Trans people’s surgeries cost NHS £250,000,000,000,000,000

Well, no, not really, that’s just me ever-so-gently poking fun at the headline of this article in the Coventry Telegraph. The gist of the content seems to be this:

1. NHS Coventry commissioned 17 operations in the last five years (fewer than 4 operations each year) at an average cost of £10,735 each
2. NHS Warwickshire commissioned 6 operations in the last four years (8 operations each year) at a cost of £10,750 each

From the original headline – Sex-change operations cost NHS £250,000 over five years – you could be forgiven for thinking that we’d used up the entire budget for both PCTs for five years running with our wildly extravagant (yet life-saving) surgeries, but as the anonymous NHS Coventry spokeswoman points out, the number of operations was low and followed established medical guidelines.

On the other hand, now that the newspaper knows how to make Freedom of Information requests, perhaps we can look forward to more concrete facts and figures about what our medical treatment really costs the nation’s taxpayers. Maybe then we can start to lay to rest, once and for all, some of the inaccurate scare stories about medical transitioning.