrapped up in this and they see other
01:45people having sex hormones and so on.
01:47And so this is a really complicated thing to assess and you need a sophisticated multidisciplinary
01:51clinic for both situations to assess it.
01:54And in fact, most of these girls don't go on to end up on sex hormones.
01:59They actually, they'll actually resolve or they'll identify as non-binary, queer or what
02:06have you, and are happy with, or relatively happy with that identity for themselves.
02:13Now Queensland government has just banned puberty blockers and sex hormones in under 18 in public
02:19clinics in Queensland.
02:22The excuse they've used is there was an alleged problem in one of the services in Cairns.
02:27The West Australian opposition has said that they'll ban these drugs and it's become a
02:32political issue internationally.
02:34Internationally, hugely controversial, especially in the UK.
02:37Yeah, because there was this report by a paediatrician called Hilary Cass and the Cass report argued
02:43that there was no evidence that these drugs benefited kids.
02:48And in fact, the evidence was not as certain as the Cass report made out, or as people's
02:54interpretation of the Cass report was made out, but it ended up in banning these treatments.
02:59Now the problem in Australia is that you've got the Queensland government banning them
03:05on the basis of a problem in one clinic, when they've actually got a world-class clinic
03:09in Brisbane.
03:10We also have a world-class clinic in Perth, they're two of the best clinics along with
03:14Melbourne.
03:15Sydney's been a bit rocky.
03:18These clinics, particularly the Perth clinic, have been following these kids closely and
03:22they find that the kids who decide, for example, to have puberty blockers, they don't have
03:29regrets.
03:30Very few of them back out as time goes on and so on.
03:33And it seems to do them good.
03:35The problem nationally is you get one state doing this, another state doing that, lots
03:39of political conflict.
03:41What's the science?
03:42And that's why the ministers asked the National Health and Medical Research Council, our peak
03:46health research body, to look at these guidelines.
03:50What does the science say and come up with new guidelines that could be applied across
03:53the country?
03:54Because the other problem we've got is some of this is happening in the private sector
03:58and there's anecdotal reports that GPs are giving these drugs out, which is far beyond
04:05their scope of practice.
04:07And so we need a national view of what's going on so that parents know what to expect.
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