Thread by @Bernard_Lane

.@ABCMediaWatch didn't bother to check & got it wrong. In September, faithful to gender clinic dogma, they dismissed one of my contacts, US endocrinologist Will Malone, as "a conservative Christian doctor from Idaho, who specialises in diabetes".

With remarkable consistency, Australia's public broadcaster the ABC implies that only right-wing Christians are worried about the safety & ethics of medicalised gender change for minors, so that "gender affirming" medicine is not only blessed by science but "progressive".

It's just not true. Concern about unnecessary medicalisation of youth cuts across the social & political divides. The rise & spread of groups of health professionals, parents & detransitioners often with little else in common apart from child welfare is a remarkable story.

Malone happens not to be Christian or conservative, & now the ABC has published a quasi-correction: "Dr Malone wants it known that religion has nothing to do with his opposition to the treatment & that as an endocrinologist, he treats many hormone diseases, not only diabetes."

Another gender clinic dogma is that the only experts allowed in the debate are the clinicians who preside over "gender affirming" medicine. What's the expertise of a gender clinician? It's not a specialisation like gastroenterology.

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health is not a conventional medical college & its activism suggests Queer Theory, not scientific method. The group recently objected to a journal article protesting that none of the authors were members of AusPATH.

So perhaps membership of the AusPATH guild is the true mark of expertise. In any case, gender clinic staff -- nurses, paediatricians, psychiatrists, endocrinologists & psychologists -- all have their own expertise, affiliations & traditions.

As an endocrinologist Will Malone is clearly qualified to talk about hormones & adolescent development. Endocrinology is central to the debate about using drugs to interrupt normal puberty or to mimic bodily features of the opposite sex.

It's not clear why the Australian Standards of Care treatment guidelines issued by the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne did not include an endocrinologist among its four published authors. The ABC has showcased the RCH gender clinic over several years.
rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/…

The gender clinic lobby's formula for expertise boils down to saying, "Trust us, we know what we're doing". That's a frail defence when multiple reviews of the medical literature show that what the clinics are doing rests on low-quality evidence. Long-term effects are unknown.

In his 2019 review, Oxford University's Carl Heneghan concluded these hormonal drug treatments "remain largely experimental" & warned "the current evidence base does not support informed decision making & safe practice in children".
blogs.bmj.com/bmjebmspotligh…

Gender clinicians would object that Heneghan is unqualified because he has no experience doling out cross-sex hormone drugs. But the expertise required to assess the quality of research data is quite different & as professor of evidence-based medicine, Heneghan has it.

As for Malone, there's another reason I've quoted him. He's a leading figure in the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. A quick look at the clinical & academic advisors for SEGM shows a wide range of relevant expertise.
segm.org/about_us

SEGM states it is "free from political, ideological, religious, or financial influences". It went public in March 2020 with my news report in The Australian, and since then its members have been quoted in The Economist, Medscape & The Sydney Morning Herald.

SEGM people have also had letters published in journals such as The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. Malone was lead author of a letter in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, a publication of The Endocrine Society.
segm.org/unknown_gender…
segm.org/endocrine_soci…

All this information & context Media Watch kept from its audience or did not bother to discover. This is a program that purports to defend journalistic standards. I know personally of staff at @ABCnews disturbed about the broadcaster's ideological capture by gender ideology.

Editorially, culturally and as a corporation the ABC appears entangled with the activist project of "gender identity" & its medical manifestation in children's hospital gender clinics. It seems unable to step back & find the distance that would allow an independent view.

Its coverage of these topics is emotive, promotional & one-sided. Its showcasing of the RCH gender clinic has been linked with increases in new patient referrals. Media Watch ignores the ABC's gender conflicts.

https://twitter.com/Bernard_Lane/status/1338227092912160770?s=20

The ABC is a customer of Pride in Diversity, an offshoot of a former gay rights body now pushing self-identified trans rights, which are in conflict with the interests of women, lesbians & gays who do not want subjective gender to supplant biological sex.
the11thhourblog.com/post/australia…

So, don't expect the ABC to tell Australians about the rapid international rise of LGB groups marking out a new territory in cultural politics, without the T, or the Q.

https://twitter.com/Bernard_Lane/status/1450360063160291333?s=20