Expert
Idols toppling in all directions.
Australia’s foremost gender-medicine expert and the lead author of the nation’s guidelines on gender-affirming care, Michelle Telfer, was excoriated by a Family Court judge for giving misleading evidence in support of a mother who wanted her child to be prescribed puberty blockers, in a judgment that has called into question the integrity of treatment of gender-dysphoric children.
So what exactly is a “gender-medicine expert”? Telfer sounds more like a shill than an expert.
Judge Andrew Strum, who stripped the mother of custody and effectively blocked the 12-year-old from accessing treatment, criticised the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne for failing to give the child a formal gender dysphoria diagnosis until the court proceedings had commenced, despite having treated the child for six years.
The hospital’s chief of medicine, Professor Telfer, he said, cheapened the suffering of victims of Nazism when she suggested a landmark review that recommended limitations on medication for gender-dysphoric children formed part of a wave of transgender oppression commencing with the Nazis.
Cheapened the suffering of victims of Nazism and expensived the mood swings of children.
Justice Strum also questioned the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, authored by Professor Telfer, for not recognising children may not be capable of making life-altering medical decisions about their gender identity.
“It is concerning that an oddly binary approach is adopted in relation to children, especially of the age of the child the subject of these proceedings; that is, to affirm unreservedly those who present with concerns regarding their gender, brooking no questioning thereof,” he wrote in the judgment.
“The case of the mother … is that because the child says so, the child is, and must unquestioningly be affirmed as being, female in gender identity. However, that overlooks the obvious, namely, that the child is still a child and not even, if it matters, a teenager.”
And what does being a child entail? Among other things, a tendency to credulity. Skepticism is a tool that develops with age; children generally believe what they’re told unless it’s very obviously a joke. If children grow up with parents who subscribe to gender ideology, that child will be a gender believer until it reaches the age when parents are wrong about everything.
The judgment, published in April, anonymised Professor Telfer as Associate Professor L and did not name the Royal Children’s Hospital due to statutory prohibitions preventing the identification of witnesses in Family Court proceedings. However, The Australian was on Thursday successful in petitioning the court to name Professor Telfer and her place of work, arguing it was in the public interest for the practices of an expert healthcare professional and a pre-eminent medical service to be transparent.
Not to be confused with trans-parent.
“Nationwide News submits, and I agree, that the interests of the public are best served by members of the public having access to the entire context of Associate Professor L’s opinion or practice, so that it can be properly assessed,” Justice Strum ruled in approving the application. “Such transparency, including as to that expert’s identity, enables individuals to evaluate critically the validity, reliability and implications of that opinion and practice.”
He said maintaining confidentiality over Professor Telfer’s identity “may well undermine public confidence in the administration of justice”.
If a doctor is out there peddling gender-woo then people need to know who that doctor is.
To age, I would also add education and lifelong learning.
In my early teens I was a NAZI, yet by my late teens, a Communist.
In my 20s, I was anti-Gay.
In my 30s, I accepted Holocaust denialism.
In my 40s, it was “No connection between HIV and AIDS.
In my 50s, climate change denialism.
In my 60s, I was firmly in the TWAW camp until the Great Terf Wars.
In each of these, I was persuaded out of my original position by better information and by always being open to new ideas and perspectives. In other words, I grew.
The only one of those beliefs I still hold to is Communism, and the older I get, the more evident it is that Marx was right in his analysis of Capitalism and the drag that it is on human ingenuity and creativity. As humans, we always prosper most when we cooperate the most. One only needs to look at Musk, Thiel, Bezos, et al to see the damage unbridled greed does to a nation.
/threadjack
Nationwide News is a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp and will latch on to anything that allows it to stoke the outrage machine to keep its ever-dwindling subscribers turning away. It is Fox News in a tabloid format.
The interests of Nationwide News are best served by members of the public being kept in a continuous state of outrage over Trans, Climate, Taxation, Laura Norder, Immigration, and Unions.
I don’t understand. Is The Australian owned by Nationwide News? Is The Australian, like The Daily Mail in England, the only newspaper so sure that it has long since been abandoned by any readers with a ‘woke’ agenda that it can safely publish the facts about the TRA takeover without losing readership, and perhaps even gaining circulation?
Sorry, that comment was in response to the rev. I should have made it clear. In any case, rev., you sound like me – constitutionally gullible, but with the saving grace of being willing to learn and change.
Communism, like capitalism, hasn’t managed to work yet; because the people driven to take advantage of either system and turn them into self-serving authoritarianism are much more motivated than the majority of people, who merely wish to live our lives to the best of our abilities and leave complex political decisions to others.