I had thought that too StumbledIn, that it was a staging post en route to traditional GIDs but their blurb says otherwise- ‘Indigo Gender Service will provide the services offered by the seven existing gender identity clinics, but in a non-specialised and primary care setting.’
lgbt.foundation/news/gtd-healthcare-and-lgbt-foundation-to-launch-new-adult-trans-health-service-in-greater-manchester/389
So it sounds like it will have the same powers as the others- of patient diagnosis and of surgical referral say, but in a specifically ‘affirmative’ environment, including with service delivery by staff who have themselves transitioned, which in this context in terms of the clinician-patient relationship could be significant.
They also provide no explicit welcome or services for detransitioning or detransitioned people, which I am afraid in the current climate could give the unfortunate impression of a politicised service provision, especially considering it is a very newly-developed service.
(everyone working in this area, will know detransitioned people exist and will have specific needs to be met. With these service providers’ apparent expertise in the needs of the trans community, and very recent direct involvement of the community in shaping the service, how did this not come up?)
All medical services should allow for patient refusal of any offered treatment and should offer full information-giving as a fundamental basis of patient consent to treatment. We should be confident that this is a key tenet for the service provision here also.
But I’m afraid that a service which promotes itself as ‘affirmative’ is not going to give the same objective impression, of facilitating the basics of consent, in the same way as a service which for example also explicitly highlighted offering ‘watch and wait’ approaches as an option and recognised detransitioning people to the extent of either supporting them too or explicitly saying they will signpost them on to dedicated support elsewhere.
Nor do they mention long term follow up or offering research participation in their blurb. Which isn’t to say they might not be doing it, we can’t know, but you would hope so. I think it’s also interesting that they refer to patients of their medical services only as ‘people’ in the blurb above. Very established medical services do sometimes talk of ‘service users’ or ‘clients’ or just eg ‘young people’, ‘women’ or ‘men’, where safety and efficacy is not a question beyond the normal basics of good medical practice and where they want to create a non- medicalised kind of atmosphere. That can be the case in some areas of medicine to improve community participation where for example the condition or service itself is stigmatised.
But in this context it feels off-key when the treatments have a poor evidence base and there’s very poor understanding of which patients the treatments will be right for long term. It feels inappropriate give a ‘post-medicalised’ sort of impression, when the basic medical evidence work still hasn’t been robustly done.
Maybe all this is available within Indigo as a part of their good clinical practice, I have no idea, but to call the service ‘affirmative’ is really at basic service ethos level not a good look in a specialist service. It’s not like the patients they will see there, will have already had objective counselling somewhere else first, as part of the deal.
I want a relationship with my doctor that’s positive and welcoming as much as anyone else does but I need to know they are going to be as objective as possible in what they recommend to me when I explain whatever it is that is bothering me.