Ani O'Brien: The lunatics are taking the government to court

PATHA to take the government to court over puberty blockers

A handful of activists, with a tenuous grip on reality and a plethora of mental health issues between them, are dragging the government into the courts over the puberty blocker ban.

On 1 December 2025, the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) filed an urgent injunction seeking to block the upcoming ban on new prescriptions of puberty-blockers for “gender-dysphoric youth” set to take effect on 19 December.

Jennifer Shields, Healthcare Lead at Qtopia, and President 

of PATHA. Photo: NZ Herald

PATHA claims the regulation is “illegal and unethical,” arguing that “transgender children in Aotearoa” are being “subjected to harm just to ‘win a war on woke.’” This argument is as weak as the bones of the children they put on puberty blockers. The decision by Cabinet was based on clinical evidence, lack of regulatory approval, other credible jurisdictions making similar bans, and, of course, observable reality. Reality is not something these people are particularly familiar with, however.

This is an ideological tantrum escalated to legal action.

To understand the situation, you have to understand who is driving it. PATHA models itself on WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) an organisation that has been thoroughly dismantled on the world stage over the last five years.

WPATH used to be treated as authoritative. That ended when major European health systems including Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the UK, all turned their backs on its guidelines, citing a lack of evidence, poor clinical standards, and ideological capture. Senior clinicians resigned, membership cratered, and the leaked “WPATH Files” exposed that internal decision-making was driven by activists, not medical science.

PATHA is New Zealand’s smaller, more chaotic, more activist-dominated knock-off. It has even less credibility and considerably more dysfunction. The few actual clinicians involved are routinely browbeaten by activists who insist that “lived experience” should trump medical qualifications.

I have been privy to PATHA’s internal email chains. They are not the communications of a professional medical association. They are struggle sessions with emotional pile-ons, toxic ideological policing, and often result in leadership shutting conversations down because members become hysterical and abusive to each other.

These are not impartial experts. Nor are they calm, evidence-based professionals. They are highly emotional activists who try to outdo each other comparing mental and physical ailments like bingo cards.

In fact, Jennifer Shields, President of PATHA, somehow holds the title of “Healthcare Lead” at Qtopia despite his education history consisting of a small business admin certificate, a web design certificate, and unfinished Fine Arts and Bachelor Arts degrees.

Click to view

The role is described on Shields’ LinkedIn as:

Leading a national training programme for Aotearoa’s primary care workforce around gender diversity & gender affirming care. Advocating for trans health and wellbeing throughout Aotearoa by keeping up with and contributing to efforts around research, advocacy, programme and system design.

These are the people claiming they, not the Ministry of Health, not Medsafe, and not the elected Government, should be the ones determining what drugs are given to children. Why on Earth would we want Shields and friends advising and training our medical professionals in anything?

One of the reasons governments overseas have pulled back from puberty blockers is simply that the evidence is not there. Not for long-term safety, long-term benefit, and not for the extraordinary ideological claims activists have made.

Our own health authorities admitted that there is no high-quality evidence proving the long-term effects of these drugs are safe. Saying that aloud is not “anti-trans.” It is basic medical ethics. It is entirely reasonable that when the evidence is weak and the harms great, governments introduce safeguards.

The ban on new prescriptions is not “political theatre” either. It is responsible governance. What is political is how long it took the government to issue the order. They spent years battling activists inside our public service, and in pressure groups, when they should have been able to simply apply the evidence to policy. Every other area of paediatric medicine requires rigorous evidence before we expose a child to lifelong risks. Only this particular drug is fought over because activists demand an exemption.

PATHA and the activist networks orbiting it do not care about puberty blockers in any meaningful clinical sense. If they did, they would have spent the last decade demanding proper trials, long-term follow-up studies, and transparent data, not fighting tooth and nail to avoid all three. Their outrage isn’t rooted in concern for children’s wellbeing. It’s rooted in the fact that the government has finally interrupted their ideological project and belief that children should be socially and medically transitioned on the basis of identity politics. They’re angry because the ban exposes just how flimsy their scientific claims always were.

For these activists, puberty blockers have never been a medical tool, they’ve been a political symbol. A litmus test and loyalty marker. Something to defend at all costs because admitting uncertainty would collapse the entire narrative they’ve built around “affirmation” as the only morally acceptable pathway. They cannot tolerate scrutiny because scrutiny reveals the truth that they are willing to gamble with children’s bodies to protect their ideological scaffolding. That is why they are lashing out now. To preserve the myth that their worldview is beyond question and to punish anyone, including the government, who dares to break the spell.

All over the world trans activists have used fear and 

violence to control the narrative and drive their agenda.

Now PATHA wants the courts to step in and overrule ministers, override Medsafe, and pretend that activist demands somehow constitute legal entitlements. It is astonishing when you consider the basic fact that the puberty-blocking drugs they’re fighting for aren’t even approved by Medsafe for the treatment of gender dysphoria. Every prescription to date has been off-label; a workaround that has been tolerated only because politicians and health bureaucrats were too intimidated by activist backlash to enforce normal standards.

And yet PATHA’s injunction pretends the government has stripped away a regulated, evidence-backed treatment, when in reality we just cannot keep giving unapproved, poorly studied drugs to minors while pretending it’s “best practice.”

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One of the most manipulative tactics used by gender-activist organisations has been the relentless repetition of the claim that children who are not “affirmed” will inevitably become suicidal. The statistics they cite are almost always drawn from self-selected surveys, uncontrolled studies, or advocacy-generated data that cannot establish causation. Yet these numbers are presented to frightened parents as unquestionable scientific truth. It is emotional blackmail. Suicide risk in distressed adolescents is complex, multifactorial, and absolutely not reducible to whether a child is immediately affirmed in a new gender identity or put on a medicalised pathway. But activists have found the suicide narrative to be an extraordinarily effective pressure tool and a way to shut down debate, terrify parents into compliance, and paint any form of clinical caution as lethal cruelty. It is unethical, dishonest, and deeply irresponsible.

This injunction is not about “saving children.” It is about preserving an activist-dominated system in which a tiny cluster of loud political actors, the majority of whom are trans-identifying males, were previously allowed to dictate national health policy without scrutiny. They are demanding the right to bypass the regulatory body responsible for medicine safety, the elected ministers responsible for health policy, and the public’s expectation that children should not be used as test cases for ideology.

I said this in my letter to the Public Service Commissioner and I’ll say it again here:

“The [Human Rights] Commission’s assertion that denying minors access to an unapproved, high-risk medical intervention constitutes a violation of human rights is not only incorrect, it inverts the very logic of child protection. If anything, children have stronger human rights protections against being prescribed drugs that carry sterilising effects and long-term developmental consequences, particularly when they are too young to fully understand those implications.”

In every other field of medicine, the burden of proof lies with those promoting the treatment, not those asking for caution. But for puberty blockers, activists succeeded in flipping that logic on its head.

I would like to say that facing these deranged cases in court is helpful in that it sets precedents and flushes out madness, however, there is a lingering worry that the creeping ideological capture of our judiciary will see the activists win. Too often we see judges swayed not by evidence, regulatory precedent, or legislative intent, but by whatever fashionable cause is dominating elite discourse that month. The courts have shown, in recent years, a real appetite for inserting themselves into policy debates where they have neither democratic authority nor clinical expertise. And so yes, it is entirely plausible that a judge could look past the lack of Medsafe approval, the absence of long-term safety data, the international retreat from puberty blockers, and the activist dysfunction within PATHA, and still decide that the government’s decision must be overridden to appease a loud, highly ideological minority. That is the risk. Not because the law supports PATHA’s argument, it doesn’t, but because some corners of our judicial system have proven far too susceptible to the emotional theatrics of activist groups.

Another uncomfortable truth nobody seems willing to say out loud is that many of the most vocal activists in this space centre their personal mental-health struggles as if those struggles grant them clinical authority. They talk about their diagnoses constantly, sometimes even performatively, wearing them like identity markers when it bolsters their political argument.

Having a mental health condition is not the issue; many, many New Zealanders live with one. The issue is that these activists routinely use their self-disclosed diagnoses as emotional leverage, as a way to shut down debate or demand special authority over medical policy. Their personal distress becomes a political credential. Their emotional and mental volatility becomes “lived experience.” And they frame any clinician who questions them as oppressive or dangerous often seeking to silence them by laying complaints with regulatory bodies. That dynamic is deeply unhealthy and it is certainly not how a country should determine the medical treatments given to children.

What vulnerable young people need in all of this is the opposite of what these activist circles provide. They need calm, clinically grounded adults who can assess evidence, weigh risks, and prioritise long-term wellbeing over ideological purity. Instead, they’ve been confronted with activists who treat personal crisis as political authority and frame any attempt at medical caution as an attack on their identity. Children deserve better than that. They deserve health policy shaped by stability, expertise, and clear-headed judgement, not by adults who use their own emotional turbulence as a mandate to reshape the healthcare system. When we are dealing with treatments that affect developing brains and bodies, the adults in the room must actually be functioning, sane adults.

At its core, the case will be about one thing: control. Who sets national health policy? Parliament, Cabinet, and the regulatory agencies responsible for public health? Or activists and lobbyists who believe their worldview should trump all else? It will also test a fundamental question:

Do medical standards and safety regulations apply to everyone, or do they magically cease to apply when the activists shouting the loudest insist their cause is morally special?

PATHA and WPATH have spent years presenting themselves as untouchable, immune to scrutiny, and above the rules every other medical field must follow. The government has finally refused to play along. So let them file their injunctions. Let them howl on social media and brand anyone who disagrees with them a bigot or a warmonger in the “culture wars.” We will continue to fight their lunacy.

Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.