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Features Health Inequalities Healthcare

The Rocky Road of Hormone Transition

Perhaps this feeling is a consequence, at least to some extent, of the near-ubiquitous before-and-after pictures of hormonal transition. These photos omit the difficult middle, offering instead an arbitrarily selected “after”.

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Features Healthcare History Lived Experience

Gender Identity Clinics: Genesis and Unoriginal Sin

Giving evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee on 8 September 2015, Dr John Dean authoritatively summarised the genesis of gender identity clinics [GICs]: 

“there is quite considerable diversity of opinion between different clinicians and different clinics. All seven gender clinics in England arose out of the special interest of an individual a long time in the past. There has not been a lot of planning of their development, and there certainly is no training pathway for medical practitioners or others who work in this field.” [1]

Who were these individuals ‘a long time in the past’, how did they come to define the lives of trans people, and why are GICs such a focus of criticism from the patients they exist to serve?

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