Just how bad can it be in the UK?

Author

pasc

TL;DR

I spend a lot of time with well-meaning, well-educated cis people that are more neutral on trans issues, and I have to keep my wits sharper than average to stay on top of the general apathy or the constant PR warfare waged against people like us. I often wish I could pull stats out of my pocket and let data viz do the work. Sadly the graphs and info I want for these conversations with neutrals1 often don’t exist - or at least not in the way I want them to - so I made them.

FOR TRANS FOLX

This isn’t meant for you, because most of you already know this stuff and find it depressing. Heck, even I don’t want to open this page up, but I do want to have it to hand for those difficult conversations where you want people to understand just how things can be.

I’m giving higher priority to comprehensive, well-researched quantitative data sources because:

  1. There’s often a knee-jerk “that’s just anecdotal and not a trend!” reaction you have to counter and

  2. The number of anecdotal pieces of evidence that show just how bad trans people have it in the UK are overwhelming in number and require far more time to put together into a coherent and well-researched narrative.

Having said that, observational and anecdotal pieces are as, if not more important than the most well-backed stats when making people understand what we are going through as a community.

NOTE!

  1. This page will be a live, ongoing project. I will keep updating it over time. If you know a particularly compelling, informative and accurate data source that can further illustrate just how bad it is, please feel free to use the contact form to let me know (once the contact form is up xoxo)

  1. Issues listed here will focus on the adult trans and queer population. This is because the ethical lapse and moral failing of the UK government regarding trans children requires an entire different post to detail and explain.

3. Wait Times for Gender Identity Clinics

In the UK, trans people who wish to any state-provided services for helping with gender dysphoria have to access NHS Gender Clinics. These offer formal diagnosis, psychological support, speech therapy and are typically the first step in accessing medication or surgery via the state (@TransActual_2025a). Unfortunately, as has been the case for over a decade, these services are inadequate and the waiting times are far above the NHS 18 week (~4-5 months) target for all referrals to be seen by their specialist clinic, with not a single regional provider meeting this target.

It is also worth noting that the figures below (compiled by volunteers at TransActual in 2024) only indicate the time to get to the first appointment. There may be several more months after each of these that a person will have to wait before they can even access hormones.

Moreover, I have excluded wait times for trans youth, since that particular state failing of our youth deserves its own analysis, and because, ever since the Tavistock and Portman youth clinic closed down, the two new England youth clinics have still not been set up, so the waiting times are indefinite. Many of the young trans people on those waiting lists age out of the youth clinics and only get to be seen by an adult clinic after puberty.

Fig 3.1

Personally, I was first referred in early 2019, before I managed to go private in mid-2020 (this is the option many people have to go through). I was still receiving text messages from the NHS last year (2024) asking if I still wanted to be kept on the waiting list. So, I haven’t been seen in over 6 years, which fits the pattern for London.

References

2025. https://transactual.org.uk/medical-transition/gender-dysphoria-clinics/.
“Rainbow Map — Rainbowmap.ilga-Europe.org.” https://rainbowmap.ilga-europe.org/.
Spiegelhalter, David. The Art of Statistics. Pelican Books, London.
TransActual. n.d. “GP Refusal to Prescribe HRT: Summary Report.” https://transactual.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/GP-refusal-to-prescribe-HRT-October-Report-V2.pdf.
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Footnotes

  1. I say “neutrals” because, although these people are lovely, and they are loving and supportive of me, one of the few if not the only trans person in their life, their support is often very passive. The difference between a neutral and an ally is that a neutral would not actually take any action in support of me or others like me if that action risked any reputational or social cost to themselves. I don’t mean quitting your job because you disagree with your company’s ethos - I mean more actions like correcting someone misusing pronouns, or telling your aunt at Xmas that you have trans people in your life and it hurts your feelings to hear her say that they’re “all mentally ill perverts”.↩︎

  2. Sex ed for under 9 year olds may make many people raise raise their eyebrows. If it did for you, try to evaluate what sex education means to you (if you’re like me, mental images of putting a condom on a banana abound), and what it might mean at different educational stages. Sex ad for primary school children doesn’t involve teaching them how to have sex. Last I checked the sex ed guidance, the focus for primary school children was teaching them about consent, bodily autonomy, and how to communicate if someone makes them feel physically unsafe (y’know, a pretty key educational strategy if you want to be able to identify sexual abusers).↩︎