Dear Doctor, it's just shared care...

Why that letter from a gender specialist deserves a yes

You’ve been asked to do shared care for a trans patient. Here’s what I wish I could tell you.

I know how busy you are. I know that your morning surgery is already overbooked, that your inbox is full of blood results and discharge letters, and that the last thing you need is another unfamiliar request landing on your desk. I’ve been there. I spent years as a GP myself, and I remember that feeling of a letter arriving from a specialist asking me to do something I wasn’t entirely sure about.

So when a letter arrives asking you to prescribe hormones for a trans patient as part of a shared care arrangement, I completely understand why your first instinct might be to hesitate. You might feel that this is outside your area of expertise. You might worry about the risks. You might have heard things in the media that have made you nervous about getting involved in this area of medicine at all.

I want you to know that those feelings are valid, and I’m not writing this letter to make you feel bad about any of them. I’m writing because I think if you understood a few things differently, you’d feel a lot more confident about saying yes.

What you might have been told…