How long are the waiting lists roughly to get your first appointment at an NHS gender clinic?
I can’t give any first-hand experience or specifics of that particular clinic, since I live at the other end of the country. But I’ll try to help, Lily. As Postgirl mentioned, some GICs have very poor waiting list times if they are seriously oversubscribed; the Charing Cross clinic still makes patients wait for up to five years, which can feel like a slow death if near the start of serious puberty. Often, gender identity services suffer from a chronic lack of funding; since they aren’t first priority for the NHS, patients can sometimes end up waiting years for their first appointment. I didn’t think that the Porterbrook was one of them, but looking around, it does appear to have had its problems – complaints of a lack of funding and a lack of attention to trans patients, as well as a horrible waiting list. There’s a link to a Livejournal posting at the bottom; it was written exactly a year ago, so there is a decent chance that grievances have been addressed and the situation has improv
