Next week, HRLA client Jillian Spencer enters a mediation conference with her former employer, Queensland Children’s Hospital. This is an important part of the process, with trial scheduled for November if a settlement can’t be reached.

In 2023, Jillian raised concerns that fell on the wrong side of a prevailing orthodoxy by questioning the automatic “affirmation” model of treating gender-confused children, and she has carried the professional and personal consequences ever since. Her position sits inside a now-familiar pattern. Across Australia, the freedom to speak and to act according to conscience comes into conflict with radical transgender ideology. A clinician who questions a contested model of care is no longer met with argument. She is met with professional sanction and termination.

In the current legal environment, when an individual’s views clash with the ideological views of an employer or regulator, little stands in the way of the consequences that follow. The cost of holding a contested view is borne privately by the individual, who is often tied up in lengthy legal proceedings.

Even if successful, the legal process is punishment enough. No tribunal needs to hand down a final verdict for the cost to be exacted. The years of proceedings, the legal expense, the professional limbo, the toll on someone who has done nothing unlawful – none of this is a neutral feature of a functioning system. It falls hardest on those with the courage to speak first.

Jillian has shown that courage. She has spoken plainly on questions most of her profession will not touch, and she has paid for it.

Meanwhile, the questions she raised are being vindicated abroad. Courts, public reviews and health authorities in countries around the world are stepping back from the radical gender treatments many Australian institutions continue to defend. The international tide is turning. But Australia is yet to catch up.

A free country should not punish people for asking the questions the rest of the world is now answering.

Jillian’s trial is scheduled for November. HRLA will continue to assist her throughout this case.