Every UK medical student offered free trans healthcare training

Every medical student in the UK is being offered free access to Affirm's five-hour CPD-accredited trans healthcare training course during Transgender Awareness Week, 13 to 20 November. The move follows a 2026 NHS England-commissioned review finding LGBTQ+ health is absent from required medical education, with just one in eight students feeling their knowledge was good enough.

On the face of it, a free online course during one awareness week sounds like a small thing. It is not.

The review that prompted this offer was commissioned by NHS England and conducted by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Aberdeen. Its finding was stark: the General Medical Council's standards for medical education do not mention LGBTQ+ health. Not inadequately, not briefly. Not at all. What a student learns about caring for trans and non-binary patients depends entirely on whether their particular medical school happens to cover it, and right now most do not. One in eight students felt their knowledge was adequate. One in eight.

So when Affirm, the online training platform co-founded by clinical psychologist and gender specialist Laura Scarrone Bonhomme, opens its award-winning course to every UK medical student free of charge this week, it is stepping into a gap that the system itself created and has so far declined to close.

What the course actually contains

The training is adapted from the book Gender Affirming Therapy: A Guide to What Transgender and Non-Binary Clients Can Teach Us, co-authored by Scarrone Bonhomme, Dr Michael Beattie, and Skye Davies. That book won the British Psychological Society's 2025 Practitioner Text Award and the American Psychological Association Division 44 Distinguished Book Award in 2025, so this is not a hastily assembled resource. It is serious clinical education, built on serious scholarship.

The six modules move from foundations of gender and clinical pathways, through gender norms and sexuality, into the history of trans health and how politics shapes access, and then into something I think is the most valuable part of any training: hearing from trans and non-binary people directly, in their own words, about what care has actually felt like. The final module puts clinicians in the room with real scenarios, working on language and power dynamics.

That structure matters. You cannot teach somebody to care for trans patients by handing them a list of terminology and sending them in. You need them to understand the history that makes a trans person hesitate before asking for help. You need them to have heard what a dismissive consultation actually does to someone who already feared coming in. And you need them to have practised the language before the first appointment, not during it.

The gap the training is trying to fill

Scarrone Bonhomme put it plainly: "It saddens me every time I hear doctors worry about saying the wrong thing when caring for trans and non-binary patients, while those same community members dread seeking care for fear of discrimination."

That is the disconnect. Two groups of people, both frightened of the same consultation, for entirely different reasons. A doctor who has never been taught anything about trans healthcare is not a bad person; they are a person the system failed to prepare. And a trans patient who has been dismissed, misgendered, or refused care has often learned, the hard way, that the safest strategy is to avoid healthcare altogether.

This training cannot fix the system on its own. What it can do is reach this generation of doctors before that pattern sets in, before the habits form, before the worries calcify into avoidance.

NHS England's guidance cut both ways

The article notes that October brought revised NHS England guidance on hospital accommodation, stating that trans patients should be "accommodated in line with their biological sex." Trans organisations responded that the guidance failed to explain how trans patients should actually be cared for safely: a reasonable concern when the guidance places responsibility on individual clinicians while, as Scarrone Bonhomme observed, failing to give those clinicians the knowledge they need to act on it.

That tension is real. You cannot issue guidance that increases clinical responsibility and simultaneously leave the clinical education gap untouched. Affirm is doing something the system has not: equipping doctors to put good intentions into good practice.

Why this week, and why it matters beyond this week

The course is free to any medical student in the UK with a university email address between 13 and 20 November. Medical schools wanting access beyond Transgender Awareness Week can contact Affirm directly.

I hope they do. One week is a beginning. What trans patients need is a medical profession where this knowledge is baseline, not optional, not confined to the students lucky enough to study somewhere it is offered, not dependent on an awareness week to unlock it. Gender Plus, the trans healthcare provider, has already endorsed the training and promoted it to its network, with director Dr Claudia Zitz describing it as comprehensive enough that they felt it worth sharing widely.

The GMC's standards do not mention LGBTQ+ health. That is what needs to change, and it needs to change as a matter of requirement, not recommendation. Until it does, initiatives like this one are doing work the system should be doing itself, and I am grateful they exist.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Expert, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP.