Content note: this post includes information about extremely long waits for accessing gender affirming healthcare.

If you need support, please reach out to:

LGBT Health & Wellbeing (open 12-9pm Tuesday – Thursday and 1-6pm on Sunday):

Helpline: 0800 464 700

Live chat: www.lgbthealth.org.uk

Email: helpline@lgbthealth.org.uk

Samaritans (open 24 hours):

Helpline: 116 123

Email: jo@samaritans.org

What’s happened?

Today, Public Health Scotland (PHS) has published waiting times data for Scottish Gender Identity Clinics. The data shows that Scotland’s largest GIC, the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow, is overwhelmed, unable to meet demand, and that change is urgently needed.

The data shows that Sandyford (as of March 2025):

• Was offering first appointments to people who had been waiting six and a half years for their first appointment
• Was offering fewer first appointments for new patients – providing fewer than 50 first appointments over the year
• Has almost 4000 people on its waiting list – an increase in almost 1000 people from the year before
• Has three times as many people who have been wating over 5 years for a first appointment than the year before

What do PHS count?

PHS data counts how long a person who has a first appointment waited from when they joined the waiting list. It doesn’t count how long a person who joins the waiting list today will wait for their first appointment.

With almost 4000 people waiting, and fewer than 50 appointments being offered a year, the most hopeful estimate is that you would wait 80 years for a first appointment.

Yet this estimate is probably far too optimistic. FOI data and some great reporting done by What The Trans? shows that waits are in fact probably to be counted in hundreds of years. Without drastic action, most people on the waiting list will never be seen.

What can we do?

The Sandyford Clinic is supposed to provide services to people who live in eight Scottish local healthboard areas. Other than Greater Glasgow and Clyde, those other healthboards are:

• Ayrshire & Arran
• Dumfries & Galloway
• Western Isles
• Forth Valley
• Tayside
• Lanarkshire
• Argyll & Bute (Highlands)

Currently, those healthboards provide virtually no gender identity healthcare. And clearly, the Sandyford cannot provide the services people need. We think that those healthboards need to hear from trans and non-binary people directly about the crisis trans healthcare is in, and to be asked what they will do to look after people who are being put at the back of a queue that will never end.

Live in one of those healthboards? Please add your name to our letters to healthboards here: www.scottishtrans.org/cantkeepwaiting

We’re also running an event on Saturday, November 22^nd to bring together community groups and trans and non-binary people from across Scotland into one space where we can discuss how to take care of each other while things are so bad and how we can take action to create a better future for trans healthcare in Scotland.

Get your tickets here: https://www.outsavvy.com/event/30917/we-cant-keep-waiting-take-action-for-trans-healthcare