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The UK NHS Postcode Lottery

Posted on October 18, 2008 by steph1963

I am Stephanie Butterfield, and I am transitioning on the UK PCT-led NHS system. Whilst i feel fortunate to have had my trachea shave/vocal cord surgery and facial hair removal already, with my GRS also guaranteed when the time comes, I do however feel very frustrated at the UK postcode lottery, not just for me, but for others too.

The PCT’s (Primary Care Trusts), often treat transsexual procedures as unnecessary, or simply cosmetic, not thinking beyond their small mindedness and thinking about the TS patients’ quality of life.

The postcode lottery works like this – one PCT will fund a girl’s breast augmentation and facial hair removal, whereas another PCT will not. How, you may ask?  If it is the NHS (National Health Service), we should get even and equal access to funded treatments and operations available on the NHS.

However, each PCT has the right to decide funding at a local level; it’s this which allows the postcode lottery to thrive, leaving many transgirls and transguys frustrated at the unfairness of it all.

Another irritating feature of the NHS transition route is the waiting one has to do, from GP (general practitioner) to GIC (gender identity center), from 1st opinion to 2nd opinion, from 2nd opinion to the operation itself.

I am currently at the waiting for my 2nd opinion stage, an 8 and a half month wait as I write, and my latest frustration is being blocked from seeing an endocrinologist.

Stephanie

Filed under: Life Experiences, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Review – “BBC America Reveals: Sex Change Soldier”

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Khyri

I was a little apprehensive going into the latest episode of “BBC America Reveals” – titling it “Sex Change Soldier” made it sound like a tawdry tabloid exposé rather than a serious documentary on one person’s journey from male to female. But I knew they’d done previous respectful treatments of a young transman and three partners of transvestites, so I approached it with an open mind.

Captain Ian HamiltonThe format was a little different in that the female documentary-maker (unnamed, and unseen) gave a narration that showed she became a true friend to Jan Hamilton during the filming. Apart from a few interactions that Jan has with people in her life, we don’t get to see or hear from others during the hour-long show. From the start, when we see footage of “Captain Ian Hamilton” of the Elite Parachute Regiment hiking through the jungle, Jan is on-camera almost all the time.

We are introduced to Jan, who tells us that she is a 42-year-old woman trapped in a man’s body. The narrator informs us that Jan will be the first officer in the (presumably British) armed forces to “undergo a sex change” – transition. She continues on to say that during the making of the documentary, she came to fully understand the price that Jan must pay to go through this.

Jan takes us through her daily routine of voice exercises, putting on makeup, tucking, and – after she shows us her thinning hair – putting on her wig. “I’m still Ian when I wake up.” Each morning she jogs four miles, in an effort go from 224 lbs and 14″ biceps, down to 154 lbs. Despite only having dressed in public for four months, Jan is ready to go to Thailand for FFS, “to have my face rebuilt to make me look like a woman”.

Jan Hamilton“I hid behind this big wall of being a paratrooper … I hated myself and I hated the world and I hated being in the world.” Jan had an overpowering sense of the wrong person, the wrong body.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Commentary, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 24 Comments »

At what age should our bodies be ‘put right’?

Posted on August 14, 2008 by davinia1963

The copy below is to what I think is an excellent article from The Guardian newspaper in Britain. My own opinion is that under 18 is possibly too young to transition, however I knew full well who I was inside at that age, and if I’d transitioned my life would have been far more productive and easier! (Sadly, it’s so long since I posted on here I’ve forgotten a lot of the tips!)

News : Society : Children

‘My body is wrong’

Should teenagers who believe they are transgender be helped to change sex? And if so, what about the four-year-olds who feel the same way? Viv Groskop meets the parents and doctors in favour of intervention

Viv Groskop – The Guardian, Thursday August 14 2008

‘She was our first child,” recalls Sarah (not her real name), a mother of two who lives in the south of England. “But from age three we knew something was wrong. She was very introverted, isolated. When she started school at four she came home and said she was a freak. It seemed a strange word for a four-year-old to use. She was always quite a sad little person.”

Sarah’s daughter was born and grew up as a boy. Now 19, she is far happier in a woman’s body as a post-operative transsexual. It took two years for the family to get used to calling her “she”. Her mother says her daughter experienced her childhood as mental torture, especially during puberty. “Looking back, we could never find any tape in the house. It was because she was taping her genitals up every day. She said to us later that she thought it would all go right for her at puberty, that her willy would drop off and she would grow breasts. She said she was going completely crazy because she knew in her head that she was a girl.”

One day, when her daughter was 14, Sarah walked in on her in her bedroom. “She was there in front of the mirror with her genitals tucked away. She was very embarrassed. I said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here but if you want to talk to me, you can.’ About 10 minutes later she came and lay on the bed next to me and said, ‘I want to be a girl. I’m not a boy. My body is wrong. Everything is wrong.'” For Sarah, this was more than shocking: “I had watched programmes on transgender, I’m very interested in people, it’s part of who I am to find out about these things … But you never imagine it’s going to happen to you.”

Sarah sought help from her GP – who laughed. Eventually, her daughter got a referral to the one London clinic that deals with gender identity disorder in children and adolescents. But obtaining treatment on the NHS in her daughter’s mid-teens was slow and difficult. Several suicide attempts followed and the family remortgaged their house to pay for private hormone treatment. Once Sarah’s daughter was 18, they also paid for an operation abroad.
Continue reading →

Filed under: News, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Review: “My Secret Female Body” on BBC America

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Khyri

Having reviewed “Transvestite Wives” earlier, I felt it was only fair to give a similar treatment to “My Secret Female Body”, another in the ‘Reveals’ series that premiered on BBC America on June 22, 2008.

This documentary focused on a twenty two year old transman, Danny. From the BBC America web site:

Born as Katie, Danny has been living as a man for four years and has had male hormone injections every two weeks for a year. Now, at 22, Danny undergoes a dramatic surgical transformation, which physically changes his body from female to male. This documentary sees Danny embark on the first stage of this irreversible procedure – a double mastectomy, followed by complicated penis surgery.

Like “Transvestite Wives”, Danny has an amazingly supportive girlfriend who loves him in his pre-op body, and is fully behind him in his decision to undergo SRS. We also get to hear from Danny’s mother (“I had a wonderful daughter, and now I have a wonderful and happier son”), sister and best friend who talk frankly about their initial misgivings and current acceptance. There’s very little discussion of social intolerance – just a couple of anecdotes about altercations “down the pub”.

Much of the focus is on the physical transformation. We see Danny’s doctor administering his testosterone shot, and discussing the bodily changes these have already brought about. We’re also there for Danny’s first consultation with the plastic surgeon who will be doing his top surgery. A note to sensitive viewers – although BBC America did blur out some visuals, probably to bring the show into line with American censorship guidelines, there’s still plenty of detail to the scenes in the operating theater and the descriptions used by the doctor made me squirm just a little.

When the surgical results are not as perfect as they could have been, the viewer is spared none of Danny’s anguish and emotional turmoil. At the end of the hour, we are left with the impression that there is no fairytale ending for Danny and his girlfriend – and yet Danny’s life is clearly a happier one even though he faces more procedures in the future. Just from watching his face as he listens to his friend discuss how his new phallus was fashioned from forearm grafts, we can tell what’s on the horizon for Danny…

This documentary is highly recommended for any FtM pre-op transsexual who is considering the next step. It doesn’t sugar-coat anything, but still manages to convery a message of hope.

For those of you with access to BBC America, this will be shown again as follows:

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 1:00 AM
Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 5:00 PM

“Transvestite Wives” will also be shown again on Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 6:00 PM, if you missed it the first time around.

Filed under: Commentary, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Review: ‘Transvestite Wives’ on BBC America

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Khyri

Edited to add: “Transvestite Wives” will also be shown again on Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 6:00 PM, if you missed it the first time around.

Last night, I caught the premiere of BBC America’s “Transvestite Wives” episode in their BBC America Reveals series. From their website:

Transvestite Wives looks at three transvestite relationships, as seen through the eyes of their wives and partners.

In the Scottish Highlands, Sheila discovered seven years into her marriage that her husband Dennis was a transvestite. In Newark, 20-year-old Sam, is embracing her 40-year-old partner Chris’ tranny lifestyle; and in Barnsley, Robyn, who has struggled to be accepted for her weight problem, at last finds happiness with her cross-dresser husband Dean.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised from the title, but none of the relationships had the trans partner in full-time mode. The couples were shown in both same-sex and opposite sex modes, although in the case of Sam and Chris/Rachel, we saw only Rachel for the majority of the episode.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Commentary, Education, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

TS driving instructor ‘knocked down’ by pupils husband!

Posted on May 25, 2008 by davinia1963

Living in Britain I am proud of how tolerant we have become as a nation. I always thought that we were fully open to new ideas and different ways of life, after all for one thing we are a truly multi-racial nation, built up of communities from all over what was the British Empire. But this recent story about a Driving Instructor in Yorkshire, close to where I live does make me wonder:
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1020767/Muslim-man-threatens-sue-driving-school-sending-transsexual-instructor-teach-wife.html?ITO=1490

Emma, the transsexual driving instructor
Driving Instructor, Emma Sherdley, is in the middle of treatment to change gender and has the legal paperwork to prove it. But one client claimed he had been shortchanged when he booked a female instructor to teach his wife how to drive. He phoned the Laugh ‘n’ Pass driving school threatening to sue after Miss Sherdley, 42, turned up for the lesson. “You have sent me a man. Send me a proper female. How dare you send a man with a deep voice,’ he told Joanne Dixon, who runs the school in West Yorkshire. The man, a Muslim from the Meadowhall district of Sheffield who has not been named, claimed the company deliberately sent a man disguised as a woman.

I understand it is against the strict laws of Islam for a man unrelated to a woman to spend time in a confined space with her, but as Emma is now legally a woman should this be any different from two women in a car together? Is this simply a case of yet another religion ‘clutching at straws’ to discredit transsexuality? Or using fundamentalism to turn back time by a thousand years?

Filed under: News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on TS driving instructor ‘knocked down’ by pupils husband!