My speech on the Welsh Gender Services’ suspension

A few days ago, on the eve of a Bank Holiday weekend, the Welsh Gender Service, who handle all trans healthcare across Wales, cancelled all surgeries with immediate effect, including patients in pre-op at the time. Despite the statement from WGS, there are reports that some people are having post-op endocrine support also suspended. I was asked if I would give a speech at the protest that took place in Cardiff City Centre on Bank Holiday Monday, next to the statue of Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. This is the speech I gave.

I was asked if I might like to speak and, while generally I would like nothing less than to stand up in front of people and be the centre of attention, perhaps if a middle-aged cis white guy says something then someone in power might actually listen.

I have been fortunate enough to have trans people in my life since I was an 18-year-old at university; my then-boyfriend’s best friend had known that she wasn’t a boy for as long as she could remember, as a small child. I remember seeing her joy grow as she managed to navigate the 1990s’ English NHS and get a body that reflected her self-image. We shouldn’t need to see trans joy to recognise and understand trans people’s humanity, but apparently too many of my fellow cissies don’t understand empathy and solidarity in quite the same way.

And, frankly, people my age and older should be just as capable of recognising that the hate being faced by our trans and enby family and friends right now is exactly the same scaremongering anti-queer bullshit that we faced in the 1980s and 1990s. Bridget Phillipson might be nearly a decade my junior, but Yvette Cooper and Mary-Ann Stephenson have a few years on me. We are all old enough to remember Section 28 and they should definitely know better than to have created it anew these few decades later.

As I’m sure other people have already said, while the Welsh Gender Service is where the impact has been seen, with hospitals forced to tell people in pre-op to get dressed and go home, it’s important to remember they are not the people with power and agency here. As is so often the case, our ability to do things better here in Wales is stymied by English obstruction.

From what we understand, this stems from a transphobic journalist having blogged hit-pieces about the Welsh Gender Service, which were sent to Natasha Asghar, the Tory health spokesperson in the Senedd, and so — because we don’t perform gender-affirming surgeries here yng Nghymru — NHS England bodies have put pressure on the NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee to investigate why a “disproportionate” amount of referrals are coming from Wales — we’re about 5% of the UK population, but 17% of UK referrals for gender-related surgery.

Obviously, because we can’t have anything nice on Terf Island, this is taken as a sign of “oh my gods we’re allowing too many people to have bodily autonomy”, rather than showing that we do things better in Wales and we can surpass the incredibly low bar of English waiting list processing times. We do things better enough that the UN praised the Welsh Gender Service, despite the parlous state of trans healthcare across the UK.

As we all know, no matter how much mouldy wizard lady and her cult might claim otherwise, nobody is being rushed through to surgery; the waiting time last year for a first appointment was 2 years. And we’re not talking about large numbers of people to serve here; just over 200 men and enbies were referred for top surgery in 2025, just over 150 women and about 50 guys referred for bottom surgery.

To make matters worse, the Joint Commissioning Committee didn’t consult with — or even inform — the stakeholder group. The first news we had of any of this was individual people sharing on Reddit and social media that surgeries were being cancelled last-minute. And let’s be clear, even Wes Streeting recognised that delays and waiting lists for trans-specific healthcare were “unacceptable” and “fundamentally wrong”; NHS gender services had effectively ceased to exist for the majority of people already. We all know too well that, on top of worse mental health rates among queer people to start with, these delays have a horrific effect on the mental health of trans people trying to navigate these failing systems.

So what can we do about it? #

I call on Ian Green, former chief-exec at Terrence Higgins Trust and now chair of the Joint Commissioning Committee, to ensure this review happens quickly and fairly, so that trans people in Wales have as little interruption as possible and can get back to living their lives.

More than that, though, I call on Mabon ap Gwynfor, our Cabinet Minister for Health and Care, to cancel this review altogether.

It’s great to see Plaid Cymru’s official account reshare the Instagram statement from their Senedd member Matthew Jones, but I have to ask what the fuck. Health is fully devolved; this is in their gift. Yes, we rely on NHS England to perform these surgeries, but Wales has ownership over our healthcare services.

So I also call on Mabon ap Gwynfor urgently to put together plans for a self-ID-based model of trans healthcare in Wales, removing medical gatekeeping and recognising that — to quote the American Psychological Association:

Diversity in gender identity and expression is part of the human experience and transgender and gender nonbinary identities and expressions are healthy, incongruence between one’s sex and gender is neither pathological nor a mental health disorder

To put it another way, HRT, HRT: over the counter and for free.

Cymru is a small nation and we don’t yet have full control of our national destiny. But our health service is fully devolved, so we do have the power to create a fully-devolved pathway for trans healthcare. We can and should remove English transphobia and English bureaucracy — English interference — from how we look after trans people’s health needs in Wales. The Senedd and the Llywodraeth might not be able to fully insulate Welsh queers from an increasingly hostile UK, but we can at least make sure that our trans friends and family are able to have their healthcare needs met — promptly and compassionately. So write to your Senedd members, talk to them, help them understand how important this is, so they can give our Plaid government the pressure and support they need to make this happen.

As we all know, this is part of a wider turn to the dark side around the world. We all need to campaign for wider queer liberation, including trans people’s needs at the heart of it. We need to have solidarity with liberation more widely, fighting the fascist wave that demonises difference — from trying to suppress our beautiful queer lives to terrorising refugees and lynching Black academics. We are all one people, we need to support eachother and help each other with our fights, from here at home to Palestine, Sudan and the DRC.

And, importantly, we must make space for joy. Trans joy — and queer joy more generally — is revolutionary. No matter how dark things get, they cannot take the potential for joy away from us. So fight and dance, protest and sing. Together, we can make a difference.