There wasn’t much publicity.

It was a short letter signed by Federal Minister for Health Greg Hunt giving his backing for nationally consistent guidelines on the care and treatment of Australia’s transgender youth.

But released in May, his letter to state and territory health ministers seemed to bring a sudden stop to the campaign waged through the pages of The Australian newspaper for a national inquiry into what has become one of the main battlegrounds of the so-called ‘culture wars’.

Over the past year, there had been dozens of articles — often directed at the activities of clinicians at the specialist gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne — decrying the “experimental” treatments allegedly being administered to young, vulnerable people with little external oversight.