Should there be stricter checks before gender transition treatment is approved?

[RowsOfFlowers]

Am I being unreasonable in thinking that there needs to be better regulation for those wanting to transition to another gender?

My worry is there are not enough checks, psychological evaluations going on. My friend used to work at a gender reassignment clinic, and she’d regularly tell me about men in their 50s wanting to get gender reassignment surgery. One that she assessed had a history of domestic abuse against their wife.

I find this truly worrying.

What sort of regulation are you imagining?

Checks to make sure that a person is 'true trans'? (How would this be defined? The path to reassignment (in the UK) at present is self-declared dissatisfaction with one's own 'gender'. That isn't actually testable. How could this be improved?)

Or that they are not trying to opt out of a life containing mistakes, previous abuse, criminal convictions...? So making it clear that some people 'deserve' to transition, and some don't? Where else in healthcare is this applied? (I would argue that transition isn't healthcare, but that is how it currently framed. And if it healthcare and is just cosmetic alteration, then how do you regulate who is allowed to cosmetically alter themselves and who not? Where is the line?)

I agree - you make some interesting points. But then maybe it should be treated differently to other healthcare because it’s putting some people at risk of danger (I.e.women; see rape/sexual assault cases in women’s prisons) I do think some psych or forensic evaluation needs to take place. I know I won’t be popular in my view, particularly among TRAs.

I have only ever read one assessment for a GRC - was from an NHS provider and it was an eye-opener.
Man goes to prison for sex offences, meets a transwoman in prison, decides he's a woman.
Gets approved for GRC as he has been 'living as a woman' while in prison.

That was it, padded out with more paragraphs for a couple of pages.

I honestly thought there was more assessment than that.

No.

The medically unnecessary body modifications that transgenderists consider ‘gender affirming’ have absolutely no place in any healthcare system.

They are not healthcare. It is no different to somebody who wants extreme body mods such as tattooed eyeballs, 100 facial piercings, tongue-splitting, or horns inserted under the skin.

There should absolutely be more checks before ANY gender surgeries are conducted or hormones are prescribed including a requirement for the individual to acknowledge that no treatment will enable them to change their sex.

Yes, they should brain scan them to make sure they have the brain of the the opposite sex.

I'm confused, is your implication that someone doesn't "deserve" a particular treatment for having prior convictions?

Are you proposing complete self id for access transgender body modification?

These treatments today on the NHS require assessment for gender dysphoria by a psychologist.

20 years ago DH had a colleague who had surgery. He had to ‘live as a woman’ for a year first and go to some counselling sessions first.
Within a few years he moved and returned to using a male name etc. he was utterly miserable when it hit him that he wasn’t in fact a woman. The counselling didn’t pick up that he had serious issues with being gay and had been rejected by his family which clearly was the route.
I don’t think they even make them jump through that many hoops now and that clearly wasn’t enough.

There should be no gender transition surgery through the nhs full stop. We have children unable to access cancer therapies and treatments due to funding restrictions as well as numerous other similar situations, any gender transition surgery should be funded privately - if someone is unable to afford private surgery then counseling/ mental health support should be provided to enable the person to cone to terms with the body that they have - a bit like people who have to come to terms with life changing injuries or birth defects where surgery cannot be offered ie burn survivors, those born with limb deformations etc

It should be banned altogether. It’s absolute insanity.

No, I am proposing that trransgender body modification be excluded from healthcare. They should not be available on the NHS, in the same way that nose jobs, tooth filing, and scarification are not - because they are not healthcare.

There is a YouTuber called Ezra Butler who was allowed to transition With alarming speed via Gender GP top surgery also!

This person has a well documented online honesty about being mentally unwell and ED
its shocking

No, it’s not about “deserving,” I am coming at it from a safety perspective. Why should we allow male sex offenders to have gender reassignment surgery on the nhs when they can pose a serious risk to women? I do believe there should be some safeguards!

Is the answer not that regardless of any surgery a man has, he still is not allowed to use women’s single sex spaces like toilets, hospital wards etc?

that surely is the most effective way to manage the risk men pose towards women? Any medical treatment they have had is utterly irrelevant

Yah I completely agree with you there.

I think there needs to be a robust psychological support service available to tackle the (majority, I’d say) cases of gender dysphoria linked to trauma, autism, internalised homophobia etc, if this as an issue is actually on the NHS’s agenda.

Let’s be very clear here: by ‘gender surgery’ you mean males having breast implants, having their penis and testicles removed, having their jaw and forehead bones and Adam’s apples shaved, having fat moved from their stomachs to their backsides. For females it means having a double mastectomy, having their ovaries and uterus removed, having a huge skin flap taken from their arms to create a skin tube sewn onto their pubis in order to mimic a penis.
In short, bodily modification in the extreme.
If a man walked into a GPs and asked for his penis to be removed the Gp would quite rightly refer him to a psychiatrist!

They’re not ‘treatments’. They’re cosmetic surgeries and as such should not be performed under the NHS.

It’s not possible to devise a framework that guarantees that fetishisists aren’t getting the surgery, nor that vulnerable people haven’t been influenced/ persuaded by said fetishists, nor one that can predict which vulnerable people might detransition 10 years a later and regret “their” (coerced) decision.

ONE detransitioned individual proves flaws in the process and therefore cannot guarantee the science or processes are good.

And there’s no point giving analogies with other medical conditions as it’s not a medical condition. It’s a psychological condition for which there’s no objective test, and the interventions are completely irreversible.

A history of violence against women seems very relevant, if transition opens up access to all female spaces (as it was take to, via GRC, until very recently).

The transition process is a ‘gate’ for a lot more than a private medical journey.

“Gender transition” surgeries shouldn’t be provided by the NHS at all, they are not medically necessary.

No man, no matter how many surgeries he has had, should be allowed in female only spaces.

Men have never needed to have surgery to have a GRC!

And yet I have pcos which results in excessive facial hair growth but I was denied laser hair removal or such on the nhs as they said “it’s cosmetic” - it’s not fair.

Btw my post isn’t solely about surgeries on the nhs, it’s about gender surgeries in general, so including private clinics. I just think there needs to be better regulation of it all. It’s a serious change with serious implications for society imo!