Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Childhood Gender Transition Prohibition Bill 2023 be referred to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 30 June 2024.

The Childhood Gender Transition Prohibition Bill 2023 was introduced into this place last year. It is a bill which seeks to prohibit health practitioners from knowingly providing gender clinical interventions to a minor that are intended to transition the minor's biological sex. What that actually looks like in practice is the process of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and the processes of castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, metoidioplasty, some names I cannot even pronounce, phalloplasty, vaginoplasty or mastectomy on children. The fact that we are here today in 2024 even discussing these matters is quite astonishing. What the bill intends to do is seek to implement Australia's obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which seeks to prevent all forms of physical or mental violence, injury, abuse, neglect, negligent treatment and the like on children.

If we look to the bill itself, it appears in several parts, which are as follows. The first operative part of the bill would seek to provide prohibitions on medical practitioners from involving themselves in these particular prescriptions, surgeries or cross-sex hormones. The second part of the bill seeks to provide obligations upon the medical regulatory body to provide sanctions to medical practitioners who knowingly do that. The bill also seeks to limit or prohibit Commonwealth funding for these clinics in their entirety.

Over the past decade or so there has been a drastic increase in the number of children and teenagers voicing confusion about their gender. It's a term known as gender dysphoria. The year before last, the Daily Telegraph reported, through a freedom of information request, the frightening statistic that there were 2,067 young people attending public gender clinics in Australia in the previous year, 2021, which was almost 10 times the number in 2014, when there were only 211 children. We are talking about children. The number of under-18s being prescribed puberty suppressing drugs, coincidentally, shot up from five in 2014 to 624 in 2019. The increase in the number of young people seeking such treatment is not only related to Australia. We've all heard of the fallout from the Tavistock Centre and the number of gender dysphoria treatments in their under-18s, which had been skyrocketing prior to the clinic closing.

What is tragic in this scenario, however, is the wave of what are now known as detransitioners, children who in later life regret decisions that were made, decisions that were perhaps ill-advised or where there were other ways of dealing with them, such as through mental health care or counselling of any form. The lesson learnt from these various jurisdictions is clear: the proliferation of these drugs and surgeries will ultimately lead to an epidemic of detransitioners.

The fact that we are not talking about this in this country is staggering. We have seen several attempts in this chamber—one by me, I think one recently by One Nation and one earlier—to simply get this matter to a hearing.

This is a bill before the Australian Senate. It is deserving of a hearing. This is a very complicated and very difficult area. Even the experts agree with that. The experts agree that it actually isn't easy to find, read and understand all the information. Researchers at Westmead Hospital concluded that one of the biggest challenges for clinicians working with children who present for assessment of gender dysphoria is the effect of the polarised sociopolitical discourses in their daily clinical practice.

So, if there was ever a matter that required the caring gaze of a Senate hearing, it is this. I can almost hear the voices from the other side of the chamber, however, and our friends in the Greens. I know, because I've heard it several times already before—that this will simply traumatise children and place enormous pressure on families. We're talking about serious medical intervention in the lives of children. In most states in this country—in all states, I would say—we don't allow children to drink under the age of 18, to get tattoos when they're under 18 or to drive a car until they're 16. Yet here in Australia children as young as three years of age are being offered this kind of intervention. It is absolutely shameful. It is shameful that there isn't more protection for these children, many of whom will go on to regret what they have been involved in. It is even more shameful that the people in this chamber continually refuse to allow this matter to be properly debated as it should, in the confines and the surrounds of a Senate committee.

This is a complicated matter. We could go on and on. I will say that I expect that this will be put to a vote. I implore those in this chamber to take a different look at what we are proposing here. This is perfectly reasonable, as is the procedural request for this matter to be simply taken to a hearing, and I ask that this motion be supported.