When I self-referred to Glasgow’s gender clinic in 2016, the waiting list for a first appointment was 11 months. Now, it’s 224 years.
That’s not a typo. The Sandyford gender clinic is so hopelessly understaffed that it’s barely seeing any people, so the backlog is ever growing. The national average is bad enough – 25 years – but in Scotland, the majority of people waiting for an appointment will die without ever being seen. The average wait time in England is 12 years; in Scotland it’s 58 years.
And that’s not the waiting list for treatment. That’s just for the first assessment. Getting the same HRT that other women can get the same day from their GP can take months more.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the NHS has long been told that the gender clinic model – created not to provide basic healthcare for trans people, but to gatekeep it – is hopelessly broken. The 224-year waiting list is the inevitable result of years of underfunding, understaffing and deliberate neglect.
QueerAF:
Trans+ people do not need to be assessed by gender clinics or diagnosed by psychiatrists to tell us what we already know: we are trans. The healthcare we need, especially when it comes to hormones, is already available to cis people through making an appointment with their GP.
Gender clinics are unnecessary and exist to segregate healthcare for Trans+ people. Abolishing this system and providing Trans+ healthcare in primary care, at the GP through an informed consent model, would solve many of the issues this data reveals. GPs already prescribe hormones to cis adults. Trans+ adults simply need the same access to this healthcare.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims it does. And the gender clinic system is to all intents and purposes a ban on trans people’s healthcare. For much of the UK, if you cannot afford to go private your healthcare is denied.