This past week, Queensland Health discontinued every disciplinary proceeding against Dr Jillian Spencer. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency dropped its investigation into her social media posts. After three years, her name is clear. ‘I’ve been exonerated,’ she said. ‘My name has been cleared, and I can hold my head high.’ Full credit to her, and to the Human Rights Law Alliance, who stood with her through all of it. In April 2023, Dr Spencer was stood down from clinical duties at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. She is an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist, and no patient complained about her care. Her offence was to argue that children presenting with gender distress should be thoroughly assessed – including for other mental health conditions – before being placed on a pathway toward puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. She objected to recording a child’s stated gender rather than their sex in medical records. She would not affirm a child’s identity automatically, against her own clinical judgement.
For this she was suspended, repeatedly reprimanded, and eventually sent a notice of termination. The matter was headed for a Supreme Court trial later this year. She refused to retract – and she was not left to do it alone. Children’s Health Queensland now accepts that her concerns were grounded in her training and background as an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist. It accepts that these are matters of legitimate professional and public debate, and that clinicians have an important role in raising concerns about patient safety. It accepts that the treatment of gender dysphoria must follow the best available research and the child’s best interests – rather than directing a child down a predetermined pathway. It acknowledges that undiagnosed mental illness may contribute to gender distress, and that a proper assessment has to look for it.
Read that list again. Every proposition on it was, three years ago, sufficient grounds to end a psychiatrist’s career at that hospital. Today they are the health service’s own stated position. This is a moment where it would be easy to claim too much. The terms of the resolution are confidential. We do not know what was agreed or what was given up. This was a settlement, not a judgment – no court has ruled, no precedent has been set, and a clinician facing the same treatment in another state has no case law to point to. Nobody has been held to account. Those who suspended Dr Spencer and reprimanded her remain where they are. She is in private practice now; her place at the hospital has not been returned to her. The statement wishes her well in her future endeavours. And this is Queensland only. The state paused new prescriptions of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children, defended that pause through a court challenge, and has extended it. The Northern Territory has followed. Six jurisdictions have not.
The federal review will not deliver final guidelines until 2028. Children are being prescribed these drugs today, across most of this country, and none of that has changed. While we celebrate after years of frustration, there is a harder question beneath it. For three years, clinicians across Australia watched a respected psychiatrist lose her place for saying what she believed to be true about children in her care. How many of them decided to say nothing? We will never know. That is the point of making an example of someone. The cost is not borne by her – she at least has the dignity of having spoken. It is borne by every child seen by a doctor who watched and concluded it was not worth it. Institutional capture does not need to silence everyone. It only needs to silence one person loudly enough. Christians should not be surprised by any of this. We follow one who told the truth knowing exactly what it would cost him. ‘Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.’ (Proverbs 12:19)
Three years is a long time. It is not forever. She was right – and the institution that punished her has now said so in writing. We do not always lose. Please pray for Dr Spencer as she rebuilds. Pray for the doctors still weighing whether to speak, who now have one more reason to think it might be worth it. And pray for the children in the six jurisdictions where nothing has changed at all.
Source: Australian Christian Lobby