What the Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia is telling clinicians to do with LGBTQA+ patients

The Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia (CMDFA) has published guidance telling health professionals to steer LGBTQA+ patients toward change or suppression of their sexual orientation and gender identity.

The guidance appears in the July 2026 “sexuality” edition of Luke’s Journal. This is not a private theological discussion. The CMDFA is a national fellowship of doctors, dentists and other health professionals, and the edition repeatedly tells clinicians how to understand, advise and respond to LGBTQA+ patients.

For many of us, this is personal. Survivors and advocates have spent years explaining that contemporary conversion practices rarely announce themselves as “conversion therapy”. They are more often embedded in pastoral care, counselling, messages of brokenness, identity-specific demands for celibacy and repeated pressure to resist or suppress a person’s sexuality or gender.

That work has led five Australian jurisdictions to legally recognise the harms of LGBTQA+ change and suppression practices. Governments, health bodies and professional regulators have accepted a basic principle:

Sexual and gender diversity is not an illness. Healthcare should not be directed toward making LGBTQA+ people heterosexual or cisgender.

The CMDFA is promoting guidance that closely mirrors conversion practices and warrants urgent regulatory investigation.

I have raised a patient-safety concern with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, and I am asking you to consider doing the same.

The CMDFA’s prescription for LGBTQA+ patients

Across the edition, contributors tell health professionals to steer LGBTQA+ patients toward heterosexuality, cisgender conformity and sexual suppression:

• Dr Catherine Hollier tells Christian health professionals to adopt a “priest-like” role and use their clinical authority to guide patients toward heterosexual marriage as the only proper expression of sexuality.
• Paul Joshua Bedwell urges clinicians and pastors to offer “change-allowing” therapy to young people who want to move away from same-sex attraction, while dismissing laws and professional standards intended to prevent conversion practices as ideological control.
• Patricia and Kamal Weerakoon tell clinicians not to affirm transgender patients. They instruct them to treat a patient’s gender identity as false, search for supposed underlying causes, and guide the patient toward accepting their sex assigned at birth.
• Josias Ng tells clinicians to withhold a transgender patient’s requested pronouns and use the clinical encounter to direct them toward a Christian account of their “true” identity, even when the patient does not share that faith.
• Robert Smith encourages health and pastoral professionals to frame same-sex attraction as a product of human fallenness, damaged parental relationships, abuse, pornography or LGBTQA+ influence, then support patients to suppress its expression through celibacy or pursue “reorientation”.

This is not just a collection of conservative religious opinions. It is practical guidance for using medical and pastoral authority to steer LGBTQA+ patients toward heterosexuality, cisgender conformity and sexual suppression.

Dressing ideology up as evidence

The publication repeatedly turns evidence into claims the evidence can’t support. Scientific language and selective citations are used to support conclusions predetermined by conversion ideology. Contrary evidence is dismissed as ideology, while speculation is presented as clinical truth.

Bedwell, for example, cites evidence that attraction, behaviour and identity can change during adolescence, then uses natural variation to justify intervention toward heterosexuality. The cited Savin-Williams and Ream study was observational. It did not test whether clinicians can safely change sexual orientation. Likewise, the Ganna and colleagues genetic study found that same-sex sexual behaviour is complex and cannot be predicted from a few genetic variants. It did not find that counselling, pastoral care or religious discipline can redirect sexuality.

Smith presents deficient parental bonding, family dysfunction, abuse, pornography and LGBTQA+ influence as explanations for homosexuality. These are not established causes. They are familiar conversion-practice narratives presented without evidence of the causal relationships claimed.

The transgender articles begin with the theological conclusion that sex assigned at birth defines the only acceptable identity. From there, affirming care is ruled out and cisgender conformity becomes the intended outcome before the patient has been assessed.

It’s pseudoscience in a medical wrapper.

Putting patient safety at risk

Religious belief is not the issue. A patient may freely choose to discuss faith, sexual ethics or celibacy. Ethical care can help them explore those questions without prescribing an identity outcome.

A red line is crossed when the clinician decides that heterosexuality, cisgender identity or compliance with a religious sexual ethic is the healthier destination. This edition of Luke’s Journal gives clinicians a framework for doing exactly that.

For an LGBTQA+ patient, particularly a young person or someone from a conservative religious community, the foreseeable risks include:

• shame and internalised stigma being reinforced by a trusted professional;
• reluctance to disclose sexuality, gender identity, relationships or mental-health concerns;
• delayed access to appropriate and affirming care;
• religious beliefs being introduced into care without the patient’s request or consent;
• ordinary developmental uncertainty being used as an opportunity to promote illegal and unethical change or suppression practices;
• referral into pastoral or counselling networks committed to a predetermined outcome; and
• deterioration in mental health, family relationships and trust in healthcare.

The significant psychological, relational and spiritual harms among survivors of both formal and informal conversion practices are well documented (Jones et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2021; Power et al., 2022).

A large 2024 study also found exposure to conversion practices was associated with greater symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress and suicidality (Tran et al., 2024).

The Australian Medical Association states that being LGBTQA+ is a normal and healthy expression of human diversity, that conversion practices have no place in society, and that doctors should affirm, support and provide care for LGBTQA+ people. The Medical Board of Australia’s code requires patient-centred care and cautions doctors against expressing personal beliefs in ways that exploit vulnerability or cause distress.

This does not prevent careful assessment, discussion of uncertainty or respectful disagreement about areas of contested clinical evidence. It requires clinicians to distinguish evidence from doctrine, respect patient autonomy, avoid discrimination and refrain from steering patients toward an identity outcome selected by the practitioner.

The law has changed for a reason

Victoria, NSW, the ACT, Queensland and South Australia now prohibit defined forms of LGBTQA+ change or suppression practice. The statutory tests differ, and publishing an article is not necessarily enough by itself to establish a breach, but this edition creates an obvious regulatory question: are registered practitioners using, recommending or facilitating these approaches with patients?

Regulators should not wait for a harmed patient, who then has to shoulder the burden of making a complaint on their own. They should proactively examine how this “medical guidance” is being used in practice now, and assess whether patients are being directed toward prohibited or professionally unsafe outcomes.

After everything survivors have done to secure legal recognition of these harms, it’s outrageous to see such reckless health advice still in circulation. The same discredited ideas have been repackaged as health guidance and amplified by people whose qualifications and professional networks make them appear trustworthy. Medical credentials should not be used to turn religious doctrine into apparent clinical fact. LGBTQA+ patients deserve much better.

Please raise your concern

I have asked the HCCC and AHPRA to assess the edition as a whole, identify the registered practitioners responsible for authoring, editing or peer reviewing the material and consider whether the publication creates an ongoing risk of prohibited or harmful practices being recommended to patients.

If you share these concerns, I encourage you to make your own factual and respectful submission. You do not need to allege that a particular offence has been proved. Ask the regulators to assess the material, the professional conduct involved and the risks to patients.

Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency

• Raise a concern through Ahpra’s online portal
• Email for notification material: notifications@ahpra.gov.au
• Telephone: 1300 419 495

NSW Health Care Complaints Commission

• Make a complaint through the HCCC portal
• Completed complaint forms can be emailed to hccc@hccc.nsw.gov.au
• Telephone: 1800 043 159

Include a link to the full edition and identify the passages that concern you. If you are writing from another state or territory, you can also contact your local health complaints body. Please keep complaints evidence-based and directed to the regulators. Do not harass individual authors, their families, workplaces or patients.

Religious freedom does not include a professional entitlement to present LGBTQA+ identity as brokenness and then call the response healthcare. Patients deserve clinicians who recognise the difference between personal doctrine and clinical evidence. They deserve care that is safe, respectful and directed by their needs, not by a practitioner’s preferred identity outcome.

References

American Psychological Association. (2020, March 10). A growing number of states ban sexual orientation change efforts. https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2020/sexual-orientation-change

Australian Medical Association. (2021, November 19). AMA releases new position statement on LGBTQIA+ health. https://www.ama.com.au/media/ama-releases-new-position-statement-lgbtqia-health

Ganna, A., Verweij, K. J. H., Nivard, M. G., Maier, R., Wedow, R., Busch, A. S., Abdellaoui, A., Guo, S., Sathirapongsasuti, J. F., Lichtenstein, P., Lundstrom, S., Langstrom, N., Auton, A., Harris, K. M., Beecham, G. W., Martin, E. R., Sanders, A. R., Perry, J. R. B., Neale, B. M., & Zietsch, B. P. (2019). Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior. Science, 365(6456), eaat7693. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat7693

Jones, T. W., Brown, A., Carnie, L., Fletcher, G., & Leonard, W. (2018). Preventing harm, promoting justice: Responding to LGBT conversion therapy in Australia. Human Rights Law Centre and La Trobe University. https://www.hrlc.org.au/reports/preventing-harm/

Jones, T. W., Jones, T. M., Power, J., Despott, N., & Pallotta-Chiarolli, M. (2021). Healing spiritual harms: Supporting recovery from LGBTQA+ change and suppression practices. Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1201588/Healing-spiritual-harms-Supporting-recovery-from-LGBTQA-change-and-suppression-practices.pdf

Medical Board of Australia. (2020). Good medical practice: A code of conduct for doctors in Australia. https://www.medicalboard.gov.au/Codes-Guidelines-Policies/Code-of-conduct.aspx

Power, J., Jones, T. W., Jones, T., Despott, N., Pallotta-Chiarolli, M., & Anderson, J. (2022). Better understanding of the scope and nature of LGBTQA+ religious conversion practices will support recovery. Medical Journal of Australia, 217(3), 119-122. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51441

Savin-Williams, R. C., & Ream, G. L. (2007). Prevalence and stability of sexual orientation components during adolescence and young adulthood. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(3), 385-394. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9088-5

Tran, N. K., et al. (2024). Conversion practice recall and mental health symptoms in sexual and gender minority adults in the USA: A cross-sectional study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 11(11), 879-889. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(24)00251-7