- Thank you, Mr. President.
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia,
I raise a deeply troubling issue for all Australians.
We know that feelings arise and pass,
especially through adolescence.
No feeling is final.
Yet children who present with a felt sense of being born
into the wrong body are given licence
to make irreversible decisions
that will affect their brain development
and scar and mutilate their bodies.
This is the life ahead for too many young people
on the transgender highway.
There's been an undeniable explosion of young females
presenting with gender dysphoria.
100 years of diagnostic history indicates
this predominantly impacted males, yet in just 10 years
we have witnessed a social contagion running rampant
through our teenage girls,
girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.
In the United States, females requesting gender surgery
in 2016-17 quadrupled.
In the UK, females presenting with gender dysphoria
over the last decade has risen over 4000%
And in Australia, the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne
has seen referrals rise
from one every two years to 104 in 2014.
In spite of the horrendous outcomes
for many of these children, solid statistics,
and I've met some, solid statistics are hard to come by.
It seems this area of medical practise would prefer
to keep their bad news under wraps.
Gender dysphoria, as many eminent medical professionals
will agree, overwhelmingly presents
with pre-existing mental health conditions.
In today's highly politicised environment,
when a child shares their distress around comfort
with their gender, parents are challenged and even shamed
if they attempt to take a comprehensive therapeutic approach
to help their child.
Instead, parents are labelled abusive and accused
of harming their child when they refuse to consent
to their child's self-declared transgender identity.
Many of us may not remember our own teenage years,
but those of us who have raised children
through to adulthood will recall our own children
going through adolescence.
Parents walk a very fine line
between nurturing their child's emerging independence
and supporting their child's fragility.
What we do know is that during this time
teens become super sensitive.
They hate people looking at them.
They often loathe their newly emerging adult bodies,
even feel revolted by them.
Everything is magnified, and they're easily embarrassed.
And being part of a tribe is powerful during this time,
and that's a perfect concoction for a social contagion.
To make matters worse, the process of neural pruning
during this time means their executive function
is compromised, which is where we make
our most effective decisions.
It's irresponsible that we're surrendering these life
and body-altering decisions to our children,
putting them on a medical pathway of puberty blockers,
sex hormones and irreversible surgery.
An adult brain is required to balance the consequences
of these life-changing decisions.
We're charging our children and equally abhorrent,
our courts with these enormous decisions.
And it's our children, as young adults,
that will left to face the horrendous consequences.
The medical pathway for children presenting
with gender dysphoria is widely accepted as experimental.
There's no evidence that it's safe.
This is a call to all parents.
Your children are being used in an experiment
where there's no evidence it's safe
and plenty of evidence it's not.
Overnight, Sweden's leading gender clinic
stopped routine treatment of minors with hormonal drugs
due to safety concerns, citing cancer and infertility risks.
There are concerns around bone density, memory,
development of grey matter, and cognitive impairment.
These treatment are not proven safe, and yet our children
can quite easily be prescribed puberty blockers
and sex hormone treatment to then land
on the operating table for irreversible surgery
with grossly inadequate counselling.
The counselling instead is left for the parents,
for them to come to the terms with the loss
of one gender child and welcome the emergence of another.
There's another Sorry Day coming.
That Sorry Day will be for all those vulnerable children
that struggled through adolescence, as so many do,
and we did nothing to protect them.
When we start to accept that boys at 10 and a half
can take puberty blockers, girls at 14
can have double mastectomies, and parents can be criticised
and shamed when they attempted to counsel their children
against these life-altering decisions,
then lunacy, neglect, and savagery are prevailing.
These children will have every right as adults
to turn to their parents, medical professionals, hospitals,
and the judicial system and demand compensation
for our negligence because we lacked the courage,
we lacked the will to protect these children
when they needed it the most.
Thank you, Mr.