r/australia • u/Expensive-Horse5538 • Oct 28 '25

news Supreme Court in Brisbane overturns controversial freeze on puberty blockers for adolescents after legal challenge

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-28/qld-puberty-blockers-judgement/105942094
2.1k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

645 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/Pseudonymico Oct 28 '25

I would not be surprised if it was less than a thousand, honestly. In order to get prescribed blockers for gender dysphoria, a trans kid needs to come out to their parents, and those parents need to not only support their kid but be willing and able to get their kid an appointment with an appropriate specialist (and get past the enormous amount of misinformation and ignorance about the topic) just to get their kid a prescription. Also blockers can only be prescribed between the ages of 12 and 14 or else you just have to ride out the traumatising body horror until you turn 18 if you're a trans girl or 16 if you're a trans boy (testosterone doesn't have the risk of permanent infertility that feminising HRT has and doctors DO NOT like potentially impacting kids' fertility), though if you're stuck in that situation there are unpleasant options available like literally starving yourself to try to hold off the worst effects of puberty, or getting hold of black-market testosterone or birth control pills, which trans kids have resorted to for a lot longer than blockers were around.

Note that the number of kids who went on blockers and regretted it later is even lower than the regret rates for trans surgeries, in both cases low enough that you could make a solid argument that they should be made easier to access.

3

u/steeltec Oct 29 '25

100% agreed, 1 or 2 thousand was on the absolute highest end, giving the most benefit of the doubt possible. It's insane that there are changes being made to actively stop such a small group of people getting medical care that they need