Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson’s recent podcast conversation with Irish author and gender-critic advocate Helen Joyce should send shockwaves through Australia’s political class.

While the United Kingdom and several European nations have moved to protect children by banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions on minors, Australia is accelerating in the opposite direction.

Helen Joyce is no fringe commentator. She is the former Britain Editor at The Economist, where she worked for more than 15 years.
She is now Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters, a human-rights organisation focused on safeguarding sex-based rights, and author of the internationally acclaimed book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. Her analysis is grounded in evidence, not ideology — and her warning to Australia is stark.

“Your clinics are worse. Much worse.”

Joyce told Anderson that while the UK’s Tavistock clinic was rightly shut down after the Cass Review found its practices “remarkably poor,” Australia’s gender clinics are “much worse than Tavistock”.

“You’re doing it to many more people. You’re still doing it. You’re doing it younger. You’re not explaining any better. You have far less oversight,” she said.

This is staggering. Britain now bans puberty blockers outright — publicly funded or private. Both major parties agree. The UK Health Secretary extended the prohibition, saying it is “simply unlawful” to prescribe these experimental drugs for gender distress.

Meanwhile, Australia continues to hand them out to children. 

The Big Lie: “Affirm them or they will kill themselves”

Joyce dismantled one of the most harmful and politically exploited myths in this debate: the claim that children will commit suicide if not affirmed as the opposite sex.

She was blunt:

“It is simply not true that having a trans identity makes it more likely that you will harm yourself or kill yourself.”

High-quality studies from Finland and the UK show that suicidal thinking is explained by other factors — family breakdown, autism, anxiety, trauma — not “gender identity.”

Worse still, Joyce warns that telling children they are at high risk of suicide is itself dangerous:

“It is highly irresponsible. Suicide is contagious.”

And yet Australian politicians repeat this claim as if it were settled fact. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan recently insisted trans-identified children are “15 times more likely” to kill themselves — a statistic Joyce called “false and dangerous.”

A Human Rights Abuse — And We Are Still Doing It

Joyce did not mince words:

“Doing this to children is a human rights abuse.”

She compared the future reckoning to the moral horror now associated with eugenics. Australia’s gender clinics are placing children on a conveyor belt: social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, infertility, sterilisation, and surgery. All before adulthood — often before parents are even told.

Family First has long warned that children have a right to grow up without irreversible medicalisation, and girls and women have a right to safety, privacy, and fairness. As Joyce put it:

“A transgender woman isn’t any type of woman. A transgender woman is a man who says he’s a woman… If it isn’t your biology that makes you a woman, what is it?” 

It is time for Australia to catch up

The world is moving away from experimental gender medicine on minors. The UK, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark have all pulled back. Australia is now the radical outlier.

Family First renews its call for an immediate halt to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions on minors, and an end to secret social transitioning in schools.

Children deserve to reach adulthood with intact bodies, healthy development and their fertility preserved.

The UK has acted. Europe has acted. It’s time Australia protected its children too.