Mark Butler’s late-Friday announcement of a review of transgender medicine came apparently out of the blue. Why would a federal health minister, on the eve of a tight election, launch into an area of policy known as one of the touchiest culture-war subjects imaginable?

In an area that Butler himself described “contested and evolving”, the announcement acted like an ink-blot test. Everyone read their own views into it.

Health Minister Mark Butler.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Those who have opposed the medicine of gender transition – who say it’s a “social contagion” which has sucked thousands of young people, particularly girls, into dangerous medicalisation – hope it will upend Australia’s current practices.

Under the current national guidelines, written in 2018 in the country’s busiest gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, it’s assumed that a child’s statements about their gender identity should be taken seriously and acted........

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