Hilary Cass’s review of children’s gender services revealed how young people are being badly let down by the NHS. The picture for adults awaiting treatment in NHS gender clinics is similarly bleak: the current system is broken – and thousands of people are stuck in limbo.
The Health Secretary Steve Barclay is expected to announce plans to ban transwomen like me from female hospital wards today*. Let’s be clear, the privacy, dignity and safety of women in hospital have been overlooked for too long – but Barclay will also need to offer separate wards or rooms for transgender people. Yes, women should not be expected to budge up and make room for men who identify as transgender, but nor should the Health Secretary make the lives of those who transitioned – perhaps many years ago – more difficult than needs be.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) claims to be a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organisation devoted to transgender health. It is seemingly credible, and UK clinicians — both NHS and private — proudly trumpet their links to it.
It’s never been easy to get gender reassignment surgery on the NHS. More than a decade ago, when I was living in Birmingham, I was referred by a psychiatrist to a Gender Identity Clinic in London. NHS England funded seven adult clinics: none of which were anywhere near me. I had to take six days off work just to attend a series of brief appointments at the Charing Cross GIC in Hammersmith. My first assessment came in May 2012, six months after that referral. Four years later, I was eventually discharged after my surgery.
The transgender crisis that has engulfed the Labour Party has now lurched into a new and previously unimaginable phase. When the hitherto unknown group, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) launched its egregious manifesto last week, peak-lunacy seemed to have been reached.
Following demands for compliance — including “pledge 4: Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary” — they condemned what they considered to be transphobic organisations, naming Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance and calling for transphobes to be expelled from the party.
Three years after her parliamentary committee reported on transgender rights, Maria Miller this week accused her own government of mishandling trans issues.
When the Tory chair of the House of Commons women and equalities committee announces publicly that her own government’s priorities are wrong, we must surely be in the last days of this shambolic administration.
WHEN the government announced a consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act in July last year, trans people expected that by now we might be discussing the outcome.
However, proposals to streamline and demedicalise the process to change our legal gender proved more controversial than the government perhaps anticipated. Repeated delays left a vacuum that spawned polarised and often heated discussions on social media and elsewhere.
Debbie Hayton