PATHA has released on its website its new “Gender Affirming Healthcare Guidelines”, complete with the Te Whatu Ora logo, although the Guidelines no longer comply with government policy.
The Minister of Health’s 19 November announcement of restrictions on the use of puberty blockers for minors made obsolete the advice on puberty blockers in the previously written Guidelines. Although Te Whatu Ora invited PATHA to change the Guidelines to align them with the new regulations, PATHA declined the offer and instead published them independently, leaving the Te Whatu Ora logo on the cover page.
“It is improper for PATHA to use the Te Whatu Ora logo in this way,” says Fern Hickson, spokesperson for Resist Gender Education. “It implies Ministry support for the Guidelines while simultaneously directly contradicting government policy.”
As an activist group, PATHA is entitled to advocate for its position but it is not entitled to imply government support for a document that no longer has Ministerial sign-off.
The Guidelines contradict government policy that is based on international peer-reviewed evidence contained in five systematic reviews so far – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Cass/UK, and the Health and Human Services report just released in the US. All have reached the same conclusion:
The harms from sex-rejecting procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations — are significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked. (HHS report)
The Minister of Health needs to respond to this presumptuous action by PATHA and confirm that it does not agree with PATHA’s assertion that puberty blockers are “largely reversible”, nor that the Cass Review is unreliable.
“Of particular concern”, says Hickson, “is the eight-page section in the Guidelines that provide advice on how to administer cross-sex hormones to children as young as ten. PATHA thinks it is acceptable to give young children drugs that it knows cause irreversible changes, including sterility.”
PATHA is a self-selected group of activists who support the belief that extreme body modification to ‘pass’ as the opposite sex is a human right, even for very young children.
“PATHA has revealed itself to be a body modification activist group, not a professional healthcare organisation,” says Hickson. “We call on the government to officially cut ties with PATHA and its Guidelines.”
Resist Gender Education is a diverse alliance of concerned citizens, educators, parents and grandparents, including some who are members of the rainbow community.
