county Bureau: Last News

Reports of treatment being refused or withdrawn are on the rise – and no official figures exist to track the issue.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON TBIJ (THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM)

REPORTER  BILLIE GAY JACKSON
BUREAU LOCAL EDITOR GARETH DAVIES
DEPUTY EDITOR KATIE MARK
EDITOR FRANZ WILD
PRODUCTION EDITOR JOSEPHINE LETHBRIDGE
FACT CHECKER RACHEL SCHRAER

The text message Emily* received from her GP practice was life-changing. Emily, who is transgender, was first prescribed hormone replacement therapy (HRT) two years ago. It had enabled her life to feel “ordinary”. Suddenly her prescription had been stopped.

The message explained that the GP practice was unable to “safely support ongoing prescribing or monitoring” of the “specialist drug”. If Emily wanted a new prescription, she would have to go private – a cost she could not afford.

In recent months the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s (TBIJ) Trans+ Voices team discovered that some trans+ people, like Emily, have had HRT refused or withdrawn. This had happened even when the prescription had been recommended by a specialist – and in some cases after having received the treatment for years.

Similar experiences shared on online forums suggested these were not isolated incidents. So TBIJ set about trying to determine the scale of the issue.

But no official data exists to clearly indicate the number of trans+ people who have had ongoing prescriptions withdrawn, neither across the NHS as a whole nor at most individual gender clinics. Prescription refusals, which occur when a person tries to start the treatment, are sometimes documented but not at a national level.

TBIJ sought to collect its own data and Emily was among more than 60 trans+ people who replied to our survey on the subject.

While the survey cannot be considered representative of the trans+ community as a whole, responses included others who say they have experienced withdrawals of care. Emily, who is 25, was not the only respondent who had been