"[P]utting LGBT people’s needs at the heart of the NHS": Government spokesman

Tara works for the NHS and has done for several years in a variety of positions. Was Hewitt speaking as a NHS capacity or on the basis of personal experiences/own consultancy/TELI involvement?

I wish I could upvote your post, needmoresleep.

I think we are on the cusp.

Ha! Was about to link to the very same piece.

Maria Miller called me a fake feminist over gender self-ID. Now she says I was right all along

In a shameless U-turn, Miller has now cooled on self-identification of gender, and says single-sex spaces must be protected.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/01/maria-miller-called-me-fake-feminist-over-gender-self-id-now-she-says-i

Maybe she thinks there's a shadowy cabal of evil witches who stand at the doors of medical buildings refusing entry to anyone insufficiently gender conforming.

Which of course is exactly what you'd expect a group of women containing a statistically higher than average percentage of lesbians to do.

(Nods seriously.)

The statement 'basic healthcare that the rest of us take for granted' is simply not true. Or rather 'basic' can be really basic. (Though other times it is excellent - there is a lottery element.)

We ended up paying for DD to have surgery. She was on repeat prescriptions of the sort of painkillers that you are only supposed to take for 10 days and was barely getting any sleep. The wait list where she lived was 4 years. The private surgeon said his NHS wait list was 10 months and far too long for her to wait, as it would have meant a lifetime of restricted mobillity. Similarly we paid for my 89 year old mother to have private physio as she would never have got back on her feet had she waited 6 weeks for the NHS. (Tip £100 for 3 physio sessions was the best £100 she will have ever spent. Whilst DDs surgery was less than the cost of her repeating her University year, so again a sensible, if unwelcome, investment.)

The NHS is free so restricts demand through queuing. There is something really entitled about healthy young people, deciding that they are 'in the wrong body' so deciding to physically or chemically mutilate themselves, and to then expect to queue jump in front of seriously ill people. And even less acceptable when coupled with a refusal to accept that gender dysphora might be a (rare) mental health issue that needs to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist.

My guess is that the NHS accountants have been at work and calculated the lifelong cost of a teenager who has decided she is dysphoric, including the cost of treating side effects and/or any later decision to detransition. Plus perhaps

the cost of fertility treatment.

I suspect this is going to be the big difference between the US and UK. In the US, you get treatment is you pay (including those who opt for cheap drugs from the internet.) In the UK, society pays. Which gives society the right to set priorities, and to question a healthy fertile teenager who self-diagnoses, and then demands a massive share of the available resource.

My mums psychiatrist confirmed that a decision about 8 years ago to push to diagnose Alzheimer's was directly related to Aricept coming out of patent. Aricept delivered sufficient improvements in capacity that the savings in care costs outweighed the (now much reduced) drug cost.

Bloody Mermaids

This is a new kind of crazy. How on earth can it be the case that trans people don't have access to "basic" healthcare? Who or what is stopping them?

There are people who genuinely have difficulty accessing basic healthcare - homeless people, for example. Young people with mental health problems may have to wait months for a CAMHS appointment. But trans people? Are they being denied appointments by their GP? What does Miller imagine is going on?

Pain this is my hope too.

It is an illuminating read!

Some GC people on twitter seem to have welcomed this as a u turn and as the start of rowing back from self id.

Yes agreed. 'Not able to access' needs unpacking.

Just realised that Hewitt was pulling stats from this report.

www.stonewall.org.uk/sites/default/files/lgbt-in-britain-trans.pdf

I am imagining a situation in which a transman doesn't get his reminder for a cervical smear because he's had his gender changed on NHS systems

That's what came to my mind, but is that it? Not getting a reminder letter is hardly 'can't access basic health care'. Smear uptake is important but, as you say, the immediate answer seems pretty clear.

Does anyone have a link to the report? It would be interesting to see what actual substance there is.

In the interest of the clarity (with respect to single sex provision) that Maria Miller is suddenly so keen on, perhaps we could ask her to confirm that sex referred to in the equalities act is biological sex not legal sex. Don't hold your breath for a reply.

^This. Why aren't journalists doing their job? Miller is on record saying that people who 'transition' from male to female should have access to women's refuges and rape crisis centres. If she doesn't want to talk about self-id (which was a recommendation of the committee she chaired!), fine, let's talk about services. What does she mean by single-sex services, and how does she propose to resolve the misgendering vs biological reality conundrum wrt trans healthcare?

I agree that actual collected cases of "non-access" would be useful. With dates, postcodes, context - the whole bit.

I'd like a bit more detail about the "not able to access" part. If TRAs have demanded that all traces of a person's biological sex be wiped from the profile their GP's office sees and that results in transmen not being called in for smears etc then that's the fault of TRAs, not the NHS. If what's meant is that if a transman turns up at their GP and asks for a smear to be done, and is refused even though they have told the GP that they are trans and have a cervix, then that's outrageous.

If what's meant is that transmen have trouble finding a provider who'll do their smear while convincingly pretending that they're not female then their problem would seem to be that nurses, gynos, GPs etc are neither therapists nor actors.

The solution appears to be to register sex and note preferred gender separately, with the former enabling appropriate health care and the latter allowing politeness.
Yup. That's the answer right there, but instead I suspect Miller's comments are a precursor to another £££ consultancy exercise (maybe Jess Bradley could lead it if they're still looking for a job) and more leaflets about people with cervixes.

“Many trans people simply don’t have access to the basic healthcare that the rest of us take for granted – things like cervical smears are often things that trans men are not able to access,” Ms Miller told the Press Association

Ridiculous

Yeah why dont they have access?? Eh?? Eh??

God forbid that we put sick people at the heart of the NHS

MIL died nearly 18 months ago

Completely and utterly the fault of our current NHS which did not put the needs of a sick 72 year old at the heart of its fucking organisation

And thats not a pop at any of the staff who attempted to help her

The NHS killed her through neglect

Dd has ME ...is she getting any help? Fuck me no...again not down to individual staff

Friends 14 year old boy died from cancer, NHS staff this time refused him pain killers

the amount of women with life changing (albeit low level) injuries following childbirth

The NHS is fucked at the moment and its such a shame

It's worth a push though whilst this is in the news?

In the interest of the clarity (with respect to single sex provision) that Maria Miller is suddenly so keen on, perhaps we could ask her to confirm that sex referred to in the equalities act is biological sex not legal sex. Don't hold your breath for a reply.

But Marguerita their fear of misgendering means that they are afraid to according to Hewitt.

I'm sad to say that Miller is my MP - I am pretty certain she is only interested in scoring political points... she will change her tack to suit the circumstances.

I really don't think she did. I think that politicians as a group are so short sighted and short termist that they really do not engage brain before championing a cause. But awareness is growing, people are waking up and this will help to prod people in the right direction I hope.