The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned the NHS that it must offer transgender patients awaiting transitioning treatment access to fertility services or it risks breaking the law.
The EHRC said trans patients should be offered the opportunity to store their eggs or sperm in the same way as some patients who undergo fertility-threatening procedures such as chemotherapy to allow them to conceive afterwards.
It will come as a disappointment to those suffering pain because they have been refused hip and knee surgery that NHS England is not ‘breaking the law’. But then the 2010 Equality Act, continually invoked in such cases, also includes religion as a protected category, and despite this the religious right to conscientiously object to being forced to celebrate sexual diversity always comes a poor second to the rights of the sexually diverse.
Presumably the cases envisaged are those involving women who think they are men, and want to have a child without conceiving naturally with a male partner. Presumably, too, such persons will breastfeed their babies before they have their breasts surgically removed.
If a ‘trans man’ desires true equality, surely the equal right should be to father a child, not become a mother; this being impossible, however, they will be offered expensive fertility ‘treatment’ even though they are not infertile, followed by surgical mutilation of healthy reproductive organs and a life-long ingestion of opposite-sex hormones, all at the taxpayer’s expense. This is akin to offering liposuction to an anorexic, or a loaded gun to someone convinced that God is saying: ‘Kill yourself’. In fact, the suicide rate of those who have ‘transitioned’ is appallingly high, as is the attempted suicide rate of those who consider themselves ‘trans’.
‘Gender dysphoria’ may no longer be seen as a mental illness, but it covers a high proportion of those on the autistic spectrum. Despite this, children in the UK are being given hormone-blocking ‘treatment’ to halt the natural transitioning process from child to adult.
What these people need is psychological help, not life-changing surgery and a lifetime of hormones that pose health problems. Their problem is in the mind, and it is the mind that should be treated; the body should not be re-sculpted to resemble the image in the mind’s eye. Being male or female is not an illness, and any ‘treatment’ offered should be to help those having trouble with reality to accept it.
