After four years, Dr Jereth Kok is still suspended from medical practice because of stuff he wrote online.
One of the things he wrote was for me when I was editing Eternity, the Christian newspaper and website of which I was the founding editor.
Kok’s Eternity piece “a medical perspective on transgender” https://www.eternitynews.com.au/archive/a-medical-perspective-on-transgender/ was part of a series on transgender kicked off by an opinion column ‘Transgender not as black and white as you might think’.
In the first opinion column, an Eternity writer called for Christians to listen sensitively to transgender people and to respect them “It is human to falter and err along the path towards God. Those errors and missteps do not alter God’s final Yes or No, which is based entirely on the death and resurrection of Jesus, not on our bodily transformations and secret sins,” she wrote.
Kok’s piece was a reminder that surgery does not lead to a complete physical change in gender characteristics. “Even at a more superficial level, no amount of hormonal or surgical “therapy” can give a woman functioning male genitals. It cannot give a man ovaries, enable him to menstruate or to conceive a child. “Sex reassignment therapy” cannot recreate the elaborate physiological and hormonal mix that comes naturally with maleness and femaleness.”
Kok has now given a couple of fresh interviews on his case. He’s been cautious about going public, no doubt from legal advice. He expects the Medical Board “trial” to occur this year finally. In a 2020 hearing before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal his suspension was upheld, with the medical board then taking its time to bring on his case.
Of the reason for his suspension from medical practice, he says on a “discernible” podcast ]“they justified it [based] on what I had said on social media, an article I’d written for a Christian magazine, comments, etc. So it was all that I had done outside of work. It was all in writing. It was on the grounds of views that I’d expressed and things that I’d written.”
Kok describes how the Medical Board trawled through thousands of comments he made on social media after two complaints and that trangenderism, abortion and LGBTQIA were the focus of the investigation.
The Human Rights Law Alliance article on his case says “Despite Dr Kok never receiving a complaint of discrimination or differential treatment from any of his patients, the Medical Board exercised emergency powers to investigate over ten years of his internet history and pick out potentially offensive comments. The investigation was conducted over three months without Dr Kok’s knowledge, and he was given a week to provide his defence.”
His strong description of gender changer surgery as “butchery’ (not in Eternity but online) was held to be denigrating other medical practitioners.
“There’s one is there are two main charges or allegations,” he tells discernible. “One is that I’ve said things that are or could be construed as insulting to other doctors. Saying that sex change surgery is butchery, using the word butcher could be construed as insulting other doctors who perform that surgery. I’m saying that they’re butchers, fine. Then the other main charge is that I’m contradicting the accepted position, the settled science of the medical profession.”
On butchery, he concedes, “I’m happy to say, all right, that’s a strong word, I won’t say a word, like butchery again. to describe sex change surgery. But, it is something I disagree with very strongly, and I consider it harmful.”
Kok explains, however, that his case has become more complex while he has been suspended.
“So there was an initial about 25 that I got in trouble for and was suspended for in 2019. I was suspended about six months before the pandemic hit, then the pandemic hit. I wasn’t working as a doctor anymore.
“I’d retrained myself to do other things. I continued using Facebook because, you know, <laugh>, I believe, I believe I’ve got every right to. But I stopped saying controversial things in a fully public setting.
“So I was just saying it in a more limited setting, but at the end of 2021, they did another search and managed to get some of these non-public. [He describes how he sent the podcasters some screenshots of what he is on “trial” for.] The bulk comes from that second search where they’ve picked up covid related issues. You know, things I’ve said about the lockdowns, the mandates, and Those sorts of topics. So there are two groups of crimes, so to speak. There’s the initial group that got me suspended and the second group that they’ve found subsequently. And I will be tried for the whole lot of them.”
In the four years since Kok has been suspended, there may have been a pendulum swing on transgender issues. An increasing number of experts have questioned the model of affirming transitions. What the Victorian Civil and Administrative Board many have considered settled science is turning out to be anything but.
The Cass Report found the affirming practice at the Tavistock institute in London to be dangerous, and local researchers who have raised the issue of co-morbidities such as autism being present in teenagers presenting as transgender mean a more holistic treatment is required. The days of assuming that affirming transgender is the primary way to help these young people have been questioned.