Writing for Queer AF, Ludovic Parsons has written an excellent history of the UK’s severely broken system of trans healthcare. It’s a tale of a system built to control people rather than help them, a system that even today considers trans people a problem to be solved rather than people who need healthcare. And it also demonstrates yet again that trans people are not a fad that began in 2015: the first UK gender clinic for the NHS was established in 1966, two decades after the first sex change surgeries and four decades after the development of synthetic hormones for trans people.
While the most brutal part of the history of British Trans+ healthcare has passed, the intent to control transition remains. The NHS Trans+ healthcare system is built on rotten foundations, still excluding many people from its criteria for transness. Its existence overlooks the fact that transitioning is a personal decision and a matter of bodily autonomy – like using contraception or having an abortion.
There’s nothing complicated or special about our healthcare, but because it’s segregated from mainstream healthcare and stuck in a neglected corner of mental health services – a throwback to a less enlightened age when being trans, being gay or being a feminist was considered a mental health problem – it isn’t fit for purpose. Any service whose current clearance rates suggest a waiting list of 224 years, as is the case for Glasgow’s Sandyford clinic, is broken beyond repair. As Parsons says:
The gender clinic system is structurally flawed, working not for Trans+ people’s health and wellbeing but against Trans+ existence itself.