The clinic profits from vulnerable children who are mentally ill
Ben Leo said:
“Are you profiteering, doctor Helen, off the back of vulnerable children who have got mental illnesses?”
A fee read aloud off a website sounds like a lot of money to charge for a child, and profiting from vulnerable children is a shape viewers recognise from real scandals.
Charging a fee for a medical service is the ordinary shape of private healthcare, not evidence of exploitation: the comparison being made is with an NHS that is free at the point of use but where the wait for a first appointment has run into years, leaving families with no realistic alternative. Trans children are not, as a category, vulnerable because they are trans; what creates vulnerability is how young people are treated, including in television studios. Being trans is not a mental illness. The World Health Organisation settled that in 2019, moving gender incongruence out of the mental disorders chapter entirely. When that framing is repeated on television as though it were fact, the people who pay the price are the families who now feel they have to defend their child's humanity before they can ask for help.
Trans young people and their families, who are told that seeking care makes them the mark in a fraud, and who then have to justify paying for something they cannot get any other way.