Good summary article by Reduxx.
While I am not in the habit of defending surgeons who carry out unnecessary, irreversible procedures with high rates of post surgical complications and of questionable benefit even when everything goes as intended, I think it’s worth pointing out that in the U.K. a potential gender reassignment patient has to secure written referrals from two different mental health professionals specialising in gender dysphoria/gender incongruence/gender identity disorder/transsexualism/whatever the fashionable term is this week (either two psychiatrists or a psychiatrist and a psychologist). So (theoretically) anyone who makes it to the stage of a surgical consultation has been signed off as mentally competent and a good candidate for surgical intervention. Ms Rashid should therefore be assured that any potential patients sent her way have been thoroughly vetted from a psychiatric point of view, leaving her to assess them purely from a physiological point of view.
Of course, here in the real world, wanting one’s knob flayed and inverted is a pretty big indicator that there is something not quite right about one’s mental state but the system Ms Rashid works within in doesn’t see this as a red flag, so the psych professionals making the referrals are working off other criteria.
For someone to have been signed off as mentally fit for surgery by TWO specialist mental health professionals to then self harm the surgical site as part of a campaign of stalking, harassing and threatening the surgeon, followed by attempting suicide and subsequent detention under the mental health act (possibly in the hope of evading a criminal conviction?) seems to me to be evidence that the vetting process for surgical referral is inadequate and the psychs making the referral were incompetent.
If this happened on the NHS’s watch there should surely be some sort of internal investigation/review to try and prevent it happening again?
Almost all the U.K. based private gender doctors are moonlighters with NHS day jobs and so follow the same protocols (based on WPATH7, I believe?) for both sets of patients, which are more or less the ones in WPATH7 so the difference between this happening privately or within a publicly funded system is largely in the areas of admin & bureaucracy, recourse & insurance and where the buck stops.
if I were Ms Rashid I would definitely be furiously sideeyeing the two psychs who declared my stalker mentally competent and would be a lot more skeptical about their referrals moving forwards!
If it were an NHS case I would expect their line managers to be doing something (not sure what tho!) and if private, I would probably be seeking independent legal advice on routes of recourse. At the very least I’d be logging the events with their professional regulator(s).
(Of course, I’m not actually TR, nor any sort of HCP, just an interested observer! I
would be interested to hear opinions from people who actually know shit about medico legal matters/NHS hierarchies/ HCP disciplinary processes).
There are only a handful of surgeons doing these ops in the U.K. right now, 1 solely private, 3 who do both private and NHS funded and 1 (maybe 2) who are recent/current NHS trainees (and will likely begin a private practice of their own as soon as is practicable). Seems to me that it’s already hard to convince qualified professionals to take up surgically refashioning the genitals of a mentally volatile patient group and this stalking case is definitely not going to help when it comes to future recruitment!
Maybe Action for Trans Health had a
glimmer of rationality in their demands for trans people to do trans surgeries on each other… 😬