Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 12 October
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Earlier this year, in an interview for Australian Story, Melbourne teenager Georgie Stone described the confusion of her early childhood. She was a girl, inside the body of a boy. ‘I felt like a mythical creature,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t really real’.
For transgender and gender-diverse youth, the disparity between the way they see themselves and the way they are seen by others can be the cause of intense distress. In addition to that – and the prospect of bullying from their peers – transgender youth in Australia face a specific set of medical and legal hurdles. Australia is the only country in the world where it’s necessary to apply to court to access puberty-blocking hormones.
When Georgie was 11, she became the youngest person in this country to be granted this permission from the courts. Now a thriving 16-year-old, Georgie is fighting to spare other children and teenagers from the distress and cost of the court process.
Georgie will be joined by her mother and founder of the Transcend support network, Rebekah Robertson, Campbell Paul, a child psychiatrist specialising in gender dysphoria and host, Jacinta Parsons. Join us at the Wheeler Centre for a conversation with an exceptional young Australian about gender, courage and making history.
Featuring
Georgie Stone
Georgie Stone, 16, was the subject of the recent ABC TV Australian Story episode ‘About a Girl’ (2016) and the Four Corners report ‘Being Me’ (2014). Her landmark court case, Re: Jamie, changed how trans adolescents access medical support in Australia. Georgie is a determined advocate for trans teens, taking her fight for law reform all the way to the Federal Parliament.
Rebekah Robertson
Rebekah Robertson founded Transcend – the first peer led nationwide support network for transgender children and their families – in 2012, and has been community building and advocating since 2007. She has been at the forefront of transforming the landscape for families of trans kids. Her daughter Georgie's landmark court case changed the law, making access to medical support possible for many more children.
Campbell Paul
Associate Professor Campbell Paul is a consultant infant, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, and Honorary Principal Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne.
As a child psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital, he has seen an increasing number of very young children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria. Campbell worked initially with paediatric endocrinologist Garry Warne and subsequently with Michelle Telfer from the Department of Adolescent Medicine – colleagues from several other hospital departments – to establish the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service. In establishing the service, there has been very close collaboration with many parents and young people. There has been a significant increase in the number of young people seen in the Gender Service.
Campbell is a member of both Australian and New Zealand and World Professional Associations for Transgender Health. In 1992, Campbell and colleagues Frances Salo and Brigid Jordan established postgraduate courses in infant and parent mental health. He is president-elect of the board of directors of the World Association for Infant Mental Health and is director of the Australian training centre for Newborn Behavioural Observation (NBO) at the Royal Women’s Hospital Melbourne.
Jacinta Parsons
Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, writer and public speaker who currently hosts the Afternoon program on ABC Local Radio Melbourne. She released her debut memoir, Unseen: The Secret Life of Chronic Illness in 2020 and ...