Building Hope
The last few years have offered precious little hope for trans people, their friends, loved ones and allies. One thing that gives us hope is the Trans Access to Healthcare campaign run by Leicester & Leicestershire Citizens, the local chapter of Citizens UK. They are the UK’s biggest alliance of civil society organisations – schools, charities, and faith groups – committed to community organising to give people the power and confidence to make real change in their communities.
Trade has been part of the Trans Access to Healthcare campaign from very early on – and it drew us into memberships of Citizens UK – but the campaign didn’t start with us. In 2023 Leicester & Leicester Citizens conducted a listening campaign across the city to hear the issues that needed changing in people’s lives at the time. From a house meeting in a local, inclusive church they heard multiple stories about how badly trans people were treated by the NHS locally. It’s common knowledge that the waiting lists for treatment at NHS Gender Identity Clinics (GIC) are exhaustingly long. But that was only part of the story. Time and again, Citizens heard stories like Nick’s (a pseudonym because he fears of the impact on his existing healthcare if he uses his real name):
I remember walking to my GP for what I thought was an appointment about my knee, only to get a phone call from my GP asking me about gender care whilst I was on my way. I got there and my knee wasn’t checked, instead I was told this was a scheduled appointment to talk about my GIC paperwork, at which point my GP asked me what the difference between titles and pronouns were because she didn’t understand.
I later requested for my name to be changed on the NHS system; I provided all the necessary paperwork to do this but years later I was still missing important cardiology appointments because the letters were being sent to my old name and details. Eventually I was told the way to stop further deadnaming was to change my NHS number, which I did… and then all my notes were lost and none of my existing diagnoses for other things were moved across.
I’ve had friends whose GPs have refused to provide their medication which they’ve been on for years because the GP doesn’t seem to understand the clinical processes. I’m so angry about the state of things for myself and trans people like me, but it feels good to use that anger to generate change through the Citizens campaign. More than anything right now, I need that hope that things can change for trans people.
Over the summer of 2023, Trade helped Citizens UK to collect more stories from trans people’s experience of the local NHS, through a stall in our Health & Wellbeing Marquee at Leicester Pride.
Taking all the stories together, we identified several key issues that were under the control of the local Integrated Care Board (ICB) and the NHS in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. We formulated three asks of the ICB that formed the core of our campaign:
- Will you implement a ‘tell us once’ approach to updating patients’ gender, name and pronouns on NHS patient records that is integrated across primary and secondary care?
- Will you roll-out a programme of clinically led training about the needs of trans people across the local primary care system?
- Will you create a network of trans healthcare champions in every primary care network who can work to improve the treatment and care of trans patients?
Policymakers tend to like cold hard statistics, but we know the power of stories. Making private wounds public and sharing experiences of navigating the NHS as a trans person has a real impact. Members of the campaign have bravely shared their stories at meetings and training sessions with NHS managers and primary care staff. More than once the power of our stories has reduced senior NHS managers to tears and helped win commitments to change. We are making real progress on the implementation of two of our three asks, and we believe this will reduce barriers to dignified healthcare for trans people locally. The idea of building local networks of trans healthcare champions has been heard as part of the national NHS LGBT+ Evidence Review. This gives us hope.
We also find hope in the broad-based campaign team that we’ve built locally, who are working together to improve trans healthcare. There are, of course, lots of trans people at the heart of the campaign team, alongside cis staff and volunteers from Trade, the Leicestershire LGBTQ+ Centre, and other local charities. The community organising model used by Citizens UK likes to find and nurture ‘unusual allies’ and that’s certainly strengthened our campaign – having an Anglican ordinand (trainee vicar), staff from the Leicester Diocese, and older hijabi women in campaign meetings, speaking up as trans allies, has certainly helped shift the perceptions of senior NHS managers about who trans healthcare matters to. This solidarity helps build hope for all of us and inspires us to continue working for progressive change in our communities.
#BuildingHope
