Australia’s “Cass Review”?
By Paul Tyson
The Vine Review was set up early this year by the Queensland State Government to conduct an evidence-based Review into Queensland Health’s use of puberty suppression and gender affirming hormone treatments for minors suffering from gender dysphoria.
There are two serious problems in trying to make an evidence-based review of this matter. Firstly, no one can objectively define gender. Secondly, we now treat sex as if it were not an objective reality about a person.
On the opening page of her 2024 book, renowned gender theorist Judith Butler explains that “the myriad, continuing debates about the word [gender] show that no one approach to defining, or understanding, gender reigns.”
This is not a promising start if one wants objective and universal categories of evidence. But it gets worse. As the first hearing of Tickle v Giggle pointed out, if a transwoman decides that they have the gender identity of being female, then their sex is determined by their gender. So we see that sex in Australian law now has no objective reality. Australians are not permitted to know that a person is male or female because they have a male reproductive physiology or a female reproductive physiology.
Undefinable and subjective, “gender” is now treated as determining a person’s supposedly changeable “sex”, and objective facts of human reproductive biology are now not evidence of a person’s sex. Doing an “evidence-based” assessment of anything to do with gender and sex now requires some astonishing conceptual gymnastics to try and treat unreal gender as if you can have evidence about it, whilst also treating the objective realities of sex as if they do not exist. But this is worse than simply mad. We are talking about the proper care of psychologically distressed children here.
Echoes of the Past
I now wish to segue into a quick look at Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how mundane and typically bureaucratic human evil is, but this is not to claim any moral equivalence between genocidal Nazism and Gender gender-affirming care. Even so, it is worth noting that Trans Activists routinely do call sex-realists Nazis. Premier and party leader alike defamed Moira Deeming as a Nazi sympathizer, and Natalie Feliks denounced the Jewish gender-critical feminist Julie Szego as perpetrator of a “Far Right Nazi ideology” on the ABC’s Media Watch. But I am not interested in calling anyone a Nazi; let us cautiously unpack Arendt’s insights into the banality of evil.
Arendt’s well-known reflections on Otto Eichmann’s trial for genocidal war crimes got her into a lot of trouble with many of her fellow Jews. Eichmann was an SS Nazi, and he was present at the Wannsee Conference in which the “final solution to the Jewish question” was planned. Eichmann was tasked with overseeing the transportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps. He knew he was facilitating genocide. Surely, here was pure and unadulterated evil? Surely, Eichmann should hang as a demonic monster, as someone totally Other to human reason and right feeling?
Arendt was deeply shaken by the wilful inhumanity, the determined small-mindedness, and the callous bureaucratic proficiency of Eichmann, but she did not find the monster many of her fellow outraged Jews were looking for. Instead – as she saw it – she found something far more chilling. Eichmann was in many regards a normal person, and like most respectable officials and senior bureaucrats, he performed his tasks with procedural exactness and without moral question. Where his evil lay was in his ability to dissociate himself and his responsibilities from the human and moral reality of what, as a good member of his government and a diligent subordinate, he was actually doing. Hence, to Arendt, it is banality, rather than monstrosity, which really defines human evil.
The indisputable and evident facts are that everyone who is giving puberty suppressors and opposite sex hormones to children is “affirming” these often ASD children onto a pathway not only to adult sterilization and sexual dysfunction, but to the possibility of mastectomies, hysterectomies, castrations, penectomies, and cosmetic genital reconstructive surgeries. That is, “gender affirmers” of distressed body dysmorphic minors know they are sterilizing and mutilating seriously confused children and teenagers. But we tell ourselves we are following the correct protocols and being compliant with the professional and legal obligations that are required of us by our betters, so what else can we do? This was Eichmann’s defence.
Any evidence-based evaluation of gender affirming treatments for minors will be playing along with the present professional and legislative inversion of reality if it defines “gender” as real and “sex” as not real. This would be playing into the banality of “Gender Affirming Care” at the clear cost of objective and unconscionable harms to the reproductive integrity of Queensland minors. But perhaps the Vine Review will treat “sex” as an objective reality, a child’s natural reproductive integrity as a good that should be protected, and “gender” as the anti-realist construction of queer ideology which it is. If that happens, then evidence will actually mean something, rather than being an exercise in sophistry. If that happens, then perhaps this will embolden our government to finally put an end to the child mutilating banality that is Gender Affirming Care.
Image: Professor Ruth Vine will conduct Queensland’s review of gender-affirming care for kids.
Dr Paul Tyson is a Philosopher and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Queensland.
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