Episode 1

Warning: this episode contains some explicit language and discussion of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.

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Transgender rights. It’s possibly the most successful civil rights movement of all time. It’s a cause that’s been swiftly and enthusiastically embraced by government, corporates, media and many of our once trusted institutions. Any criticism of the trans rights movement is branded as bigoted, transphobic, even fascist or neo nazi. Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, refers to women like me as anti-trans rights campaigners. But most of us prefer the term gender critical. 

We’re critical of the transgender movement. Because behind the rainbows and glitter and drag queens, we see something dark and disturbing taking place. 

My awakening came in June 2020, during one of the many covid lockdowns here in Melbourne. While scrolling Facebook, Harry Potter author JK Rowling kept showing up in my feed. The headlines were shocking. She was a transphobe. I thought she must’ve said something straight out of the 1950s and I didn’t want to know. So I kept scrolling. But, she kept coming up in my feed. So eventually I read one of the articles. 

It explained that Rowling had written an essay that had caused great offense. But I didn’t understand what was so offensive. So I went to her actual essay to read it for myself. And I still didn’t get it. There was nothing hateful in her words and frankly, I was shocked by the issues she was raising – issues I had never heard about here in Australia.

Down the rabbit hole I went. I learnt that a male, mixed martial arts fighter had competed against a woman and fractured her skull. A man on remand for rape had been placed in a women’s prison and had -unsurprisingly – sexually assaulted women prisoners. Homosexuality was now considered transphobic. Gays and lesbians were being told to unlearn their genital preferences and date trans people. And suddenly no one knew what a woman was. But women definitely weren’t the only people who could get pregnant– now men could also give birth. All this under the cover of transgender rights.

I was genuinely in a semi state of shock for a few months, whispering out loud to myself “this is Orwellian”. And then I found the others. The gender criticals. A motley crew of feminists, gays and lesbians cast out of their own movement, and some Christian conservatives. I started a chat group, then a Facebook group, and then a YouTube channel. I had a website built and coordinated an event in Hobart called Gender Identity in Law. I organised a few protests and had some articles published. I had become an activist.

But for me, what’s even more sinister than the assault on women’s rights, is what’s happening to children and families in the name of LGBTQIA+. Children as young as three years old are being diagnosed as transgender. Thousands of teenage girls, with no history of gender dysphoria are suddenly declaring that they’re boys. And youth gender clinics are all too eager to tell them yes, you are transgender and we can turn you into a boy. 

Michael Biggs

Puberty blockers at 12, cross sex hormones at 16 and at 18 you’d start the surgeries

Dylan Wilson

well I’m a doctor and I can tell you that’s exactly what they do, those children are being sterilised all over the world and in Australia,

Judith Hunter 

they said wouldn’t you rather have a live son than a dead daughter,

John Whitehall

I think a fundamental issue here is that nobody could believe that major children’s hospitals could embark upon such a program which does not have scientific backing to it.

Dianna Kenny

It is going to be viewed as one of the worst medical scandals in history,

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You’re listening to Desexing Society, I’m your host, Stassja Frei. Episode 1: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

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Judith Hunter

I became aware of the transgender issue when my daughter announced out of the blue that she was actually a male and wanted us to call her a male’s name and take her off to the doctor and she said she wanted testosterone and that we must go along with this. 

That’s Judith Hunter. She and her husband John are the only Australian parents who’ve spoken publicly, under their real names, about the nightmare parents face when a teen declares they’re trans. 

If you’re like I once was, you might think it takes years of careful psychotherapy before doctors sign off on hormones or sex reassignment surgery. Not anymore. And it’s not called sex change anymore, because that’s transphobic. It’s called gender affirmation.

Judith Hunter

At the time I was pretty sceptical because I knew that she didn’t have any history of gender dysphoria, she was 17 and I also knew that there were several other girls in her drama group who were saying similar things, that they were claiming that they were actually boys. So my curiosity and sense of wanting to dig deeper made me start digging deeper and what I found pretty quickly was that this was clearly a global phenomenon that had erupted in the last 10 years or so and was spreading like a contagion among teenagers.

It’s known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a term coined by American physician Dr Lisa Littman. She’d noticed on social media that girls in her small town were announcing they were transgender. At first she thought it was great they felt comfortable coming out. But as the 5^th, 6^th and 7^th girl announced they were trans, she became concerned and began looking into it. She lurked in online spaces and saw teens asking “does this make me trans?” and the answer was always, “yes! And you need to start medical transition now, otherwise you’ll regret it.” There was also advice on how to trick your parents into agreeing to cross sex hormones. So Lisa developed a survey for parents and used the data as the basis for her 2018 paper titled, Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.

Finally, clinicians and parents had a term for this new phenomenon. Lisa hypothesised that social influences and maladaptive coping mechanisms were at play.

Judith Hunter

She was a young person who was clearly influenced by her peer group and so, found the answer to her adolescent angst was supposedly that I’m trans and I, sadly I believe that’s a lie that’s being sold to a generation of questioning young people.

One evening in October 2018, Jude was scrolling Facebook when she came across a post from her daughter announcing she was a transman, used he/him pronouns and her new name was Jax. Jude immediately went and asked her what this was all about. Things got heated. She was already concerned about her daughter’s three-year battle with poor mental health. And she knew about the girls at drama class calling themselves boys. But nothing could’ve prepared her for what happened next. A few days later, her daughter had a session with her regular psychiatrist, and this was where things really blew up. 

Judith Hunter

she told the psychiatrist that she was suicidal, and that’s what they’re taught to say that your parents, if they don’t immediately get on board, you say you’re suicidal, so clearly the psychiatrist had no choice but to instruct us to take her to hospital because he couldn’t risk his career by just telling us to ignore her suicidal ideation

Jude’s husband John handled the admission. It took all night because suicidal ideation isn’t immediately life threatening. John collapsed into bed at 7am and then it was Jude’s turn to visit the hospital. 

Judith Hunter

and when I got in there, already there was a male name above her bed and I asked to see my daughter, I was told I had a son. I said that’s not her name above the bed, I was told that was her name. I said, this is ridiculous, I was told I was transphobic, I was told I was bigoted, I was told I was not inclusive, they said wouldn’t you rather have a live son than a dead daughter, they immediately wanted to refer her to the endocrinologist for hormones – this is without even any, any proper psychiatric analysis, they were just immediately saying this is what we’re doing. And I said no no no, we’re not agreeing to that appointment with the endocrinologist, that’s just absolutely crazy [ fade]

I can only imagine how incredibly disorienting this was for Jude. 

Judith Hunter

It’s really like you’ve suddenly been flung into a parallel universe that is a mad house. It’s, you don’t believe that these things are happening, they don’t make sense 

Parents around the world report being asked that infamous question: “would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?” Critics call it emotional blackmail.

Judith Hunter

we were vilified to such an extent that from that point in time, our family was fractured, broken. Our daughter saw that we were the enemy because we wouldn’t jump on board the trans train. We were vilified by the doctors, told what terrible parents we were for not goingalong with it, so she had the support of the health professionals on her side, going along with her self-diagnosis, and mum and dad suddenly became the enemy and so, therefore our family just fell apart [fade]

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Dianna Kenny

So parents have been taking their children to these so called bastions of safety to get support for their children’s mental health issues, only to be horrified that their children are being automatically affirmed the minute they walk in the door. So even these places that are charged with the care and management of children’s mental health issues are actually perpetrating further damage on children and their families 

Dr Dianna Kenny has been working with trans identified teenagers since 2017 She’s a former Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, specialising in child developmental psychology. She now runs a very busy private practice, busy because she’s one of the few clinicians in Sydney that offers explorative psychotherapy for gender dysphoria. The alternative to Dianna’s approach is called gender affirmation which involves the therapist supporting the client’s belief that they’re the opposite sex.

A colleague reached out to her in 2016 concerned about the rise in teenagers presenting at his clinic with gender dysphoria.

Dianna Kenny 

He sent me a couple of articles and so I started to become interested and then concerned and then extremely alarmed at what was going on and sort of got drawn into it because it was such a horrifying thing that I was observing

Stassja

You said you were alarmed and horrified, what was so disturbing about what you were seeing?

Dianna Kenny 

with all of the institutions who are supposed to be safeguarding our children, they’ve all drunk the kool aid of the transgender lobby and have fallen in behind a completely fallacious ideology that has no basis in science or logic.

Part of the fallacious ideology Dianna mentioned, is the belief that trans people know who they are. That a three year old boy or a ten year old girl knows without a shadow of a doubt, that they’re meant to be the opposite sex. Clinicians should therefore take a back seat and let the child decide when to start puberty blockers or cross sex hormones. I’m not exaggerating. It’s built into the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, a document produced by doctors at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, a document we’ll examine more in the next episode. In those Standards of Care it states, “decision making should be driven by the child or adolescent wherever possible.”

In her practice, Dianna takes an exploratory approach when working with trans identified young people. She’s seen time and again that gender dysphoria is often the manifestation of other issues the child is grappling with – what Lisa Littman called maladaptive coping mechanisms. Something she’s seen more than once is a family with two children – a boy and a girl. The father is very close with the son, going surfing or fishing or camping, but he doesn’t spend much time with the daughter. He’s not doing it maliciously and often doesn’t even realise this dynamic is playing out. But for the girl, she interprets this as her father no longer loves her. And using her child’s logic, she thinks if I was a boy, like my brother, then dad would love me again and want to spend time with me. This is just one example.

Dianna Kenny

The thing that I’ve discovered working with this population of young people, is how individualised the problems are. And how they’re expressed in gender dysphoria, so the underlying issues are incredibly complex and there’s no set presentation you’ve go to be so cautious and careful about helping the young person unpack what’s going on for them. And with the younger adolescents I work very closely with parents and I state that up front to the young person that this is a family matter, it’s a family enterprise and while the child is a minor and living at home it’s really important that the family is involved in treatment. 

Dianna’s approach is so sensible, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could possibly take issue with it. But we are in very strange times and trans activists would consider Dianna to be practicing “gender identity conversion therapy” which to them, is as morally reprehensible as gay conversion therapy. Their argument relies on the idea that being trans is innate, in the same way that being gay or lesbian is considered innate. If a child is inherently trans, then any therapy aimed at making them not trans is conversion therapy. But this is precisely what’s at issue: are these children inherently transgender, or is something else going on? And if something else is going on, then isn’t talk therapy the safer option compared to medical interventions?

If that’s Dianna’s approach, what’s on offer at public gender clinics? Well, according to their website, the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service offers an initial assessment that might be with a nurse or a doctor. Then you get four appointments with either a psychologist or psychiatrist and then you’ll be seen by a paediatrician. That’s five sessions to decide whether a child is transgender, and then off to the paediatrician to be assessed for puberty blockers or cross sex hormones.

Dianna Kenny

Look I can only say it’s laughable. The children I’m working with and the adolescents, some of them I’ve been seeing weekly for one two and three years so far, because the issues are so profound that you can only scrape the surface in five sessions and because there’s already a bias towards affirmation, the kind of interviews these children are having at the Royal Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, where the majority of staff are captured and are expecting that the child is transgender, they’re just going to do the “are you sure?” questions.

Dianna’s assessment that these kids have profound underlying issues is backed up by research from Sydney’s Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Clinicians there undertook a study of 79 children and teens presenting with gender dysphoria. They found 63% had anxiety, 62% depression, 35% behavioural disorders including ADHD and 14% had autism spectrum disorder compared with only 1-2% of the general population.

There were also high rates of adverse childhood experiences, with 66% having experienced family conflict, 64% having a parent with a mental illness, 60% having lost an important person like a parent through separation, and 54% having experienced bullying.

This research raises many questions. Is poor mental health a result of gender dysphoria or adverse life events? Are these children going to be transgender in adulthood? Or have they latched on to the idea of being trans as a solution to their other problems?

In the three years prior to Jude’s daughter announcing she was trans, her mental health had been in decline. She was diagnosed with depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. And she’d had two psychiatric inpatient stays. But nothing seemed to be helping.

Judith Hunter

We went through public, we went through private, different psychologists, different psychiatrists, different diagnosis. At the end of the day, I sat down and counted up in that three years I’d taken her to 70 different medical appointments. So all I ever did was try and seek help for her. And I found the mental health system to be an absolute minefield. I don’t think I ever got really good help in that time. And I think the only person who ever made a proper diagnosis in that period was the psychiatric registrar who did admit her to hospital that time, and he said he thought she had borderline personality disorder. And that diagnosis of his was dismissed by the staff once she got into the adolescent unit, they dismissed his diagnosis. So yeah, a terrible, terrible failing of practitioners treating somebody and then to just immediately jump on the trans thing and pretend the three years before that hadn’t even happened and that there weren’t red flags to say, this is a troubled young person who’s been struggling.

I first met Jude on Facebook. Eventually we had a phone call. At the time, I was on a crusade to win back women’s sex based rights, but during that phone call with Jude, I felt absolutely useless. There was nothing I or anyone could do to undo what had happened to her daughter. 

Judith Hunter

And they actually wrote up a discharge summary and said that we agreed to the referral to the endocrinologist, I didn’t find that out til many months later when I got my hands on a copy of her discharge summary from that admission. But yes, they falsified her discharge summary and said we agreed to the referral, and then unfortunately as the timing goes, she turned 18 a month later and she took herself off to the appointment that they made against our wishes and they started her on testosterone.

Given the extreme and irreversible changes caused by testosterone – changes like facial hair, body hair, a permanently deepened voice, bone growth in the jaw and brow ridge, male pattern baldness, an enlarged clitoris – wouldn’t you want to be as certain as possible that this is right for the patient? Shouldn’t it be an absolute last resort after psychotherapy just hasn’t helped? Why were the clinicians so intent on transing Jude’s daughter? 

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Sandra Pertot is a recently retired clinical psychologist with five decades of experience. She did her master’s degree in 1972, and was part of the first wave of therapists specialising in human sexuality. This was around the time the lesbian and gay liberation movement was starting to gain traction. With more exposure to gay rights and gay culture, more young people began to question whether they were perhaps gay.

Sandra Pertot

I would see, particularly young males, I would see females as well, who had come to the belief that they were gay because they looked at a guy’s dick when they went into the urinal or they were looking at naked men in some sort of books. And what they were doing was keeping on looking at these people, checking to see if they were still- there was no sexual arousal attached to it at all. So I can’t see the difference between working with this population of young people who thought they might be gay and helping them find out what was the best pathway for them and this young group now. It was never my job to tell them whether they were gay or not. 

It’s not hard to imagine that exposing children and teens to the idea of transgenderism might lead some of them to question whether they’re meant to be trans. For teenage girls in particular, it would be easy to interpret discomfort with sex-based stereotypes as a sign you’re meant to be a boy. 

Sandra Pertot

And to say that somehow we’re anti trans by not immediately affirming is like saying I was anti-gay because I didn’t immediately affirm these young boys who thought they were gay because they’d go into a urinal and look at a guy’s penis. Where is the professionalism in just going along with them, “oh yes you’re doing that therefore you’re gay.” So my biggest distress is actually with the health professions. It’s appalling to hear of cases in Australia where a mental health professional will say to the parents, do you want a dead daughter or a live son? To me, those words alone should lead to some sort of complaint and penalty for using that sort of emotional manipulation on parents. It’s totally inappropriate. 

Sandra also sees parallels between the current gender affirmation model and the recovered memory movement of the 1980s. In the 70s the horrifying extent of child sexual abuse was being uncovered. And by the 80s a theory became popular amongst many therapists that memories too traumatic to face, such as childhood sexual abuse, could become buried in the subconscious mind. Through recovered memory therapy, such memories could be brought to the surface for examination and healing. 

Sandra Pertot

there was a book called the courage to heal and it became a very popular book and almost a bible for therapists working with people with histories of reported sexual abuse. And basically they said if they say they’ve been abused, they’ve been abused. What does that remind you of?

It reminds me of online trans communities where teens questioning whether they’re trans are told “if you think you might be trans, it means you are trans.” 

Sandra Pertot

And the other things is these therapists would go looking for it. This is what really was dangerous. They would probe the client to discover whether there’d been any hidden sexual abuse. And if you ask people leading questions and they’re trying to solve a problem and you’re taking them down a pathway that says this could be the reason why you’ve got these problems, that’s manipulation, because it’s not coming from the person. One of the therapeutic skills is to learn how to ask questions that aren’t going to take your client down a pathway that’s not right. There was a very early experiment done in the 60s by a research group Truax and Carkhuff and they did a number of studies showing that when a therapist or a health professional is sitting with a client, you cannot do value free therapy. Everything youdo – all your facial expressions, the questions you ask, the questions you don’t ask, the way you sit – all of those things convey information to your client about what you want from them.

The gender affirmation model ignores over a century of psychoanalytic research as well as decades of research on gender dysphoria. It also ignores the lessons learned from the recovered memory movement. 

Sandra Pertot

So then of course that all blew up it meant that some people were charged with crimes of sexual abuse which were later found to not be possible. But it ruined a lot of families. And there’s a very clear similarity between “if they say they’ve been abused they have”, “if they say they’re trans, they are.” And I think it’s probably going to take another five years or so but it’s all going to fall over and all these therapists that have been gender affirming are suddenly going to be very quiet, in the same way that people who’d been literally manipulating their clients to come to the view that they had been sexually assaulted, no one talks about it.

I want to briefly introduce you to Julie – not her real name. Like Jude, Julie was taken off guard when her daughter Claire – also not her real name – suddenly declared a trans identity. 

“Julie”

It came up in Claire’s first term at high school, so she was 12, actually 11 turning 12 and she was really withdrawn and coming home from school crying and not wanting to talk about the day and really upset and one day she was just inconsolable and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and I asked her what was wrong and she asked if I would still love her if she was a boy.

Claire fits the profile identified by Sydney’s Westmead researchers, in that she had experienced the loss of her father through separation and was suffering depression. 

“Julie”

I had referred her to CAMHS – child and adolescent mental health service – a couple of months before that because I was concerned about her self-esteem and a bit of self-harm. She was very close to her dad when he walked out when she was two and never came back, doesn’t see her at all, lives overseas. So I’m conscious that there are a lot of self-esteem issues anyway. So when the sort of self-harm came up I thought right, I’ll take her to CAHMS and then a couple of months after she came home and said that, so I went and spoke to her practitioner at CAMHS and I went and spoke to her school.

Claire’s case worker at CAMHS was not a medical doctor, but a social worker. 

“Julie”

I was called in after a meeting with him and he had offered Claire puberty blockers and chest binders and a referral to a gender clinic at the women’s and children’s hospital here, all without warning me or prepping me or consulting me about whether or not I was happy for these things to be offered and I was really angry about it and started to challenge him – Claire was still in the room – but I let him know I was really unhappy about that and I wanted a hell of a lot more information before it got that far and he’d given her some leaflets tosome other sort of groups that I looked into and they were all very affirmative model of care – affirmative, affirmative, affirmative – and I thought, I want my child to go somewhere where she can analyse, and question and talk through her feelings, not be instantly told, right if you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable that’s it, you’re in the wrong body. So that’s when my alarm bells really started going off cos I thought hang on, this all seems very, very rushed at this stage she’s just 12, ya know. 

If you’ve not heard of breast binders, they’re little vests that you wear underneath your clothing to flatten and compress the breasts. Like corsets worn in the Victorian era, they restrict breathing and movement. Worse, they can lead to malformed breasts and broken ribs.

“Julie”

To me, a binder is telling her that there’s, her body’s not good enough and there’s something wrong with having breasts, and there isn’t. 

Julie went away and did some reading. The social worker had told her that puberty blockers were reversible, but what she found online said otherwise. She was alarmed that a public health service was giving her false information. She decided Claire would not be returning to CAMHS and she wanted to tell the case worker why.

“Julie”

So I rang up, but he was away, the case worker was away that day and I got a different guy and he said, I’m going to speak to you off the record, he said, “do not ever take your child to the gender clinic, quite a few of us here at CAMHS are really concerned about this push, kids are very quickly diagnosed,” in inverted commas, “by people that aren’t qualified to do so and they’re raced off to the gender clinic where they measure their success rate against the amount of conversions not any sort of data around child and adolescent health and mental wellbeing, it’s just the amount of transitions they make” which I thought was interesting coming from an internal guy but he said they deal with it all the time and they can’t say anything ‘cause they’ll lose their jobs so, it’s like a big issue. So that was the end of the road for me with CAMHS. I’m still trying to find a psychologist or a practitioner that I feel I can trust. I’m very nervous now that someone will start talking to my child who desperately needs, I feel, a bit of counselling, but I’m terrified they’re going to push her down this affirmation path.

I wanted to share this part of Julie’s story because I think it illustrates exactly what Sandra was describing: a mental health profession completely taken in by a dangerous fad. There’s no recognition amongst gender clinicians that rapid onset gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon. Rather, there’s open hostility towards therapists that raise such concerns. Their only explanation for the huge increase in teenage girls presenting with gender dysphoria, is that society has become more accepting of trans people, and so these girls now feel safe to come out as trans boys. 

The other striking detail from Julie is the CAMHS clinician who advised her to never take her daughter to the gender clinic. It’s unclear whether gender clinics are measuring their success by the number of children that are transitioned. But the clinician’s fear of being found out, of feeling unable to criticise the affirmation model, is real. Both Dianna and Sandra have faced threats to strip them of their licence to practice psychology. In Dianna’s case, she was working as a professor at the University of Sydney at the time.

Dianna Kenny

I’d been invited to give some presentations to the mental health networks run by NSW health and there were some zealots in the audience who objected to my saying “please let’s think about this, let’s not just jump on the bandwagon and destroy children’s lives” I didn’t put in that way, I tried to be very academically focused, I tried to be evidence based and so on, but still, the complaints were made through one of these. It was passed through the HCCC to the psychology council and they wanted me to go and account for myself and consider disciplinary action and I wrote them a 10,000 word essay as to why my views were soundly based and so on. And anyway, in the end they decided that they couldn’t prosecute complaints that were baseless, made by people who weren’t patients. 

At the time of Sandra’s complaint, she’d been working in the rural NSW city of Taree and was unaware of the international debate raging about the gender dysphoria epidemic. Two young women came to see her, reporting that within the last two months, they’d developed gender dysphoria. In their sessions, it became clear to Sandra that they were socially isolated and had found trans communities online. She didn’t think they met the criteria for medical transition and made some calls to colleagues to try and gets some advice. Her colleagues accused her of being transphobic.

Sandra Pertot

So that was when it, it just blew open for me. I could not understand how this hadn’t been addressed. It hadn’t been addressed that we didn’t have a diagnostic pathway to sort out which people were trans and which people weren’t. So in my naivety, absolutely naive to all of this, I wrote a letter to the Australian Psychological Society’s [APS] bulletin in which I expressed my concerns and then I did a podcast. And in that podcast I stressed the need for research to provide a diagnostic pathway to get the safest outcome for these people presenting. And that was when the shit really hit the fan. There was a group of people that ended up putting in a complaint to the APS about me and they wanted all sorts of things like my re-education and the board to be educated and so that, paradoxically, led me to becoming very involved in the trans issue because I had to defend myself. 

Like Dianna, the complaint against Sandra also came from fellow clinicians. A group of transgender health practitioners, called Gender Galaxy, mounted a collective campaign against her. The experience was harrowing, and as the saying goes, for those investigated for transphobia, the process is the punishment. 

Sandra Pertot

It was the most stress I’ve ever been in my life. Because I value my reputation, I value my work as a clinical psychologist, I went to uni with the idea of being a clinical psychologist – one of the few back then. I’ve loved my job. And the people I’ve met – it’s endlessly fascinating my job. So the fact that these people could cause me not only to lose my registration but have that tag attached to me that I was irresponsible or whatever words would’ve come along was devasting, absolutely devastating. 

Ultimately, the complaint was unsuccessful. Sandra retired a while later but remains involved in the movement to protect children from medical transition.

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Whilst concerned clinicians like Sandra and Dianna face potentially career ending investigations just for raising concerns, gender clinicians have powerful people protecting them. Medical institutions, bureaucracies and seemingly both sides of politics, currently support the medical transitioning of minors. Jude was understandably furious at what was happening to her daughter and she wanted accountability. She began by writing to the local hospital where her daughter had been admitted.

Judith Hunter

So that’s where I did start then when I seemed to get nowhere from there, I wrote to the AMA – the Australian Medical Association – I put in complaints to the Healthcare Complaints Commission. I wrote to the state health minister Brad Hazzard, I wrote to the federal health minister who was Greg Hunt at the time, I wrote to the Premier, I wrote to the Prime Minister, I wrote to the health minister’s advisory council.

Stassja

Any replies?

Judith Hunter

Replies, but basically fob off, fob off, fob off. There’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing being done wrong, the Healthcare Complaints – there’s nothing wrong with putting a mentally ill person on hormones, there’s nothing wrong there. And then I complained to the Healthcare Complaints, another complaint that they had falsified her discharge summary and said that we agreed to that referral when we didn’t and there they ascertained there was an apparent agreement. Tell me what an apparent agreement is? Yeah, my husband rang when we got that notification and he said “what do you mean an apparent agreement?” he said “we either did agree or we didn’t agree and we didn’t agree” and they said “this case is closed” and hung up the phone on him.

It’s more than likely that the individuals and organisations Jude complained to simply thought she was transphobic. Rather than a deeply concerned mother, terrified that her daughter was making the biggest mistake of her life, Jude was just like those puritanical, homophobic parents who reject their own child for being gay. Such is the power of the narrative put forth by the trans movement.

Judith Hunter

You’ve got this family who just love you, love you to death, want to help you, want to be there for you and these young people are taught to reject – reject the people who care for them the most. And that’s what’s really, really, really wicked about this and what’s wicked about it too is that it’s also enabled by health professionals and government organisations who are enabling this alienation from families. And it’s caused so much heartache to families.

Alienation from families is something Dianna Kenny has seen firsthand in her practice.

Dianna Kenny

I’ve seen screenshots that parents have taken of their children’s social media use and one of the screenshots said, “your parents are evil, they should be dead, we’re your family now, if you want to run away from home, we’ll look after you, you’re one of us.” So there’s all of this cult like recruitment and grooming going on online and it’s absolutely horrific some of the methods they use to drag the child away from their family. 

Dianna’s not exaggerating. It’s an experience common to many parents of trans identifying teens – finding out that strangers on the internet have been influencing their child. Jude is one of those parents.

Judith Hunter

We found messages from a trans person here in Australia, a woman who’s calling herself a man and is actually promoted as an ambassador on the Wear It Purple website and is paid money by the government to go and talk in schools and tell children all about trans. and this woman had messaged our daughter, and our daughter was 17 at the time, and we found the messages and it said, “you need to snip, snip the mother fuckers,” referring to me and her father. We were the mother F-ers and we should be snip snipped because we weren’t applauding and supporting the notion that our daughter needed to medicalise and immediately have hormones and have her breasts cut off. And yes, my husband actually found those messages and replied, took our daughter’s phone off her and replied to this woman and said, leave our daughter alone, stay away from her and she taunted back, “you can’t do anything to me, ha ha ha, what do you mean?” I think my husband said I’ll report you to the police and “there’s nothing you can do.” And so, a brazen taunting back that no, no she wasn’t at all worried that we’d found these messages encouraging our daughter to get rid of her family.

Sadly, these tactics were successful and Jude’s daughter moved out of home. She had sporadic contact with her family over the next three years, at one point going nearly a whole year with no contact.

Judith Hunter

She’d spent the first two years in shared student accommodation, but then she moved in for nearly a year with trans people. I just think she came back extremely traumatised. I don’t think those trans people were good. 

Jude’s son did some social media sleuthing and found one of the trans people his sister was living with. It was an older trans identified male. He’d posted a photo of himself dressed in women’s clothing, holding a hypodermic needle. It was captioned “Friday night bimbo injections.”

Judith Hunter

I remember when my son found that photo of this bloke and showed me and you know, posing in a negligee and provocative position but then with this hypodermic needle in his hand and bimbo, bimbo injections, so that’s what that man sees being female is, being a bimbo, I mean, they’re just sick, it’s sick. What a derogatory impression to have that that’s what a female is – a bimbo. 

While her daughter was off exploring her newfound freedom, Jude started making connections with other parents who’d lived through the same nightmare.

Judith Hunter

So it was only a matter of a few months that I found these parent support groups in the United States and it was through them that I then got put in touch with the first Australian mum over in WA who I, I’ll never forget the first time I spoke to her and we just spoke for a couple of hours I think and then we’ve been lucky enough to meet several times and zoom and talk and maintain that support for each other, and then she’s been a wonderful advocate who’s started parent groups here in Australia

Connecting with other parents is one of the last lines of support for traumatised parents. It’s not uncommon for friends and family who have bought into the trans narrative to turn against parents who are taking a more cautious approach. So it’s difficult to know who to trust and where to go for help.

Judith Hunter

I’ve talked to parents who are on medication for anxiety and depression now, I’ve talked to parents who have actually quit their jobs because they simply couldn’t work because they were so distressed. I’ve talked to parents where a few of the spouses have died of a heart attack of distress and grief. So the parents are these sort of forgotten people in all this too, the families are just this collateral in this horror show. They’re just decimated, they’re absolutely decimated. What we’ve been through, I mean, you honestly wonder sometimes how you’ve kept going, how you’ve held it together.

One very scary moment for Jude came during that three-year period of scant contact with her daughter. For some reason, she got in touch to tell her parents that she was booked in to have a double mastectomy.

Judith Hunter

she was still on our private health fund. We rang up the health fund and said, “can she do this?” And they said “yeah she can” and we were just horrified. It never even crossed our mind. And then she actually gave us permission to talk to this surgeon and I said to him, “you know we’re really concerned about our daughter’s mental health, you know, she’s so young, why would you do this?” I actually said to him, “were you cutting the breasts off young women 10 years ago?” “Oh, no, no” and I said, “well why are you doing it now?” he was all mumbling his words and didn’t know what to say. 

Jude removed her from their private health insurance and wrote a strongly worded letter to the surgeon. Thankfully it didn’t go ahead, because eventually…

Judith Hunter

She sent me text messages telling me that she regretted it. They were by text saying that she wished she could undo it all. So I guess, she put it in writing that she really did regret it. But it’s something she won’t have those conversations with me face to face, no.

Jude was right all along. Her daughter isn’t trans. Her fury at the medical profession that allowed this to happen is palpable.

Judith Hunter

They would’ve had her breasts off in 6 months, they would’ve done all that if I hadn’t done everything I could to try and stop that too. The speed that they wanted to shovel her down that medical pathway, was just astounding.

The damage inflicted by misguided medical professionals can’t be undone. Her daughter’s body is permanently changed and even now, the family remains fractured. After moving home for a year, their daughter has once again moved out and cut contact with them. 

Judith Hunter

I love my daughter dearly, I’m angry that she was harmed by the medical profession. I hope one day that she can see for herself that she deserves to be compensated, that she deserves to hold those people accountable for what they did to her. I hope that she recognises that one day.

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In the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll look more closely at the gender affirmation model.

Michael Biggs

Puberty blockers at 12, cross sex hormones at 16 and at 18 you’d start the surgeries, and they’re very keen at having the surgeries as soon as possible.

The problems with the original research underpinning gender affirmation

Michael Biggs

The horrifying thing is that one of the children dies, and so you start out with a cohort of 70 and you end up with one child dying

And we’ll look at how gender affirmation came to Australia

Bernard Lane

The appointment of Michelle Telfer, the paediatrician as director of the gender clinic at Royal Children’s Melbourne – 2012, that’s a sort of a useful marker I suppose

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Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician Matthew Friend, and to everyone who made this podcast possible. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com