The Daily Malice article that I mentioned on Monday did manage to finger one organization that does good work on behalf of trans people. That was GIRES (the Gender Identity Research and Education Society). It is a registered charity, and a quick browse of the website will show you just how valuable it is. The Malice thinks it is a waste of taxpayers’ money. But how much of a waste?
Well, just about everyone in the UK who can’t afford expensive accountants and offshore tax havens is a taxpayer. Even kids may pay some VAT out of their pocket money. But to give the Malice a fair chance I’m going assume that by “taxpayer” they mean individuals who pay things like income tax. (That accounts for some 55% of tax revenue.) There are currently around 29.9 million such people in the UK. That means that on average each UK taxpayer “wastes” 0.12 pence every year on GIRES. Outrageous, eh?
Meanwhile ITV has been getting in on the act. I’ve blogged before about 10-year-old Livvy James when she appeared on the BBC’s breakfast show. The BBC invited my pal Paris Lees from Trans Media Watch to be the resident expert that day. Not to be out done, ITV decided to ask Livvy on their show too. And for their resident “expert” on trans issues they invited Anne Atkins, someone so homophobic that even the Press Complaints Commission was moved to censure her. Atkins is also a leading figure behind True Freedom Trust, an organization that promotes “reparative therapy” (i.e. torturing people until they agree to behave they way that you want them to) for LGBT people.
As I said to someone on Twitter, at least Paddy Power only targeted adults. It takes a special kind of scum to bring in a notorious professional hate-monger to try to bully and humiliate a 10-year-old girl. Stay classy, ITV.
Finally, a bit of health news. As most of you probably know, the current medical thinking is that transition to the preferred gender is by far the best way to treat transsexuals. Post-transition, the only medical intervention they should need is regular supplies of hormones, and occasional blood tests to make sure the dosage is correct. There’s an issue here with testosterone because of the danger of mis-use by athletes, but oestrogen is regularly prescribed by GPs for contraception and HRT. Trans women ought to be able to get it easily.
What’s more, synthetic oestrogen is cheap. The NHS has a minimum prescription charge that most patients have to pay, and they make a profit on any oestrogen that they supply.
Yesterday Nottingham Primary Care Trust put all medication for trans people, pre- or post-op, on their “red list”, meaning that it can only be prescribed under the instructions of a qualified specialist. While many GPs do still refuse to treat trans people, this is a significant departure for an NHS management body, and it is probably illegal. It is also expensive, because now all trans people in the Nottingham area will have to go to a specialist gender clinic to get their regular prescriptions. It is, in fact, a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money.
But, as we have seen, tabloid newspapers are not very good at sums. They can’t work out what is a waste of money and what isn’t. All they care about is whether or not people they hate are getting treated on the NHS. And all that Nottingham PCT appears to care about is not appearing in a newspaper article being accused of wasting taxpayers’ money by treating trans people. So they have passed the buck. Our newspapers, it seems, are able to set health policy regarding who gets treated and who does not. As a taxpayer, I do not like this idea.