Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

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 witchdoctors 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.