June 16, 2023
The passage of Labor’s radical Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2023 – which enables kids as young as 12 to alter their birth certificate and change their sex – will cause untold harm to vulnerable kids further erode the integrity of Queensland’s child psychiatry sector, Katter’s Australian Party Leader and Traeger MP Robbie Katter has warned.
The Bill, which was passed by Labor and the Greens in Brisbane Wednesday night, allows a child aged under 16 to seek the assessment of a “developmentally informed practitioner” and change their legal sex record with or without their parents’ consent.
A “developmentally informed practitioner” is a person, such as doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist, whose “practice focuses on or involves children and young people”.
But the Bill’s explanatory notes explain it is not the practitioner’s role to “question” the child’s transition, but rather to learn “where the child is at in their journey” and to ascertain their “understanding of their identity and the effect of changing their identity document”[1].
Mr Katter said vulnerable Queensland children struggling with gender dysphoria were being used as pawns in the radical Left’s obsession with re-writing society’s understandings of sex and gender.
He said the harm caused to children, including the medical and psychological effects of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, by the experimental “gender affirming model” of care could deliver a generation of broken hearts and bodies.
“In 20 or 30 years, we as a society will hang out heads in shame that this sort of harm was allowed to go on unchecked and in most cases under the direction of politicians seeking to appease the fringes,” the Traeger MP said.
“Until children are 17, they cannot legally drive, until they are 18, they cannot legally drink, smoke or vote.
“We are increasingly being lectured by the radical Left and their ‘woke’ brigade that children under 14 have such little cognitive understanding of consequences that they cannot be held accountable for even the most vicious of crimes.
“Yet we are expected to believe, as argued by those very same groups, they can understand the life-long impacts of changing legal documents, calling themselves a different name, and electing to take chemicals that disrupt their natural bodies.
“You can’t have it both ways.”
Mr Katter said gender dysphoria was a real issue that should not be politicised.
He said clinicians should be free to exercise their professional judgment when treating patients and that political and ideological interference in this was a public disservice and akin to child abuse.
“I fear the recently-reported case of a psychiatrist being stood down at the Queensland Children’s Gender Service is just the tip of iceberg in regards to dictatorial way clinicians are being told to treat their patients at this publicly-funded facility,” he said.
“I have put my questions about this, especially around the exclusive use of the gender-affirming model, to the Queensland Minister for Health this week.”
The KAP voted against the BDM Bill.
[1] https://documents.parliament.qld.gov.au/tp/2022/5722T2053-D145.pdf