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Tell us your thoughtsHealthcare for young trans people in Britain has everything to do with politics and very little to do with their best interests
When the Tories were in power Kemi Badenoch boasted of stuffing key posts in the NHS with transphobes; any principles Wes Streeting had when health secretary he cheerfully abandoned to try and please the same bigots who he now complains are hounding him for his sexuality and the new health secretary, Yvette Cooper, is distinctly MIA.
Meanwhile, suicide rates for trans children are soaring and, faced with the most vehmently anti-trans healthcare regime in the so-called developed world, wealthier families are accessing private healthcare abroad. And the kids of less wealthy families are DIYing – buying the hormones they need over the internet, or getting them free via peer groups, with no medical professionals involved.
Ordinarily, in such circumstances, we would turn to the so-called justice system. But English judges tell us time and time again that they do not want to listen to trans people.
Encouraged by Wes Streeting, NHS England closed down trans youth healthcare at the WellBN Clinic in Brighton, one of the few clinics in the country offering gender affirming care. It meant something over 100 children faced being forcibly detransitioned: a truly hideous, shameful situation. And their parents, knowing that gender affirming care might mean the difference between life and death for their children, were terrified.
And at Good Law Project we were too.
We put up a crowdfunder – which we’ve now closed – and we’re supplementing what we raised with some money of our own. We’re going to fund seventeen kids from the hardest up WellBN families to get private healthcare from a private provider, Anne Health, abroad. And we’re going to fund another seven kids from especially hard up families who did not benefit from WellBN’s gender affirming healthcare to do the same. We will fund that healthcare for three years, or until the kids turn 18, whichever happens first.
This was something concrete that we could do with your help.
The latest contemptible tactic from the politicians running trans healthcare at NHS England is to try and scare these loving families by forcing social services to investigate them and – I guess – threaten to take these kids into care. We are consulting with lawyers to see whether it might be possible to sue.
