Dr Jereth Kok, a general practitioner from Melbourne, has been unable to care for his patients during a five-year suspension –which could be permanent, depending on a hearing before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) late this month.
Kok is being punished for his conservative Christian views expressed on social media – and in one case, an article on transgenderism that was published by a news site I edited called Eternity. The article “A medical perspective on Transgender”, formed part of a series that teased out the balance between grace and truth on that subject. It started with a piece by Tess Delbridge, a former Eternity staffer, “Gender bending? Transgender not as black and white as you might think”.
In the opinion column, Tess Delbridge 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.”
The Eternity article was the subject of complaints against Kok. It was likely the most read of the material objected to, the rest being Facebook posts and the like, which would have had limited readership.
Kok is in trouble partly because he pursued bitter irony. The tribunal investigators also focused on comments on conservative blogger Bill Muehleberg’s site. When Muehlenberg wrote a piece criticising Australian aid funding abortions, Kok resorted to extreme irony.
“Thanks to “family planning”, developed nations (Europe, Japan, North America) are in steep decline and are facing an impending financial and economic crisis that comes with an aged population.
“See, for example, what is happening in Japan: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12296077
“Soon, our civilisations will be vanquished, and the Earth will be overrun by Black people. The solution is clear: we must take “family planning” to poor countries and exterminate them before it is too late!“
That comment was the basis for an accusation of racism at an earlier VCAT hearing. It may not be to everyone’s taste, including this writer, but the evidence of racism is extremely thin or non-existent. Kok is aiming at abortion and employing satire after the manner of Jonathan Swift. The question is whether writing that comment – among the strongest of Kok’s online words – amounts to a thought crime worthy of not being able to be a doctor.
This is not a case of a medical practitioner being rude or inconsiderate to a patient. As HRLA points out, Kok has never received a complaint from any of the thousands of patients he had treated during his medical career.
You don’t have to agree with Kok’s views or how he worded them to be disquieted about his case.
HRLA, the Human Rights Law Alliance, will represent Jereth as he defends himself against allegations that he is not a fit and proper person to practise medicine because of his religious beliefs. A GiveSendGo fundraiser is seeking to raise $210,000 to cover the legal expenses of Dr Jereth Kok’s trial. The Canberra Declaration site reports that as of a few days ago, $150,000 has been raised. In that report Kok also makes clear the religious basis of his beliefs. “The reason I believe most of what I believe is because I’m a Christian. The reason I believe abortion is killing is because that is the longstanding Christian teaching based upon the Bible. The reason I believe what I believe about marriage, sexuality and gender is because of what the Bible says about these topics.”
At stake in the tribunal hearing is the extent to which the medical authorities can control what doctors and other medical practitioners write on social media. The Kok case already includes what is written in religious media (Eternity and the Bill Muehlenberg site.) A doctor opposing abortion or transgender treatments on a church livestream could be next.
Facebook’s response to a request by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency to hand over an archive of Kok’s Facebook page was to simply refuse, arguing that Australian laws could not compel Facebook, as a US-based organisation, to release the information. “Accordingly, APHRA may wish to consider seeking the information directly from the user Mr Jereth Kok,” Facebook lawyers wrote. It is interesting to note that APHRA considers it to have the power to compel the release of all posts and comments made by an individual. The word Orwellian fits.
In the end, the investigators from two large accounting firms were hired to read through Jereth Kok’s entire Facebook page, Bill Muelenberg’s Culture Watch blog and his Facebook page, too. While The Other Cheek operates on the assumption that anything on the internet can be found by someone, this may be a principle our readers might want to consider, too.