"How to build the plane as you are flying it" - GP for gender affirming care in Napier, NZ.

Women’s Rights Party members and parents of gender dysphoric kids hand out brochures at the GP Conference in Christchurch.

It was Friday 25^th July, and five Women’s Rights Party members, brochures in hand, gathered outside the ‘Conference for General Practice’ held in Christchurch’s Tae Pae Convention Centre. The brochures contained up to date information about adolescents with gender dysphoria, as opposed to the outdated and flawed gender affirming¹ model still too commonly disseminated amongst health practitioners. Some of the Women’s Rights Party members were also members of the group Aotearoa Support - a group for parents with children who have adopted a transgender identity, or have gender dysphoria. They were all there to hand out the brochures to the conference attendees, in the hope at least some would read them and appreciate the better knowledge they contained.

The conference was organised by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, and to date it appears they endorse the gender affirming model for gender-questioning kids. That’s not to categorically say that all within the organisation follow suit, nor all General Practitioners, but the body that is known as the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners has shown in the past they heed the advice from LGBTQ+ lobby groups , and no divergence from that has yet been evident.

For the most part, the brochures were well received by the conference attendees. The Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, also accepted a brochure on his way into the conference. Additionally, he was handed a personal letter from the brochure-group organiser, in which she pleaded as a very concerned parent for the updated PATHA NZ guidelines NOT to be released, but to be reviewed, revised, and completely re-written by a truly independent, professional, ethical, non-conflicted group. He told her he would read the letter, and said that he was also a concerned parent.

A health official paused for a chat, too, with another Women’s Rights Party member in the brochure group. He relayed how he had personally noticed a large increase in young teens identifying as trans, which perturbed him. In the conversation, he agreed that the over-medicalisation of children was a public health issue that must concern his sector. It was also very concerning what was being taught in schools, he said, as was the behaviour of some parents, who were so indoctrinated with gender ideology that they were the ones pushing their kids into adopting a gender identity, and it often wasn’t coming from the kids themselves.

Once the conference started the brochure group dispersed, but the organiser went into the conference as a registrant. She reported that there were no gender-themed stalls inside the convention centre, but there was a gender-themed session she intended to attend called “How to build the plane while you’re flying it”, led by Dr Elizabeth (Beth) McElrea, a General Practitioner at the Napier GP Clinic Tamatea Medical. Her talk was about her experience in Iceland helping to develop a National gender service for adults.

This doctor had already challenged the evidence of the brochures outside as they were being distributed, and asked how widely the issue had been read up on. She was assured that everything possible over the last six years had been read on the subject, particularly from the invested parents there.

In her session, the doctor talked about how she was a member of WPATH and PATHA NZ, and is setting up a gender affirming care practice in Napier at her GP clinic. Last year, she went to Iceland for 6 months to revamp their Gender Service for adults, of whom 85% were aged between 18-29. The Iceland endocrinology team had “stopped treating”, although she didn’t say why, and had gone there to help get things “back on track”. She helped develop an app to make getting treatment “easier”, and to get rid of the requirement for a psych evaluation and move to the “informed consent” model. She described this as “internationally accepted best practice” –which is, of course, a dubious claim. The app made it easier for gender affirming doctors to “check in” on their patients, and make sure they were getting the “treatment they wanted”. It sounded very much like a model for treatment-on-demand.

The Icelandic gender affirming doctors send their patients to Amsterdam for surgery, because it can’t be done in Iceland. Despite these doctors’ best efforts, they still have “quite a few” patients who “aren’t quite ready for surgery, yet”, but whom they continue to support. The brochure-group organiser found it hard not to think of the app as a way to apply pressure, in the guise of ‘kindness’, to book in for surgery. She thought that Dr Elizabeth McElrea’s over-confidence in the gender affirming model, particularly given all the recent developments, was staggering. Only one question was asked during this session at the Christchurch conference, and with only about 25 - 30 people in the room, it appeared to not be a highly popular topic.

Another session about suicide, which the brochure-group organiser attended, talked about clusters, social media, and social contagion. The woman speaking said “You don’t have clusters without social contagion. It’s part of the epidemiology and we look at that.” Although she was talking about suicide, the connection with kids socially (and then medically) transitioning in peer friendship groups was also undeniable to the organiser.

Although the organiser of the brochure group is aware that parents of trans kids have a lot on their hands in fighting gender ideology, and trying to keep their kids safe from all-out gender transition, she is considering a letter-writing campaign as the next step for the parents’ group, Aotearoa Support.

Whilst Dr Elizabeth McElrea’s talk was disturbing, the generally cordial receipt of the brochures from a majority of the GP’s attending the conference was heartening.

• ¹Gender affirming care, by all accounts, is about providing the health, medical, and surgical services for those who wish to identify as the opposite sex to that which they were born, upon upon their own declaration of such, with as few interventions, evaluations, or hindrances as possible. The model is to believe the patient’s own self-diagnosis that they need to transition to the opposite sex, regardless of their age.