seven - Towards affirmative care
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
Summary
Jess Phillips MP: I think I’d like to go back again to this idea of living in one gender identity: I wonder if you can tell me – clinically – what ‘living like a woman’ – or alternatively, man – actually means?
Will Huxter (NHS England): I’m not a clinician I can't tell you what that's –
Jess Phillips: Do you think that there is a clinical way to live as a woman? Or a man?
Will Huxter: The point I am making is that we are guided by specialists who work in this area, the clinical consensus among gender identity specialists about how services should operate. We are absolutely open to looking at how that might change, but I’m not in a position to make a change to the way in which those services are commissioned without having gone through a clinical process.
Maria Miller MP: Mr Huxter, sorry, I think we’re going to have to press you on that. Is – this is just factual, we have read that people have to ‘live like a woman’ or ‘live like a man’, we as a committee have struggled to know what that looks like in a day and age where men and women live in very similar ways. What do you – factually – what does that mean?
(Women and Equalities Committee, 2015)‘Living like a woman’: gatekeeping, power, and models of care
In late October of 2015 I took a break from writing an early draft of this book to watch a livestreamed oral evidence session from the UK Parliament's Transgender Equality Inquiry. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee had scrutinised written and oral evidence from range of stakeholders – including activists, academics, health service managers and gender identity specialists – on a variety of issues pertaining to trans equality. In this fourth session, members of the committee addressed the issues that had been raised by stakeholders to a number of government ministers, as well as an NHS England representative.
One exchange particularly caught my attention. With reference to assessment procedures such as RLE, committee members Jess Phillips and Maria Miller raised a pointed question about some of the underlying assumptions present in many clinical encounters for trans patients attending gender identity services.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Understanding Trans HealthDiscourse, Power and Possibility, pp. 197 - 208Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018