Victorian government funding is underwriting an expansion in the number of GPs being trained to prescribe hormones to transgender people from the age of 16 as the state’s two specialist in-hospital clinics are seeing a drop-off in referrals for the first time in a decade.
Since 2019, health provider Your Community Health has trained 1790 health professionals, including 152 GPs, in providing the “affirming care” model of treatment, by which people born male can be given female hormones and people born female are given male hormones to help them change gender.
Your Community Health’s Burgess said treatment at GP clinics was expanding “because the LGBTI community sector and the state government saw that there was an enormous demand for gender-affirming services for Victoria and … this is something that should be available in standard general practice”.
“Peer navigators” – transgender people employed to help young people find their way through the system – had also made the system more efficient, Burgess said. However, a challenge remained that not many GPs were prepared to prescribe hormones to children under 16, and “access is still very, very low in that cohort”, he said.
This was partly because of medico-legal and potential insurance issues, he said. Among these was the recent refusal of a key insurer for GPs, MDA National, to provide indemnity insurance for those treating under-18s because they could not “accurately and fairly price the risk of regret”.
Source: GPs trained to prescribe hormones to trans teens thanks to government funding