Mick Hartley

What fresh madness is this? GPs will be paid for trans hormone prescriptions:

Family doctors are to be paid for prescribing hormones to transgender patients, in the first scheme of its kind in the UK.

Under the programme, which was launched yesterday, GPs in Sussex will get £178 a year for every adult to whom they prescribe “cross sex hormone therapy”. They will also be able to claim an extra £91 a year for providing an annual health check to a transgender, non-binary or intersex (TNBI) patient.

The scheme, which also requires staff to take training in transgender healthcare, is aimed at reducing the high rates of long-term physical and mental health problems in TNBI patients and improve their low levels of satisfaction with NHS care. Trans rights campaigners welcomed the programme. Patients referred to gender identity clinics (GICs) face waits of years, after referrals soared 240 per cent in five years.

So let's just dish out the pills, no questions asked.

Trans men may be given hormones, such as testosterone, to help with masculinisation while trans women get hormones such as oestrogen to help with feminisation.

The document adds that any decision to start hormone therapy is “at the discretion of the individual GP”.

Who'll be financially rewarded for going ahead with the hormone treatment. Which might possibly sway their judgement? Bribed, in other words, to do Stonewall's bidding.

What are the NHS thinking? Yes, there's a crisis in the rise of gender dysphoria (so-called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria), especially with teenage girls saturated with social media pressure about how changing gender will solve all their problems, but just giving in to this is an unforgivable abdication of responsibility.

Debbie Hayton, a transgender advocate who transitioned in 2012, said that the scheme would lead to more patients starting on GP-prescribed cross sex hormones “even if it’s not the intended outcome”. She described the new scheme as “desperate measures for desperate times”.

Hayton questioned the level of psychological support in the scheme. “When I transitioned I had an hour with a therapist every week for months,” she said. “That’s what I needed to understand myself. An annual review is a pale shadow of that.”

It's a disaster waiting to happen for troubled young teens in Sussex.