• 4 Posts
  • 629 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: February 19th, 2026
  • lyralycan@sh.itjust.workstoTrans Memes@lemmy.blahaj.zone•I wish UK HRT didn't have medical gatekeepers _Monkey's Paw curls_
    15·
    3 days ago

    When I was going through the review process:

    • I wasn’t dressing femme enough for them because I wore skinny jeans and T-shirt to the 2nd appt.;
    • I was told different excuses for not getting HRT, one of which being I had to have a GRC before being granted, so I DIYed, got the GRC and sent it, then I was granted HRT. I later learned this was a lie;
    • I got solicited (and possibly gatekept) by the misogynistic, possibly fetishizing creep who STILL runs the GIC;
    Long version
    • Some creep messaged me via his personal gmail trying to sell me a recommendation for £50 because I was trying to get a GRC. Turns out he’d read my assessment info and he was the leader of T&P GIC, and when researching experiences with him as the reviewer girls all said he acted creepy and said misogynistic demeaning shit, denied them HRT because they weren’t petite enough, etc. dating back 10 years. His name is James Barrett and he is STILL the head clinician;
    • After my rejection of the solicitation I kept getting appointments booked over the next two months for a few weeks away (for those who don’t know there’s a huge queue and at the time transfolk had to wait 10+ months for the next appt.) with Barrett instead of usual clinicians, with random subject reasons, and each time I refused because I was afraid he’d gatekeep me too. After the third attempt I spelled it out for the admin team and told about the solicitation, and the attempts stopped;
    • I was told I couldn’t get HRT until I got a GRC, so that’s why I was looking for it in the first place. I later learned this was a fucking lie.
    • I got refused requests for progesterone because they don’t have enough proof that it’s safe, but their guidance harped on about the lack of knowledge around breast growth but the reason I requested it was fucking hormone accuracy;
    • I have to get below a certain BMI to be granted surgery.

    While I accept that lower excess fat reduces post-surgery complications, I am a) suspicious that this is more for stereotyping and the idea that women should be skinny, and b) aware that BMI is and always has been untrustworthy because it was invented (by a European) to gather stats for “the average man” aka. European white men, never to be used as medical guideline or restriction, and is only compatible with Western white men and the formula has to be adjusted for other ethnicities.

    Also one of my GP surgeries kept setting appointments (I needed a HRT review before being granted more) and then cancelling them a day before. I believe it was a receptionist who was the gatekeeper, and possibly the one who took my call. After the fourth cancellation (and being well over a month without any pills) I confronted them over the phone about gatekeeping, and it got nowhere. I got irate because the message wasn’t getting through to them and the chucklehead shut me down because I used a single expletive, saying it counts as abuse, and so I yelled at them to see the fucking point of the call and have some critical thinking and understanding of why I’m using that term to express myself, and got dismissed from the surgery. I immediately signed up with a different one and got drugs in two days.

  • lyralycan@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world•All the way from 1992English
    1·
    4 days ago

    Yo even though it was corpo-hell, that beauty of the Oasis and being any being was so alluring to me. And IP being a thing of the past (I was impressed by how many references they managed to stuff in the movie, maybe 1/4 of the book aha).

    Ya it still required working loads to buy MTX or a ticket to travel, but it was so freeing in other senses.

    Guess we got VRChat for this timeline lol