Tuesday, 2 May 2023

LGBTIQA+ health care

Tim READ (Brunswick) (19:15): (137) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is that she work with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health and public hospitals to develop a public surgical service for gender-affirming surgery in Victoria. I spoke recently with a constituent who expressed their frustration at the current unavailability of gender-affirming surgery in Victoria despite the government claiming to support the healthcare needs of trans people in the public health system. As it stands, trans people can only have this important surgery through expensive private health care or by going overseas, often to Thailand, and for many this is impossible. Not every trans person wants gender-affirming surgery, but those who do face long waits, often over a year, and pay tens of thousands of dollars for private treatment.

There are only a handful of surgeons across Australia providing gender-affirming genital surgery, each with long waiting lists of patients both booked for surgery and booked for presurgery consultations. Waiting times are so long that private surgical care in Australia is effectively unavailable for most, and I am not aware of any public surgical care in Victoria. This has resulted in massive waiting lists extending, and that can be enormously distressing and have detrimental impacts on the mental health of trans people, sometimes very seriously so. This has resulted in many trans people seeking gender-affirming surgery overseas, which poses its own risks, particularly for those with postoperative complications, which can be challenging for local surgeons who are not experienced in this field. More must be done to make gender-affirming surgery accessible for Victoria’s trans community. Alongside the significant costs, a lack of qualified surgeons practising gender-affirming genital surgery remains one of the largest barriers to accessing this health care. Not all gender-affirming surgery is genital, and surgeons working in the public system are already skilled in breast surgery and hysterectomy, so these could already be provided in the public system. It is not enough for the government to say they care about trans health. Care means action, and that means training and employing surgeons in a public service sufficient to meet demand.