Transgender EuroStudy – Legal Survey and Focus ... - ILGA Europe

Transgender EuroStudy:
Legal Survey and Focus on the
Transgender Experience of Health Care
treatment, and medical treatments should be available to trans people unless there is some
exceptional reason for not providing it. That is effectively what the Court of Appeal stated in 2006 in
the case of R v North West Lancashire Health Authority. 64 As one might imagine after reading this report,
even in the UK where the case was decided, the method of funding continues to turn this decision
upside down so that trans people are only afforded treatment in exceptional circumstances rather
than vice versa.
The principle of contemporary health care has always been to meet need on an equal basis,
which includes creating parity by having some wealthier patients paying towards their costs and
others getting it for free, rather than on a certain characteristic for example originally the colour of
your skin or your gender, and now, your ethnicity, faith, age or sexual orientation. In theory, very
recently, 65 with the implementation at national level of the Council Equal Treatment in Goods, and
Services Directive 2004/113/EC of 13 December 2004, trans people who are intending to undergo, are
undergoing or who have undergone gender reassignment 66 have to be offered equal treatment in the
provision of health care as a service. Maybe this will promote change. However, the need for
comparators in establishing the discriminatory treatment might have the effect of hiding gender
reassignment treatments even further; with doctors and administrators saying the work they do
cannot be compared with any other services, no matter how badly they do it. This is clearly not what is
intended by the Directive. This problem will not disappear and indeed needs to be addressed given
the exponential growth in the trans population that our data strongly suggests.
The Growth in the Trans Population
The data from the survey for this report also provides strong evidence that the trans population
is growing year-on-year. The majority of respondents reported that they had transitioned less than 5
years ago. The data from our survey was plotted on a graph which demonstrates the exponential
growth in the trans population for each time period we specified in the survey.
The Chart below shows a summary of the time for Europeans, now living full time in their
preferred gender, reported to have elapsed since they began their transition; these results are also
depicted (see figure 1). Figures are given for the whole group and for Female-to-Male (FTM) and Maleto-Female
(MTF) categories separately. It can be seen that the number of people transitioning is now
increasing rapidly throughout Europe.
Chart 1: Time Since Transition Reported November 2007
64
R v North West
Lancashire Health
Authority; Ex parte A, D,
G (2000) WLR 997.
65
December 21, 2007.
Time Total FTM MTF
All
985
377
608
> 5 years
601
258
343
66
Which has been as
loosely interpreted as
meaning that the trans
person merely visits
their family doctor in
order to think about it.
< 5 years
> 10 years
> 20 years
211
124
49
72
34
13
139
90
36