 | Highlights of GIRES work in 2009. |
GIRES has continued to develop its expertise, resources and influence. Public bodies are now driven by new legislation to undertake equality and diversity programmes that include provision for transgender people. The Equality Bill is focusing increased attention on this field. GIRES is frequently consulted about the development and implementation of transgender policies, while providing information, literature, website material and training for the many public bodies now preparing to fulfill their new duties. Through its website and participation in international conferences, GIRES has a worldwide impact, especially in the medical field, where the charity has strong links to the key specialists around the world. GIRES now has 382 members, including transgender people and those who support them, making it the largest transgender charity in the UK.
At present all the charity's work is undertaken by volunteers. and Reed are still the main contributors, but they are now joined by a strong group of enthusiastic and highly qualified members, who devote their own skills to research, policy development, writing literature, training, website enhancement and representing the charity externally, as well as ensuring that the charity's governance, financial controls and security arrangements are robust. This group includes , Paula Dooley, Judi Brown, Celia Mcleod, Richard Curtis, Kate Craig-Wood, Nic Bray, Kay Nicholson, Susie Withers, Jenny Gradidge, Janine Elliot and Donald Yule.
Another measure of the charity's growth is its income. When it was founded in 1997, it aimed for an income of £5,000 per annum. Since then, the amount of paid work that the charity has been commissioned to undertake has grown substantially, so that in 2008 it received nearly £28,000. That excludes the value of the free advertising, £20,000 per annum, that the charity receives from Google. This enabled the charity to build up its reserves sufficiently to fund small-scale but important research projects, without external grants, and cover the cost of attending key professional conferences where transgender issues are debated.
The charity’s main activities in 2009 to date, in each of the areas where it works, were to:
GIRES continued to work with government bodies, at national and local level. Its trustees have attended 34 meetings and consultations with ministers, other politicians and officials, often with representatives from other LGBT groups. Two of the trustees were invited to a reception at 10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister spoke about the injustice that gay married couples in California faced, because, at that time, it seemed likely that they would be required to annul their marriages. GIRES had the opportunity to point out to him that trans people were obliged to do the same, if they wished to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). Examples of these consultation are:
- Department for Children, Schools and Families, which intends to publish guidance for schools on sexist, sexual and transphobic bullying; it is also working on the recording and possible reporting of bullying, categorized according to diversity stand, including transphobic, homophobic etc.
- Government Equalities Office, in respect of the Equality Bill
- Equality and Human Rights Commission, with regard to transgender issues, especially in relation to the Equality Bill
- Ministry of Justice, in respect of the Gender Equality Act 2004
- Home Office, in respect of its equality and diversity strategy
- Surrey County Council, in respect of its equality and diversity policies
- Health Commission Wales where, thanks to a gracious invitation from Ben Thom of the Gender Trust, we are now working with him to improve the Commission's treatment guidelines.
Our work for the Parliamentary Forum has included an update on the Guidelines for health organisations on commissioning treatment services for trans people. The Forum is hoping to send this document to all PCTs along with the Guidance for GPs. The mailing project will be undertaken by GIRES. We have already sent the Guidance for GPs to all Specialised Commissioning Groups. In addition, GIRES has liaised with the National Specialised Commissioning Team for over a year, with regard to the treatment offered to gender variant adolescents, and has recently been involved in the re-write of its Definition Sets in relation to gender dysphoria.
Although the Intercollegiate draft of the Good practice guidelines on the assessment and treatment of gender dysphoria is still some way from being published, it was good to note that the president elect of WPATH, Lin Fraser, specifically mentioned an appendix to these guidelines, that describes the “importance of family support”, in her published recommendations on the new WPATH guidelines, currently under review. This was a uniquely GIRES contribution from who is our representative on the working group.
The small leaflet, “Transgender Experiences – Information and Support”, which we published for many years under the GIRES banner, has continued to be successful. We have now produced a new version, bearing the NHS logo, which we have sent to all members of the charity. To date, over 20,000 have been distributed to a variety of clinics, libraries etc in the UK and it has also recently been translated for use in Russia.
“Guidance for GPs, other clinicians and health professionals on the care of gender variant people”, which GIRES produced for the Department of Health and carries the NHS logo, has also been much in demand. Individual trans people have used it to educate their GPs who, in some cases, have risen to the challenge of personally assessing the service user following the guidance provide in the booklet. The guidance has the potential to combat the inflexibility that still characterises some of the GICs' provision in that it recognises the great variety of gender experience and expression; it encourages health professionals to take a flexible, patient-centred approach to addressing the needs of all those requiring treatment; it provides information to help these professionals feel more confident in providing local treatments under a network model, thus limiting delay and cutting travel costs; it makes it clear that obliging a service user to change gender role in order to qualify for hormone therapy is not appropriate; it encourages the inclusion of family members and significant others in at least some of the treatment process. However, the battle to have more hard copies provided by the DoH continues. Meanwhile, it is only available online.
Other booklets in the series that carry the NHS logo include: “A Guide to Hormone Therapy for Trans People” and “Medical care for gender variant children and young people: answering families' questions”; The DoH has also funded three other booklets that GIRES has published bearing its own logo: “A guide to trans service users' rights; “A guide to lower surgery for trans men” (in which Dr Curtis was extremely helpful); and “A guide to lower surgery for trans women” (in which we had some very helpful advice from another GIRES trustee, Miss Celia Macleod, who is a gynaecologist.
We have also been commissioned by PACE to prepare a booklet on helping families of trans people. This work is nearing completion.
GIRES handles a daily stream of enquiries from trans people, family members, schools, other public bodies, employers, medical professionals, representatives of the media etc. As well as giving information via telephone, the charity is able to guide callers to relevant material on its website and send them publications from the large range of literature that it has developed.
Provide training and workshops
Since the GIRES AGM in October 2008, we have provided 28 presentations or workshops for a wide variety of organisations. These include, the Government Equalities Office, local authorities; hospitals, prisons, police, IDAHO, PACE, Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, Evangelical Alliance, Gender Matters, the General Teaching Council and many others.
With funding from the Home Office, GIRES has prepared a report on “Gender Variance in the UK – Prevalence, Incidence, Growth and Geographic Distribution”. It demonstrates that policy makers in healthcare and other services have grossly underestimated the rapidly growing number of transgender people who need medical care.
In June 2009, GIRES made its annual award to eight internationally renowned clinicians for their development, on behalf of the Endocrine Society, of “Guidelines for the Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual People”. Their clear recommendation is that adolescents who experience profound and persistent gender dysphoria should be offered medication to suspend puberty at an early stage, before the development of secondary sex characteristics that cause life-long disadvantage. All recipients of the award declined the financial element and asked that it go, instead, to funding the translation of the Guidelines into several languages. In addition, one of the recipients is donating €15,000 to help fund the translations. That work is underway.
GIRES is providing a grant of £5,000 for a project conducted by a researcher at the University of Warwick. It entails a comprehensive survey, over several years, of the experiences of trans people who are receiving medical treatment in the private sector.
On behalf of Professor Louis Gooren, GIRES has donated €25,000 to fund research into transgender issues in Thailand.
The Home Office has commissioned GIRES to develop a national internet system for reporting transphobic crime. This will link into local police forces, possibly via the revised True Vision police system for reporting all forms of hate crime. Professor Playdon requested that we write a piece for health professionals, on the approach to be taken in relation to transgender people in single-sex accommodation. This policy is now required in all hospitals and care homes. The text has been adopted by the DoH and appears on its website. As a result of GIRES' input into the meeting on this topic, held at the House of Lords and hosted by Earl Howe, GIRES has been invited to do further work with the Macmillan Foundation.
The GIRES website carries a broad and growing range of material and its use is increasing rapidly. Daily visits are now 260 per day, compared to 120 a year ago. In the past year, there have been 63,000 separately identifiable visitors to the site, of whom half were base overseas, located in 155 different countries.
The Google corporation is kindly providing a charitable grant to GIRES, in the form of free advertising, which has an annual value of $36,000.
Contribute to professional conferences
These include the Symposium of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, where GIRES delivered five papers. The topics included prevalence and growth of the trans population, our work with the DoH, the treatment of gender variant adolescents and transphobic bullying in schools. GIRES also conducted three workshops at the LGBT Health Summit in Gateshead. In addition, GIRES made presentations at the conference on “Understanding and Addressing Gender Dysphoria”, held at Charing Cross Hospital by the West London Mental Health Trust and at the TG09 conference at the University of East Anglia.
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