News on the gender incongruence services front:

Today (Friday 9 June) NHS England has published an interim service specification for specialist gender incongruence services for children and young people to support Phase 1 providers in developing their new services. The public consultation on this draft interim service specification ran on the NHS England website for 45 days from 20 October to 4 December 2022. It received 5,183 responses in total. We would like to sincerely thank all those individuals and organisations who took the time to submit responses to this consultation. Read more about the consultation feedback and NHS England’s response.

We have previously made clear, including the draft interim service specification we consulted on, the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty supressing hormones as part of clinical research. This approach follows advice from Dr Hilary Cass’ Independent Review highlighting the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments.

We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria.

It’s a step.

H/t latsot