Trans men sue NHS over half built genitalia

[Justme56]

<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/2024.11.07-174004/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/07/trans-men-sue-nhs-over-half-built-genitalia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.ph/2024.11.07-174004/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/07/trans-men-sue-nhs-over-half-built-genitalia/

Yep. Boo friction hoo. There are people waiting years for hips, knees, heart surgery, IVF, cataracts etc etc. It's called a waiting list.

I doubt there are published figures. You'd need to gather data on multiple medical and surgical codes from every trust in the country. And a lot of codes, particularly for follow-up treatment of complications, wouldn't be specific enough to know which were from gender-related surgeries and which from other unrelated ones.

Dr Az Hakeem, who ran a highly successful NHS clinic for the treatment of gender dysphoria, used to run group sessions that brought post-op and pre-op patients together to talk to each other and he found that it was very successful at helping the pre-op patients decide not to choose the surgical route.

Presumably the decision (link is sulking & won’t open) was written in those halcyon days of varicose vein ops; arthroscopy for osteoarthritis; & breast reduction all on the NHS?

Long past time for a review of that decision in light of the current state of the NHS, surely 🤔 Women know we’re women even if we are flat-chested &/or more (or indeed less) hirsute than the norm; & we don’t require external validation of it. Needing that is a sign of a personality disorder; & demanding it is controlling & abusive behaviour. So cosmetic surgery of this kind is simply a drain on the NHS, however few surgeries are done, that’s money that could be better spent elsewhere; theatre hours & bed space that should be devoted to patients with physical illnesses.

Yes, the judgement was made all the way back in 1999, when all anyone not directly involved really knew about transsexuals was Jan Morris, April Ashley, that strange documentary series about the pub owner in Manchester and a handful of tabloid ‘super manly man is now a lovely little lady’ articles.

I doubt genital surgeries would turn out to have a reasonable cost/benefit ratio if any one in the NHS or NICE took the time to look into it.

As I said on another thread fairly recently the two trans people I have personally known who took their own lives were both ‘post op’ - they reached the end of the (slow moving) gender escalator and were still as unhappy as they had been before beginning transition, only with worse physical health.

Wiki page on the 1999 court case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_West_Lancashire_Health_Authority_v_A,_D_and_G

2004 article - imagine the graun commissioning research like this in 2024!

amp.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth

This is the longer article mentioned in that piece with interviews with some transsexuals.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/31/health.socialcare

Back then they estimated that up to 20% regretted having surgery.

@RethinkingLife @NoBinturongsHereMate
Very interesting posts about NICE. Thank you.
I'm sure I'm barking up the wrong tree but I wonder whether there is a legal route to questioning the reasonableness or otherwise of NICE and/or NHS decisions? I'm thinking of something like Judicial review, if the NHS were seen as a quasi-governmental body or something equivalent where the legal argument isn't 'what you're doing is wrong' (although it is!) but 'you must review your guidelines due to current evidence about the harm to benefit ratio'.

A lot of NICE guidance is appealed, including judicial reviews. Mainly by drug companies that have been turned down.

But NICE doesn't have free choice about what it reviews - it can only pick from what has been referred to it, and the topic has to fall within a strict government-determined remit. For example under the previous Labour government NICE set up a new programme to create guidelines on safe staffing levels. In 2010 the incoming coalition government cancelled the whole programme.

The surgery is optional though? Or am I missing something?

These articles are so fascinating in light of the present.
Thank you for sharing.
I'm wondering how many of the clinicians involved and quoted are still working in the field.

Thanks for the articles/wiki link. So clear 20 plus years ago about the contradictions, the regret, the dreadful biological outcomes.

James Bellringer is still operating, although close to retirement. His rep amongst the trans community has tanked (probably inevitable after so many years doing one, not-particularly-satisfying* procedure) but his former protégé Tina Rashid is popular.

Bellringer went to GIDs not long after they started using puberty blockers to warn them that the surgical referrals now coming his way didn’t have the physical size required for successful penis inversion but for whatever reason GIDs didn’t routinely pass this on to families and patients before starting blockers.

Bellringer gave a YouTube interview about a year ago

Any part of transition is optional. But some types of surgery involve multiple operations, and I can imagine it causes severe difficulties (on top of the general ones with all these operations) for some people who started the process and are now stuck part way through.

Interesting that a small number of FtM surgeries are mentioned in passing, I have never known when the NHS started providing phalloplasty or metoidioplasty - the history of FtM is not nearly as well documented as the history of MtF (like all female medical and health topics!)

Stephen Whittle reportedly made a phalloplasty themed doc for channel 4 in 2002, has anyone seen it?

t-vox.org/history/people/stephen-whittle

These two guardian pieces really illustrate the change that occurred between the peak era of old school TRAs like Whittle and the new era of TRAs like Freddy McConnell:

2002 bare report on viewing figures for Whittle’s documentary:

https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2002/aug/01/overnights

2015 opinion piece by McConnell whinging about surgical transition documentaries:

amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/14/channel-4-genitalia-surgery-trans-people-girls-to-men

(Thanks to the graun for the online back catalogue in the past few posts - funny to see the evidence of ideological capture laid out before us!)

funny to see the evidence of ideological capture laid out before us!

It really is!
Thanks for the update/video on Bellringer.

What happened to primum non nocere (first, do no harm) ?

Agreed. NICE is tightly regulated in what it can tackle and its methods and processes.

ChaCha - I doubt genital surgeries would turn out to have a reasonable cost/benefit ratio if any one in the NHS or NICE took the time to look into it.

I can't think of any NICE programme that would invite a sex realist organisation to be a stakeholder or recognise any such third-parties as relevant stakeholders.

Much would depend on the nominated clinical experts and who nominates them. Or which clinical/lived experience experts are recruited to any contributory Delphi processes.

Moving to other funding mechanisms, I'm fairly confident that if the argument is always, "But profound unhappiness or self-euthanasia are likely outcomes without this intervention" then adult gender identity services, specialised commissioning or individual funding initiative applications would accept the cost/benefit.

I do wonder where the estimates for post-surgery follow-up care would come from. Newgent's follow-up costs have been horrendous. But, I've no idea what (say) Watson's costs are.

Same hee

can’t get cosmetic treatment on the NHS and I don’t really understand why this sort of treatment is not considered cosmetic

Same here….obvs

That pretty much sums it up sadly.

‘"My psychiatrist told me, you look great, you can pass. I've come to realise that human life is made up of connecting, not passing.‘

^ powerful stuff

This!

’Our patient, Matthew (not his real name)’

You got that right 😂