The suspension of Dr Andrew Amos from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists is a case study in institutional cowardice. Amos, an academic psychiatrist at James Cook University, was not found to have harmed a patient or engaged in professional misconduct.
His crime was to express clinical reservations—shared by a large and growing body of international medical research and opinion—about aspects of the gender-affirming care model as applied to adolescents. By suspending Amos, the RANZCP has signalled to every other psychiatrist in Australia that dissent from approved doctrine can end a career.
The Amos case is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of capitulation to a gender ideology that suppresses belief in biological sex in favour of subjective gender-identification. It’s one that has drawn in medical bodies, political parties, human rights commissions, universities, and the ABC, among others.
When institutions accept genderism, they allow “trans rights” to trump all other rights. That includes the right of lesbians to meet without being forced to admit men who identify as lesbians. It includes the right of women prisoners to share their cells and showers with other women only. And it includes the right of medical professional to express doubts about gender-affirming care for adolescents.
Let me be clear about what is and is not at stake. Trans people deserve respect, dignity, and legal protections. That is how I approach every trans person I have known. What is at stake is something different—the capture of key institutions by the more militant wing of trans advocacy and the abandonment by those institutions of their core obligations, including impartial assessment of evidence, the maintenance of spaces for legitimate disagreement, and the balancing of rights.
ACON is a lobby group for gender ideology described as ‘a multimillion-dollar advocacy machine’. Its reach into government agencies, health bureaucracies, and corporate diversity programs is extraordinary. ACON’s influence over what can be said, what is funded, and who is employed is, by any reasonable measure, disproportionate to its democratic mandate, which is to say, none. It is a highly motivated lobby group pushing a narrow ideology.
The UN intervenes
When a single advocacy organisation can shape the policies of health departments, dictate the training of clinicians, and credibly threaten the careers of those who ask inconvenient questions, something has gone badly wrong.
So much so that in February the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls wrote to the Australian government expressing her concern about disciplinary action against Dr Jillian Spencer, a psychiatrist at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. Dr Spencer was investigated and dismissed after raising concerns about gender-affirming treatment for minors.
The UN letter, to which health minister Mark Butler has not responded, cited protections for freedom of expression and scientific inquiry under international covenants, and warned of a “chilling effect” on medical professionals when whistle-blowers are punished.
In all of this, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and its office of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner in particular, has been highly partisan. Rather than attempting to balance competing rights claims, it has functioned as a defender and enforcer of gender ideology. Feminist and lesbian groups wanting to protect sex-based rights have found a Commission wholly committed to the genderist belief system.
The case of Tickle v Giggle, in which a tech platform designed for women was successfully pursued through the courts for excluding a male who identified as a female, illustrates the degree to which sex-based spaces and services—spaces that exist precisely because biological sex remains a meaningful category in women’s lives—are legally precarious. That is because politicians succumbed to gender ideology and changed the Sex Discrimination Act to replace sex with gender. The women who over decades built sex-based spaces and services did not anticipate they would ever be defending the concept of womanhood itself.
Universities, which ought to be the last redoubt of free inquiry, have been among the most craven. Academics who raise questions about the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine have found seminars cancelled, invitations withdrawn, and colleagues unwilling to be seen in their company. University executives privilege the contested claims of a tiny minority over academic freedom.
Perhaps most egregiously, University of Melbourne feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith has had to have her own security guards because of threats by trans activists. (I had my own security guards for a time. The threats emanated from another fanatical organisation, the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mounting evidence
The Australian medical community lags behind its peers abroad. In the United States, the fount of gender ideology, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Psychological Association have changed their positions and now advise against gender-related surgeries for adolescents.
The Cass Review in Britain, a meticulous four-year examination of the evidence for gender-affirming care in minors, recommended great caution in prescribing puberty blockers. The review led to a sharp change in practice in England. Wherever independent evaluations have been conducted, including in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom, with Norway, France and Denmark following their lead, policies have changed to caution against irreversible interventions.
Those who express views incompatible with gender ideology can expect social media to exact retribution. A loosely coordinated network of pro-trans militants has become expert at the mechanics of reputational destruction: accusations of bigotry, the pile-on, the complaint to the employer, the campaign of sustained harassment dressed up as accountability.
And so academics, journalists, clinicians and ordinary citizens have learned to keep quiet. Many qualified experts who hold considered, evidence-based reservations about aspects of gender medicine censor themselves. This chilling effect is antithetical to everything a liberal society is supposed to stand for.
None of this requires hostility to trans people; in fact, a call for legitimate debate takes oxygen away from those who regard trans people with malice. It asks no more than we ask of every other domain of medicine and public policy—transparency, proportionality, the genuine weighing of evidence, and the protection of spaces in which disagreement can occur without professional or personal vilification.
Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. Published under Creative Commons and may be republished unmodified and with attribution to the author.