I'm not familiar with this paper, and perhaps someone who's more familiar with Australia's media landscape can let us know if the Herald-Sun is the Australian equivalent the Boston Herald or the Boston Globe. Because that makes a large difference.

The unattributed article certainly delves into some lazy journalism. Only one "expert" was interviewed:

But ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said mainstream medicine did not recognise hormone treatments and surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria, and that under US guidelines it was psychosis because "it's a belief out of accordance with reality''.

"What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief,'' he told The Age.

The "ethicist" Tonti-Filippini works for the Catholic Church (not as clergy, but as an associate professor at the John Paul II Institute) and, in his spare time, makes misleading statements about condom failure rates, devises "alternatives" to offering rape victims emergency contraception, and opposes women's right to reproductive freedom. Zoe Brain has a longer take-down of this so-called expert. He couldn't even get his facts right in the two sentences the Herald-Sun quoted him in.

I'm sure there are people in Australia who identify as transsexual or have an operative history who would have been more than willing to be quoted in this article. Instead, their readership gets the Church's opinion on a matter that is both intensely personal and highly scientific and medical. Considering their track record on issues like that, I wonder why the paper feels it needs to publish their views, unopposed, as if it's the only opinion on the matter.

Fortunately, the judge appears to have made the appropriate decision in this case - the boy in question is almost 18 and is definitely old enough to understand the consequences of a mastectomy. He's been on hormones since he was 13, meaning that he's been sure about his gender identity for some years now. And the judge even had the decency to refer to him with the appropriate gender pronouns.