One minute, Michelle Telfer was sitting in her office at the Royal Children’s Hospital, convincing herself she could ride out the controversy. The next, the Melbourne paediatrician was crying uncontrollably. For months, Telfer had found herself in the maelstrom of an unrelenting culture war centred on the clinic she led, which had so far helped almost 1500 young people struggling with their gender identity.
Now, that culture war, fuelled by the Murdoch press, had escalated into a political firestorm within the senior ranks of the Morrison government.
A former Olympic gymnast, Telfer was made of pretty strong stuff; her petite frame belying the fortitude she’d shown performing on the world stage as a teenager. But on this particular day in August 2019, the head of Australia’s largest children's gender clinic had reached a tipping point.
After weeks of almost daily negative headlines and commentary – some claiming the hospital was “castrating children”, others attacking Telfer personally – an article appeared in The Australian suggesting that Health Minister Greg Hunt was considering conducting an inquiry into the clinic's treatment.
Fearing that the government was about to buckle to pressure from powerful forces – from christian lobby groups, to doctors and journalists who’d had little to do with transgender kids – it all became too much.
“It just felt like this big chasm had opened up,” Telfer tells The Age in a rare and candid interview. “Suddenly, we had all these patients and families who were worried that we were going to be shut down. I had meetings with the hospital’s executive to work out how we were going to manage this crisis. I had messages to call someone at the state government level, calls from the College of Physicians [who had been asked by Hunt to advise him on the need for an inquiry] and calls from the federal government.
“And because I was very much the target, as the leader of the service responsible for so many children and their families, it just became overwhelming.” Read more via Brisbane Times