Fuck off, Google. For the vast majority of trans people in the UK this is the ONLY way to get hormone therapy.
If you're interested in HOW BAD it is in the UK for trans people, there's a 1.5hr video by Philosophy tube that goes into a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8
if the UK has socialized medicine and people can get hrt through that with medical supervision and proper dosages and stuff... why are people doing diy?
is it just juveniles who can't tell their parents?
It's because the NHS puts up a variety of barriers to care, with most trans patients going through a 2-5 year wait to get the hormones. This applies to adults.
Most trans people in the UK use DIY until the NHS finally decides they're "Trans enough" to deserve it, and even then, it's not guaranteed to be available due to political reasons.
Essentially, the government in the UK is extremely transphobic, and trans people are demonized and looked down upon worse than immigrants.
so the NHS is really fucking bad about trans healthcare for a lot of reasons. The process is unusually bureaucratic even for the NHS and hyper gate kept, like they will just deny care based on single answers to weird questions. Without a really good doctor who is willing to go to bat for you and stick it out and who understands this very specific process in the NHS, you probably will never actually be able to get care.
Partially this is due to NHS being underfunded and partially because people in positions of power have worked to make trans healthcare as difficult as possible to get in England.
Good question. I'm an adult from the NL and I'd say more than half of the people I know on hrt use diy.
The first step would be overcoming your fear to visit a gp. These are tied to your postalcode and often there isn't much choice.
Now you have to overcome it again when seeing a psychiatrist, and pay for that because it isn't fully covered. So you might be paying a lot just to simply be discriminated.
I finally have a supportive gp now, which was a pain to find. The only medical professional I've seen that knew what she was talking about was the woman who did my laser treatment.
Yup. Cuz I'm poor I have only the basic level of healthcare. I should add that this is essentially free and so it's not an entirely bad system. But it's effectively useless in many cases if you are poor.
How can someone be poor here? Well this can happen when you don't fit squarely in the safety net. For example a friend of mine lived with her bf, but because it was social housing they made it extra small to motivate people to get out. But that also somehow made it legally too small for two people to live there. But because she is trans and poor she was essentially forced into that situation. So people often can't be registered in the right places, which can impact your social stipend.
That's why you are forced to pick the cheapest healthcare option, and that means your own risk will be about 1k euros a year. You have to pay that much for healthcare that year before you are covered 100%. It's to demotivate overusing the system. Makes sense if you can afford it.
But what if you are genuinely poor? It's common. Just imagine the levels of discomfort we go through. Imagine being a woman with facial hair and it makes you uncomfortable. How are you supposed to do anything like work? And all the stress causes mental health issues. It's common to see in my community. People get panic attacks and everything.
And when against all odds you do go, and you pay all that somehow, you'll likely be discriminated. There's simply not enough training for psychologists here. From where I stand it's absolutely reasonable that people use diy hrt, financially and emotionally. And you have to set that in perspective to the past, where that was the status quo. 😿
kinda reminds me of when they outlawed cannabis in the us, they actually kept it legal but only with a special marijuana tax stamp... and they didn't give anyone the stamp.
so here they can say "here's how to get hrt", then not let you get it, and criminalize diy... essentially criminalizing an entire class of people but with a couple extra steps of fake tolerance...
Both sites were temporarily offline after their domain registrar received letters from the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) asking them to suspend their domain names.
Were they hosted in the UK? If not, seems like a huge overreach
Hopefully folks can still get the supplies they need. I can see a lot of sketchy VPNs giving info to the UK government though
