Australia: Sex-Change Clinic Folds...

Australia's only sex-change clinic has been temporarily shut down and its controversial director forced to quit amid growing claims that patients with psychiatric problems have been wrongly diagnosed as transsexuals and encouraged to have radical gender reassignment surgery. At least eight former patients of the Gender Dysphoria Clinic at Melbourne's Monash Medical Centre believe they may have been misdiagnosed. Some have tried to commit suicide while struggling to live as the opposite sex after the irreversible operations.

But as the clinic has limited patient follow-up, it is difficult to determine how many patients may have been adversely affected by the surgery. Three former patients have recently taken legal action against Monash and the clinic's doctors.

Psychiatrist Dr Trudy Kennedy - who is being investigated by the state's medical board - says officials at Southern Health, which operates the service, told her she could no longer run the clinic she co-founded 34 years ago. The 73-year-old claims she is being made a scapegoat after recent legal action.

A former male patient who was 21 when he underwent surgery to become a women, was awarded damages after claiming Dr Kennedy misdiagnosed him as a transsexual in the late 1980s. Since the surgery, he has twice tried to take his own life and has undergone operations to reverse the operations he had. He says he will never be able to have children, is unable to work and feels like a "mutilated freak". In the past few weeks, a 66-year-old who also underwent surgery to become a woman following a diagnosis by Dr Kennedy, settled his claim out of court.

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