Binary Australia: Dr Helen Joyce in Adelaide
Michael Barnett OAM
Dr Helen Joyce in Adelaide
Dr Helen Joyce spoke to a room of around 200 health practitioners, concerned parents, detransitioners and political advocates over the weekend at the inaugural Coalition Advancing Scientific Care (CASC) in Adelaide.
Doctors including GP’s, paediatric specialists, psychiatrists and more attended and spoke at the event, shining a light on the experimental and harmful nature of gender affirming care in Australia. Medications such as puberty blockers and cross sex hormones were confirmed to be dangerous to human bodies and the so-called research was completely inadequate and not to be relied upon.
Dr Joyce pointed out several times that “gender medicine” is not medicine and it is not scientific. She likened the limited data and skewered studies to “tooth fairy science”.
…this would be falling into the trap that Harriet Hall, a doctor who died in 2023 who was a proponent of rationalist medicine and opponent of quackery, called Tooth Fairy Science. It’s like you decided that there was a Tooth Fairy, and it would be good to work out how to maximise the amount of money she left.
Hall wrote:
“You can study whether leaving the tooth in a baggie generates more Tooth Fairy money than leaving it wrapped in Kleenex. You can study the average money left for the first tooth versus the last tooth. You can correlate Tooth Fairy proceeds with parental income. You can get reliable data that are reproducible, consistent, and statistically significant. You think you have learned something about the Tooth Fairy. But you haven’t. Your data has another explanation, parental behavior, that you haven’t even considered. You have deceived yourself by trying to do research on something that doesn’t exist.”
All this is to say that criticisms of gender medicine generally start too far downstream. It’s true what the critics say: that there are no good studies showing positive outcomes for any of the interventions, and there is no evidence that puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones “save lives”. But there’s something prior to that, which is that there is no reason to think the sorts of things done in gender clinics even might work. The whole thing is based on an invention.
Dr Joyce pointed out that medical scandals usually refer to an experimental field of medicine that is trialed, rolled out, causes harm and is then repealed. This is not the case with “gender medicine” as it is an entire area of medicine that should not even exist in the first place.
Human bodies are either male or female. No human can change sex. It is cruel and disingenuous to suggest they can. It does immeasurable harm to tell a child they were born in the wrong body. Instead of supporting gender distressed children with compassion and professional care, a cohort of medical practitioners are lying to vulnerable children and giving them drugs to deceive them into thinking they can change sex.
Dr Joyce stated that “gender medicine” only imitates medicine and has no basis in scientific fact at all.
Another reason we don’t see the emptiness of gender medicine is that gender clinics are doing a damn good imitation of medicine. Judith Butler famously said gender was an “imitation for which there is no original” – that it’s meaningful only because we do it over and over again. Well, the people working in gender medicine are performing the rituals of medicine: making appointments, doing consultations, coming up with diagnoses, writing prescriptions, doing blood tests, referring patients to other specialists like surgeons and endocrinologists, and making claims about outcomes and efficacy. When they interact with funding bodies, insurers and governments they talk as if what they are doing is medicine.
But the rituals are empty, in the same way that Butler claimed gender rituals are empty. The expression “gender dysphoria” functions as nothing more than a placeholder to make sentences that look similar in form to the kinds of sentences you might utter about angina, say, or multiple sclerosis, or schizophrenia, but because the expression is meaningless the sentences are meaningless.
In fact gender medicine is purely performative – which should delight queer theorists, since they love performativity. And the theme of the performance is the hyper-liberal, or hyper-individualist, claim that each person has a true self and knows that true self, and when they give expression to that true self they by definition cannot be wrong because the true self is the declaration. The purpose of gender medicine is to give an appearance of solidity to a specific sort of declaration of one’s true self — to your gender identity. What the clinics are selling is identity validation.
Her speech was an hour long and you can read it over several posts on her Substack here: Why gender medicine isn’t science, and isn’t medicine, Part 1
Kirralie Smith and Dr Helen Joyce at CASC in Adelaide