I think People think a person just wakes up and decides to be transgender…

 

 

 

 

The newspaper headline reads, “Gender identity clinic services under strain as referral rates soar” like it is our fault we identify as transgender.
Such headlines sell papers and get airtime I guess but there is another side to headlines like that, as the funding for all NHS care becomes squeezed and people are denied care and treatment for various conditions. It is easy to target a venerable sector of the population isn’t it? (In the UK approximately 650,000 people that’s about 1% of the population, are estimated to experience some degree of gender non-conformity)

 

With some new GIC patients waiting up to four years for appointments figures show referral increases of up to several hundred per cent. The increase in referrals to gender identity services runs parallel with society hopefully becoming more accepting of transgenderism.

 

The number of Britons seeking gender identity treatment has shot up dramatically in recent years, leaving vulnerable people waiting years for a specialist appointment. They unfortunately become trapped in a situation that can be devastating to them and their families. Most GP’s will not know or understand what this situation feels like to the transgender person, just waiting having their whole life on hold. Waiting for the first of many appointments with months between each appointment and medical evaluations and assessments made before any hormone treatment is granted only then can the transgender person start their slow transition from male to female or female to male. There is the additional period of living in role that has to be completed on top of the wait to see the Consultants in the GIC’s.

 

It is not a short journey you embark upon when you identify as being in the wrong body, it is not a whim or a phase this rise in the numbers of people seeking to transition it is just human development.  As we all develop a greater understanding of who we are and how we feel, and how we should be viewed in the world by everyone else,  plus the development of western society to move away from the binary thought of male/female, to having a third gender where we accept that a person is able to change from one gender to another in order to continue to live.

 

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal increases in the number of referrals to all of the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics (GICs) in recent years, with a number of clinics experiencing increases of several hundred percent.

 

At Charing Cross in London, the oldest and largest adult clinic, the number of referrals has almost quadrupled in 10 years, from 498 in 2006-07 to 1,892 in 2015-16.

 

A clinic in Nottingham reported a 28-fold increase in referrals in eight years, from 30 in 2008 to 850 in 2015. It expected this to increase to more than 1,000 referrals during 2016.

 

The Laurels clinic in Exeter has seen a 20-fold increase in referrals in a decade, from 31 in 2005-06 to 636 in 2015-16.

 

Referrals to Sheffield’s clinic went up from eight in 1998 to 301 in 2015.

 

At a GIC in Leeds, referrals tripled from 131 in 2009-10 to 414 in 2015-16. The increase put such a strain on the service that last October it estimated that new patients would have to wait four years for their first appointment.

 

While the clinic in Daventry, Northamptonshire, which I attend, has had a five-fold increase in the past year alone, up from 88 referrals in 2014-15 to 466 in 2015-16. The latest figures released by the trust shows that most people attending their first appointment with the clinic this month had their referral accepted over 40 weeks earlier.

 

My only hope is that the government doesn’t put the squeeze on the funding that covers the gender clinics as suicide rates in the Transgender community is already way to high and cutting the funding for clinics, medication and surgery will leave people feeling all is lost and suicide an answer to their sufferings, which we know it isn’t. 

 

Leaving the EU and triggering article 50 may have an impact on the lives of transgender people living in the UK, It’s down to the UK government to raise the bar on Equality and set an example for the rest of Europe to look up to and to follow.