Transgender care waiting list closure evidence of 'dire situation' for trans people

Kenneth Fox

The announcement that the National Gender Service is closing its waiting list has been labelled as "further evidence of the dire situation facing trans people," according to the Trangress campaign.

It means no new patients can be referred to the service due to being denied additional resources.

The Trangress campaign, which advocates for self-determined trans healthcare in Ireland, said extreme waiting times, currently estimated at over a decade long, and the invasive and demeaning psychiatric assessments that patients are forced to undergo mean that the system has long been non-functional.

In a statement, they said: "Their inability to keep up with the waiting list is entirely due to the model of care which the NGS has adopted and their absolute refusal to modernise the service.

"The delays are caused by forcing people to undergo unnecessary psychiatric assessments and their insistence on gatekeeping our access to healthcare.

"The fact that the article focused on the lack of soundproofed interview rooms as one example of the supposed lack of resources for the NGS is particularly chilling, given many patients’ experiences of demeaning, invasive and traumatic interrogations at the hands of their staff, as highlighted in the recent Dáil debate on trans healthcare"

They stated that there is an urgent need for a model of trans healthcare based on the principle of informed consent, with primary care providers playing a leading role, as is the case in many other jurisdictions.

The recent Dáil vote also demonstrates broad political support for such a model.

"The government's response to political pressure over trans healthcare has been to repeat over and over that the HSE is working to develop a new model of trans healthcare. We demand that this model be based on the principle of informed consent.

"We are also deeply concerned about the involvement of NGS clinicians in this process and believe that they have no role to play for various reasons, including the deep lack of trust in the NGS amongst the trans community in Ireland and their record of denying care to people who disagree with or refuse to cooperate with their approach.

"We demand that action is taken to remove any current NGS staff from their positions in the development of this new model of care."