Gender service for young people to stop accepting self-referrals

Yay, another policy introduced thanks to the Cass Report.

>The dossier provoked political debate over a number of its conclusions, with Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie – at that time a member of the Scottish government – saying he had difficulty accepting the report as a valid scientific document.

The British Medical Association have called for a pause on basically implementing things in the Cass Review too.

That doesn’t even go into the international backlash – Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the US Association of Pediatrics, the US Endocrine Society and The Canadian Pediatrics society have all either said “this is rubbish” or actively moved away from the findings of it.

I’m *so* glad the UK government are believing a patently biased and unfair report (that, for instance, repeatedly name-dropping a disgraced academic who was found to be creating fake accounts to send transphobic abuse on twitter) on a medical issue over almost the entirety of the medical community

This is just creating more work for GPs, who will generally know very little about assessing young people who need support from this service so they will just be writing down the patient’s self report anyway. 

This is bad practice, While I’m certain most Brits don’t want to hear it, The UK is extremely transphobic and this bigotry actually becomes more pervasive in “upper classes” of society. Thus is in many ways seen as a “dignified bigotry.”

And thus it’s more common than average amoungst doctors. It’s extremely common to have GPs who refuse trans people *all* medical care explicitly based on their own predjudices from us. And you can usually only transfer to so many other surgeries in your area.

This trend can make it so some young people just cannot get referred at all.

Tertiary services can’t sustain self-referrals.

There’s a reason why no other services in the NHS do this. They’d be inundated by a workload that is too high and contains people that shouldn’t be on there.

Let a professional assess and refer if appropriate. Not every young person questioning their gender identity needs a referral to a tertiary centre.