New reporting options for hate crime

Survey on psychological harm done by shortfalls in funding for surgery

Announcements have been made by several GIC's that NHS England is running out of funding this year - for example, the Laurel's GIC in Exeter has recently announced that they will be unable to fund any surgeries for patients from some time in November through to next April when NHS England's next fiscal year commences.

This has been caused in part by the large increase in the number of people who have come forward over the last few years and presented as being transgender, this in turn has put considerable pressure on the budget that NHS England has for all the speciality commissioned services, gender reassignment surgery being one of those services.

Many people are blaming the NHS, but in fairness to them, it really isn't their fault - this government keeps cutting the amount of funding to the NHS and specialised services are one area where the axe falls hardest - especially the funding for transgender services as the general public tends not to rate money spent in this area very high on their list of priorities, which isn't helped by negative press from such "newspapers" such as the Daily Mail.

However, these funding shortfalls are having a devastating affect on the lives of transgender people - they go by the book and complete what is mandated of them by the GIC's by completing their RLE's, fully expecting their referral at the end of that period - and then they are told "Sorry, the money has run out now, you will have to wait until next year for your referral".

Has this affected you?  Will it affect you in the next few months?

This is what this survey is about.  If your life, your mental health, your physical health has been affected on hearing about these funding shortfalls, please tell us about it - hopefully if enough people are being affected, then we can pressure NHS England to look again and try to get extra funding.

Please tell us about how the news of these shortfalls in funding and the delays due to shortage of qualified surgeons has affected you.  Your voice can make a difference.

Take the survey here

Transgender surgery vs bariatric surgery

Today it was being announced that people with a BMI of 30+ would be offered bariatric surgery soon - at a much higher cost than the majority of gender reassignment surgery.
Being overweight, for many people, is a lifestyle choice - being transgender isn't.

I wonder when the Daily Mail will be running with screaming headlines condemning the NHS for wasting billions of pounds more on these people, will they be calling them scum and a waste of taxpayers money - as they so often like to do with the relatively very small numbers of people who need gender reallignment surgery.  I sincerely doubt it because I should imagine quite a substantial proportion of their readership will fall into this category and they cannot afford to alienate them.

UK Register of trans friendly doctors and GP's

The following is a plea for those who are under the care of an understanding and compassionate doctor/GP.  I am running a survey on doctors in the UK who are transgender friendly and I need you to take part in a small survey.

Coming out and leading up to transition can arguably be the most stressful thing than any person ever does (the surgery itself was, for me at least, one of the least stressful) and so it is important to have the details of a good GP who you know will be sympathetic to the stresses that you will experience.

Having a national database of trans friendly GP's can save lives. The survey will take around 3-5 minutes of your time and could save somebody's life - now that is 3 to 5 mins well spent, wouldn't you agree?

The suvey can be found here.

If you have had a terrible experience at the hands of a GP, then you can also report it on the survey - but please be sure to only state any facts and not conjecture or supposition.

If you are needing to find a good GP then the results of the survey are updated daily (at the moment) and you can download the PDF from here.  This register is searchable (so you can search on a postcode - for example TQ1 or PO4).  You have to download the PDF, save it to your hard drive and then open it up in Adobe Acrobat Reader to be able to access the search function though).