A landmark decision from the Australian Family Court may signal the “beginning of the end” of prescribing puberty blockers to children in Australia, according to legal scholar Professor Patrick Parkinson.

As The Australian reported recently, one of the country’s leading child gender medicine experts was found to have misled the Family Court while giving evidence in support of a mother who wished to place her child on puberty blockers. The ruling delivered a scathing assessment of both the treatment and the process behind it.

The judgment in Re Devin also cast doubt on the integrity of one of Australia’s leading gender clinics.

Justice Andrew Strum’s extraordinary ruling – which effectively blocked the child from accessing puberty blockers – criticised the approach taken by hospitals toward children questioning their gender. He described the unreserved decision to “affirm” any child expressing gender concerns as “oddly binary”.

He further found that the gender clinic treating the 12-year-old had failed to issue a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria until court proceedings had begun, despite having treated the child since the age of six.

While Justice Strum did not issue a broader critique of the gender-affirming model used by the hospital’s clinic, his ruling raises significant questions about how gender-questioning children are treated in Australia.

In his widely shared post on X, Professor Parkinson emphasised that: “Justice Strum severely criticised the clinicians at the hospital gender service, including a very senior paediatrician who, in extraordinary expert evidence, likened current restrictions on puberty blockers in England and elsewhere to the persecution of LGBT+ people by the Nazis.”

“The judge found that the 12-year-old boy did not have gender dysphoria, although he was exploring his gender identity, and that the hospital had failed to conduct necessary clinical assessments. The judge ordered that the child move from living with the mother to live with the father, and prohibited either parent from taking the child back to the gender service. He relied upon the Cass Review for saying that puberty blockers were not an appropriate treatment and rejected the idea that gender identity, especially in a child of this age, is innate and immutable,” the post read.

Justice Strum made clear that the focus of the case was the welfare of the child – not broader ideological debates.

“This is a case about a child, and a relatively young one at that; not one about the cause of transgender people,” Justice Strum wrote.

“As this child grows, develops and matures, and explores and experiences life, the child might, with the related benefits of the passage of time and the acquisition of balanced understanding, come to identify as a transgender female and might elect to undergo some form of medical treatment, to ­affirm and/or align with that identity. But, similarly, with those benefits, the child might not do so, and for a variety of reasons.

“At this stage in the child’s life, all options should be left open, without any unacceptable risk of harm to the child.”

Importantly, the judgment also criticised the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines, developed by the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, which endorse a gender-affirming model of care.

Justice Strum stated that the court was “not concerned ‘in what the community thinks’ or ideologies, but only what, on the evidence, is in the child’s best interests.”

“Ideology has no place in the application by courts of the law, and certainly not in the determination by courts exercising jurisdiction under the (Family Law Act) of what is in a child’s best interests,” he wrote.

The Human Rights Law Alliance (HRLA) is currently supporting Canadian activist Billboard Chris, who is campaigning against the use of puberty blockers in gender-affirming treatment for children and is suing Australia’s eSafety Commissioner for allegedly censoring one of his posts.

HRLA is also acting for Dr Jillian Spencer, a Queensland child psychologist who was stood down from her position for questioning the use of puberty blockers.

This decision in Re Devin could have wide-reaching ramifications – not only for those cases, but also for future legal challenges involving gender-affirming care for children.