WHFamily: Gender Identity Disorder by BBC Radio 4

One of the big new areas of discussion in the last few months, and on both sides of the Atlantic, has been the question of how best to support and treat young people (both young children and teenagers) when they assert the desire to be the opposite gender to the one in which they’ve been born and raised. In the US, much of the debate centres around schooling, and the actions that are necessary if a young child is to be supported to explore their feelings in role to the full. In the UK, with two recent health service booklets already published, the current focus is more actively centred on the issue of whether hormone blocking drugs should be prescribed in order to put puberty on hold for older children, so that they can buy time to be sure of their course in life before irreversible changes of either kind are allowed to take place in their bodies. Treatment of this kind has already been practiced for several years in the Netherlands and United States. UK clinicians have other views.

This BBC Radio Four Womans Hour discussion, broadcast on 28th Feb 2008, features Lee Gale, a trans man in his twenties, who first talks about his own childhood experiences. Lee is then joined by Manchester University bioethics lecturer Dr Simona Giordano, who is critical of current UK practice, and Dr Polly Carmichael. Dr Carmichael is a consultant clinical psychologist at the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust - the UK’s only centre treating young people, and which believes hormone blocking medication should not be prescribed until normal puberty has completed, around the age of 16.