The UK National Health Service is being sued for failing to help transgender patients with fertility treatment. The Equality and Human Rights Commission says people who have transitioned have the right to start a family, but many may have been left infertile by the process.
Jamie underwent gender reassignment treatment two years ago at the age of eighteen. He now lives with his fiancee and is keen to have a family in the future. He was given the choice to freeze his eggs before transitioning from female to male, and believes that option should be automatic.
“My experience was very positive compared to other people’s. Say in years to come if I was just to carry on with my transition and not have known anything about it, then the option came across now, and I’ve gone though all my transition, there’s no going back and I wasn’t given the option, I think it would kind of crush your spirits a bit. So I’d wonder, ‘what if’,” he says.
Now the NHS is facing legal action because it doesn’t offer routine fertility treatment to transgender patients. Freezing eggs or sperm before transitioning would give trans people the chance to have biological children later in life.
Elizabeth Prochaska from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (HRC) says: “We want to make sure that there’s no discrimination in the health service in the provision that it makes for people. And the trans community is growing. It’s particularly vulnerable and it needs this support and it should be done at a national level.”
But suing NHS England, the public healthcare provider, is likely to prove controversial when the National Health Service is struggling to balance budgets and provide core services. NHS England says it doesn’t have a responsibility to ensure fertility treatment is available to all patients.
It issued a statement saying: “(It) has responded in detail to the HRC explaining why we believed their request is both misjudged and potentially unfair to NHS patients.” Some women’s rights activists argue the bigger issue is why young people are being given treatment that affects their fertility in the first place.
