The announcement that the National Gender Service is shutting its waiting list has been described as “further evidence of the dire situation facing trans people,” according to the Trangress campaign.
It means that no additional patients can be sent to the service after it was refused further resources, reports Breaking News.
The Trangress campaign, which pushes for self-directed trans healthcare in Ireland, said that extremely long waits — now believed to stretch beyond ten years — along with the intrusive and demoralising psychiatric evaluations required of patients have rendered the system effectively unusable.
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,” reports Breaking News.
“The delays are caused by forcing people to undergo unnecessary psychiatric assessments and their insistence on gatekeeping our access to healthcare,” reports Breaking News.
“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,” reports Breaking News.
They added that there is an immediate need for a model of trans healthcare grounded in informed consent, with primary care practitioners taking the lead, as seen in several other countries.
The recent Dáil vote also shows significant political backing for such an approach, reports Breaking News.
“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,” reports Breaking News.
“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,” reports Breaking News.
“We demand that action is taken to remove any current NGS staff from their positions in the development of this new model of care,” reports Breaking News.
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