{"id":7511,"date":"2019-07-12T11:22:20","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T01:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/?p=7511"},"modified":"2019-08-19T08:20:16","modified_gmt":"2019-08-18T22:20:16","slug":"paving-the-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/paving-the-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Paving the way"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re so proud of Assoc. Prof Michelle Telfer, Director Gender Service at the RCH, for having her personal story published in the latest edition of The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health<\/a>. Read the story below.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Associate
Associate Professor Michelle Telfer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michelle Telfer is not afraid to take a stand. \u201cOne of the things that has been really important for me and my career is learning to be publicly criticised\u201d, she explains. \u201cWhen you work in trans health, you upset people by doing the right thing.\u201d Telfer is Director of the Gender Service and head of the Department of Adolescent Medicine at the Royal Children\u2019s Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne (VIC, Australia). Her advocacy work led to a change in Australian family law to allow transgender children to receive hormonal treatment under age 18 years. Telfer developed the first Australian Standards for the Care and Treatment of Transgender and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, which were published in 2018. \u201cI knew that it might be controversial because of the changes we made from the previous guidelines\u201d, Telfer told The Lancet
\nChild & Adolescent Health, \u201cbut that was the whole point\u2014to make changes so that the guidelines were clinically relevant\u201d.<\/p>\n

Telfer grew up in Perth (WA, Australia) in a typical middleclass family. But other than that, her childhood was far from typical. At the age of 7, she was talent spotted by
\ngymnastics coach Liz Chetkovich. Telfer went on to represent Australia in many international competitions, including the Commonwealth Games and the World Gymnastics Championships, culminating in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. \u201cShe was dependable, consistent, reliable, but also a beautiful and stylish gymnast\u201d, comments Chetkovich, who Telfer still describes as her second mum. Despite missing around 60% of her schooling and spending up to 6 months of the year competing abroad, Telfer somehow managed to keep up with her school studies. \u201cThere was a huge amount of self-discipline and sacrifice. But I had so many wonderful experiences that really opened my eyes to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the year running up to the 1992 Olympics, Telfer spent a lot of time with the medical team, physiotherapists, and sports psychologists to ensure that she could perform
\nto the best of her abilities. \u201cWe had some fascinating conversations and discussions around what medicine can do and the interesting interactions between the physicality
\nand psychology of gymnastics\u201d, Telfer remembers, and it was as a result of these discussions that she began to consider a career in medicine. Much to everyone\u2019s surprise, she decided to sit (and pass) her Year 12 exams just a few months after returning from Barcelona. After the stress and pressure of being on the Olympic team, she found studying for her exams \u201cactually quite therapeutic\u201d.<\/p>\n

After completing her medical training at the University of Western Australia in her home town of Perth, Telfer felt the need to spread her wings. \u201cI decided to apply to the RCH in Melbourne and managed to get a job as a junior resident in 2003\u201d, she remembers. Telfer found her niche in the adolescent medical team, which fulfilled her interest in both paediatrics and child psychiatry. In 2012, after the retirement of Professor Garry Warne\u2014a paediatric endocrinologist who had been responsible for transgender patients at the RCH since 2003\u2014Telfer volunteered to take on his caseload. This was the beginning of the Gender Service at the RCH, which was the first\u2014and remains the largest\u2014transgender service in Australia. In 2012, the Service received just 18 referrals; by 2018 that number had boosted to 269. \u201cWhen I first took on these patients, Garry said \u2018this is going to be a relatively small aspect of your clinical practice\u2019, but it\u2019s actually taken over my life!\u201d laughs Telfer.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear from speaking to Telfer that her work with transgender children has had a huge impact on her. \u201cYou feel that you are genuinely helping someone and changing the trajectory of their life just by acknowledging how they feel and empowering them to be that person\u201d, she explains. \u201cI find it interesting the way that the rest of society reacts to these young people. I often think that if only they met and spoke to these trans kids, they would understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Telfer has always tackled the controversy surrounding her clinical and advocacy work head on: \u201cShe has had to deal with significant negativity, particularly from strangers who disagreed with the support she was giving to young people with gender dysphoria\u201d, comments Sarah McNab, a close friend of Telfer\u2019s and Head of General Medicine at the RCH. \u201cWhile I know this affected her personally, she was undeterred in her determination to provide her patients with exceptional care that was otherwise unavailable.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as her clinical work, Telfer and her colleagues have launched a longitudinal cohort study, Trans20. \u201cIt is going to be a vital contributor in [improving] the outcomes for trans and gender-diverse young people\u201d, Telfer explains. The study will look at not only physical health but also mental health, family functioning, emotional functioning, school functioning, and quality of life over 4 years initially, although Telfer hopes to secure funding for up to 20 years.<\/p>\n

Telfer has been delighted to see first-hand how the new Australian guidelines have been received by both the transgender and the medical communities, and how the change in the law has been so beneficial for her young patients. But a lot remains to be done to continue to change people\u2019s perspective on gender fluidity and tackle the stigma that transgender children and adolescents face. \u201cI am proud of her for choosing something that is going to make such a difference to people\u2019s lives\u201d, says Chetkovich. \u201cShe has a degree of empathy and ability to put herself into other people\u2019s situations and to fight for those people who cannot fight for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebecca Akkermans<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re so proud of Assoc. Prof Michelle Telfer, Director Gender Service at the RCH, for having her personal story published in the latest edition of The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":7512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8971,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7511"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7537,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7511\/revisions\/7537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}