Dr Helen Webberley

Webberley was educated at Queen Ethelburga's School in Harrogate from 1980 to 1987. She studied medicine at the University of Birmingham from 1987 to 1992, graduating MBChB with Honours in social medicine.

Webberley completed house officer posts in Birmingham in 1992 and 1993, followed by vocational training in Worcestershire from 1993 to 1996. She became a Member of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1996.

She practised as a general practitioner at Pershore Health Centre from 1996 to 1999 and in South Wales from 2005, including at Tudor Gate in Abergavenny from 2011 to 2013 and as senior partner at Blaina Medical Practice from 2011 to 2016. Alongside general practice she worked for a decade as a clinical medical officer in sexual health services in Worcestershire, and was admitted to Membership of the Faculty of Reproductive and Sexual Health in 2007.

Webberley has held a series of teaching posts. She was a lecturer in communication skills in the Department of Primary Care at the University of Birmingham from 2003 to 2005, course organiser for the Worcester Vocational Training Scheme, GP tutor in the Department of Elderly Care at Heartlands Hospital, and a lecturer in sexual health and communication skills until 2011. She holds postgraduate certificates in teaching and learning for healthcare professionals from Birmingham and in management for healthcare professionals from Warwick, both awarded in 2004.

Her postgraduate qualifications include diplomas in geriatric medicine, community child health, family planning and reproductive healthcare, genitourinary medicine and psychosexual medicine, and Royal College of General Practitioners certificates in gender variance (2015) and in drug and alcohol misuse (2014).

She has also worked in medical communication and publishing, as women's health advisor to Company magazine, as a medical editor at Medical News Today, and as an online doctor for several telemedicine providers. In 2015 she was GP lead for the Blaenau Gwent East Neighbourhood Care Network, and from 2015 to 2016 an invited panel member of the All Wales Task and Finish Group examining transgender services in Wales.

Webberley founded GenderGP in 2015, with her husband Mike Webberley, a gastroenterologist, also working in the service. It provided gender-affirming healthcare by telemedicine to transgender and gender-diverse people, at a time when waiting times at NHS gender identity clinics were measured in years. She served as its chief executive.

She has argued consistently that gender-affirming care belongs within general practice rather than being confined to a small number of specialist clinics, and that delay in accessing care carries its own risks. Her 2020 article in The BMJ, "The struggle for GPs to get the right care for patients with gender dysphoria", set out that position.

From 2017 the General Medical Council placed interim orders on Webberley's registration, including suspension, while it investigated complaints about her practice.

In October 2018, following a prosecution brought by Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, she was convicted at Merthyr Tydfil Magistrates' Court on two counts of carrying on or managing an independent medical agency without being registered under section 11 of the Care Standards Act 2000. In December 2018 she was fined £12,000 and ordered to pay costs.

In 2022 a Medical Practitioners Tribunal considered a series of allegations about her care of transgender patients. It found most of them not proved, and said she may have been considered to be at the vanguard of an evolving approach to transgender care. It found against her on aspects of follow-up care and, in the case of a patient aged nearly 11, on not discussing fertility risks directly with the child. Only the fertility finding led to a finding of impaired fitness to practise, and on 30 June 2022 the tribunal suspended her registration for two months.

Webberley appealed. On 31 March 2023, in Webberley v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 734 (Admin), Mr Justice Jay in the Administrative Court allowed the appeal, holding that the tribunal's determination on misconduct was wrong. He found that the tribunal's "thinking was confused, clearly wrong in places, and it omitted reference to important evidence", and declined to remit the case for redetermination. Webberley returned to practice.

In July 2024 her licence to practise was withdrawn after she did not complete revalidation, the five-yearly check required of licensed doctors, and in October 2024 she left the medical register for administrative reasons. Webberley has said she was offered either the GP exam or the exam for newly qualified doctors as a route to revalidation, judged both unsuitable for a doctor no longer working as a GP, and chose instead to leave the decision to the GMC's Registrar. She has not been erased from the register by a tribunal, and the tribunal's finding of misconduct against her was overturned on appeal.

Webberley's publications include "The struggle for GPs to get the right care for patients with gender dysphoria" (The BMJ, 2020) and, as a co-author, "A retrospective study of positive and negative determinants of gamete storage in transgender and gender-diverse patients" (International Journal of Transgender Health, 2021). Her earlier work covered contraception and sexual health, including papers in Women's Health Medicine and the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, and a 1991 letter in The Lancet on assisted reproduction and neonatal intensive care.

She has presented at the WPATH World Congress in Amsterdam in 2016 and Buenos Aires in 2018, and at meetings of the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Mermaids, and the University of Leeds. In 2016 she presented and chaired the options models for the NHS Wales All Wales Gender Variance Clinical Pathway at its public consultation in Cardiff.

Webberley has hosted a podcast since 2018, when it began as the GenderGP Podcast. Her guests include clinicians, researchers, writers and trans people talking about their own lives. She writes for a general audience, has appeared in The Guardian, the Huffington Post and The Independent and on the BBC and Reuters, and regularly debates trans healthcare on television and radio.

Webberley writes and broadcasts on gender diversity, medical education and the practice of trans healthcare. She is the author of this site, where she publishes news, insights and real-life accounts, and the voice behind Sammy, an AI companion built from more than a decade of her conversations with trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people and those who love them. She is currently writing books, which are with publishers.

• Webberley v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 734 (Admin), Administrative Court, 31 March 2023.
• Webberley H. "The struggle for GPs to get the right care for patients with gender dysphoria." BMJ 2020;368:m215.
• Rogers C, Webberley M, Mateescu R, El Rakhawy Y, Daly-Gourdialsing A, Webberley H. "A retrospective study of positive and negative determinants of gamete storage in transgender and gender-diverse patients." International Journal of Transgender Health 2021;22(1–2):167–178.
• Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, "Healthcare Inspectorate Wales prosecutes online GP", 2018.

I wrote this page and I keep it current. Last updated August 2026.