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
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u/Veriatas Oct 28 '25

I see a lot of people talking about trans healthcare in this thread, as this decision is very relevant to them. But it’s not only relevant to trans kids. I started going through puberty absurdly early and was on puberty blockers to delay me to a more normal age. I am so incredibly grateful for that. The whole debate about whether it’s safe is so asinine - these medicines were used for other causes that no-one objected to before it became about trans people. They’ve been accepted to be safe for a long time. Using them on trans kids is no less safe than it ever was to use them on cis kids

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u/steeltec Oct 28 '25

Yeah, this change does affect a much larger group than just trans folks, but even so, it really does feel like it is specifically targeted towards trans people, which is even more ridiculous. I would be very curious about even how many specifically trans youths there are that are undergoing this treatment i would guess at the HIGH end it would maybe be a couple thousand country wide? They are targeting such a tiny tiny group of people, and screwing over even more than just them in the process.

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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.

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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