Queensland and the Northern Territory have banned gender-affirming puberty blockers and hormones for trans and gender diverse young people in public healthcare, despite an independent clinical evaluation finding the care was safe, evidence-based, and not rushed. The bans followed political pressure rather than clinical evidence, and they have removed decision-making from healthcare professionals and the young people they serve.

What actually happened in Queensland?

The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Journal has published a detailed account of what has unfolded in Queensland since 2023, written by Pheona van Huizen, and I think it deserves careful attention because the timeline it sets out is remarkable.

In late 2023, Queensland Health commissioned an independent clinical evaluation of its Children's Gender Services. That evaluation, completed between December 2023 and June 2024, found that the service was providing safe care, consistent with evidence-based national guidelines. It found no evidence that patients or their families were being hurried into decisions. The service needed more resources, yes, but what it was doing was sound.

Then, in January 2025, the Queensland Government banned the initiation of puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone treatment for people under 18 in its public health system. Without consultation with Queensland Health, which is required by law when developing a Health Service Directive. The ban came first; the review it nominally justified, the Vine Review, was announced three days later.

When that directive was challenged in the Supreme Court of Queensland, Justice Callaghan ordered it set aside in October 2025. The government's response, on the same day, was to issue a Ministerial Direction maintaining the ban until 2032. Not waiting for the Vine Review to report. Not waiting for the national guidelines being developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council. Just: the ban continues.

The Vine Review's final report was released on 19 December 2025, just before the parliamentary Christmas break. On the day of its release, the Queensland Health Minister stated the ban would remain until an NHS England clinical trial called the Pathways trial is complete in 2031. The problem is that the Pathways trial has not started. It was paused in February 2026 because of safety concerns raised by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. So Queensland is waiting for results from a trial that is not running, to justify a ban on care that its own review had already found was safe.

And then the Northern Territory followed

Two days after Queensland extended its ban, the Northern Territory's Health Minister announced the same restriction in his jurisdiction. The political contagion here is obvious, even if the clinical justification is not.

The article notes that paediatric gender health services had been provided at the Cairns Sexual Health Service from at least 2008. This is not new medicine, and this is not an experiment. Trans young people have been receiving this care in Australia for nearly two decades, and the people who have been providing it are not rogue practitioners: they are clinicians working to national guidelines, within a framework that an independent evaluation found to be safe.

Who is being harmed

The Trans Pathways study, cited in the article, found that 48.1% of trans and gender diverse participants aged between 14 and 25 reported attempting suicide. Nearly half. That figure should stop anyone in their tracks. These are not abstract statistics; they describe real young people, many of whom were already navigating extraordinary barriers to care before the bans arrived: cost, long waiting lists, limited availability of gender-affirming support.

Australian law recognises that young people under 18 can consent to their own medical treatment if they demonstrate the capacity to understand it, the principle known as Gillick competence. The bans in Queensland and the Northern Territory remove that right entirely for this group of young people, in this area of healthcare, regardless of individual capacity or clinical need. That is not caution; it is discrimination.

AusPATH, the Australian Professional Association for Transgender Health, has launched Project 491 in direct response: an effort to help affected adolescents access appropriate care through alternative means. That such a project is necessary at all tells you everything about the gap the governments have created.

Why this matters beyond Australia

I have watched this pattern play out before. A jurisdiction introduces a ban, citing another jurisdiction's review, while that review's own findings are either misrepresented or quietly set aside. Queensland cited concerns influenced by events in the UK. The UK's own restrictions were driven by the Cass Review, which has since been widely discredited internationally. And now Queensland is holding its ban in place pending an NHS trial that the NHS itself has paused.

Each time a government does this, it hands the next government a precedent. The Northern Territory needed only two days to follow Queensland's lead. This is how policy spreads when it is driven by politics rather than evidence: quickly, without consultation, and at the expense of the young people who needed care yesterday.

The NHMRC is developing national clinical practice guidelines, with interim advice expected in the middle of 2026. The article raises a concern I share: the working title of those guidelines uses the term "gender dysphoria", which suggests they may not incorporate a de-pathologising informed consent model of care. The language we use shapes the frameworks we build. If the guidelines treat being trans as a disorder requiring gatekeeping rather than as a variation requiring support, they will not serve trans young people well, however carefully they are written.

What strikes me most about this account is the gap between what the clinical evidence showed and what the politicians decided. The reviews said: this care is safe. The courts said: this ban is unlawful. The government said: the ban continues anyway. Healthcare has been removed from the hands of the people best placed to provide it, and the people least equipped to make these decisions, who have no clinical training and no therapeutic relationship with these young people, have taken it instead.

That is not governance in the interests of patients. It is governance in the interests of something else entirely.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.