Doctors, Social Media, and Trans Patients: What the GMC's New Guidance Must Address
Do you feel safe from this behaviour with the new guidance?
Think about a trans woman I know. She had finally found a GP she thought might be safe. She had an appointment booked. She Googled them first, the way most of us do, just to get a sense of who they are before walking through the door. She found a post on X. Her doctor had amplified a brand built on excluding trans women from sport, and added their own comment: “Only women are women.”
She cancelled the appointment.
She did not complain to anyone. She did not contact the GMC. She just quietly withdrew from care, the way so many trans people do, because the calculation of risk felt too exhausting to make again. That is the story I want to start with, because everything else in this article grows from that moment, that woman, that cancelled appointment, and the question of whether our professional frameworks have any answer to it.
What Dr Hoenderkamp Posted
This week, Dr Renée Hoenderkamp, a registered doctor with a significant public platform, shared a post from XX Athletics, a brand that explicitly positions itself around excluding trans women from women’s sport. She added the words:
“Only women are women.”
The post was public. The account is verified. The reach was considerable.
This is not a private belief held quietly. This is a doctor using their professional platform to signal, clearly and deliberately, that trans women are not women. The question I want to ask is not whether she has the right to hold that view. The question is what, if anything, the professional framework says about what happens when a patient sees it.
What the GMC Guidance Actually Says
The GMC’s guidance on Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice is genuinely strong in many of the places that matter. Doctors must not impose their beliefs and values on patients, or cause distress by the inappropriate or insensitive expression of them. Doctors may choose to opt out of providing a particular procedure because of their personal beliefs and values, as long as this does not result in direct or indirect discrimination against, or harassment of, individual patients or groups of patients.
Inside a consultation, there is real weight in that. A doctor who tells a trans patient they do not accept their identity, who withholds care on the basis of that belief, who expresses disapproval in the room, is in direct breach of this guidance. That matters.
The Gap That the Guidance Has Not Closed
The question is, does the GMC’s Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice guidance relate only to professional practice, or does it cover people’s expression of their beliefs or values outside the workplace?
Can a doctor can post “Only women are women” on a public platform with hundreds of thousands of followers? Can they can amplify organisations built explicitly on the exclusion of trans people? Can they build a public identity rooted in the belief that trans women are not women? Is that, under the current guidance, directly within the GMC’s reach?
The woman who cancelled her appointment has no formal recourse based on what she saw online. The barrier to care she experienced was real. The harm was real. The guidance, as written, does not reach it.
Why This Is a Clinical Question, Not Just a Political One
I want to be precise here, because I think this matters. We are not talking about protecting people’s feelings, though feelings matter too. We are talking about clinical outcomes.
Trans people already face significant barriers to healthcare: higher rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm, delayed presentations, avoidance of screening. A large part of that avoidance comes from fear of exactly what that woman experienced, a doctor whose beliefs will colour the consultation before a word has been spoken. When a doctor signals publicly that they do not accept trans people as who they are, that signal reaches patients. It reaches the teenager scrolling through X at midnight wondering if they are safe to ask their GP about hormones. It reaches the trans man who has been putting off a smear test for years because he cannot face the conversation. It reaches every trans person who is already doing that exhausting calculation.
Delayed and avoided care leads to worse outcomes. That is not opinion. The evidence is there. Public statements by doctors that cause trans patients to avoid care are therefore a clinical concern, and we need our professional frameworks to recognise them as such.
The Consultation That Is Open Right Now
The GMC has just launched a consultation on updated guidance, and this is the first significant update since 2013, intended to reflect legal, social and cultural changes in the years since. The consultation is open until Thursday 11 June 2026.
We’ve got to use it.
Trans people, their families, clinicians who work in this space, anyone who has ever sat with a patient who cancelled because they were afraid: there is a window, open right now, to say directly to the GMC that the gap between clinical and public behaviour matters. That what a doctor says on social media shapes whether a patient feels safe walking through their door. That professional standards need to meet the reality of a world where a doctor’s public platform is not separate from their clinical identity.
What Good Guidance Would Say
It would not silence doctors. It would not prevent them from holding beliefs or expressing them in personal contexts. What it would do is acknowledge that a doctor with a public platform, speaking in a capacity that references their professional identity, is not entirely off duty. Their words shape public trust in medicine. Their words reach patients.
Good guidance would say that a doctor whose public statements about a protected characteristic are likely to cause a reasonable patient from that group to fear or avoid care has fallen below the standard of professional conduct we expect. The Human Rights Act provides an absolute right as far as holding a belief is concerned, but the right to act on beliefs cannot be used to support an action that infringes the rights and freedoms of others. A public statement that drives trans patients away from healthcare is, in the most literal sense, an infringement of their right to access care.
A Note on What This Is Really About
I am not writing this to pursue one doctor. I am writing this because this is not one doctor. There are doctors with platforms built on questioning trans identity, doctors who appear on television as medical voices while holding views that trans patients would find alarming, and reasonably so. The professional framework has not kept pace with the world in which doctors now operate.
The question is not whether any individual should face consequences. The question is whether a trans patient who has seen that post can trust that the system will protect them. Right now, the honest answer is: not fully. That needs to change, and the consultation that is open right now is the place to start saying so.
The future for trans patients getting fair, safe, compassionate care from every doctor they see is coming. The guidance just needs to catch up with what good medicine already knows.
If this matters to you, please share it. The more voices that reach the GMC before 11 June, the better.
Dr Helen Webberley, Gender Specialist and Medical Educator
Resources and Further Reading
GMC Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice guidance: gmc-uk.org
GMC Personal Beliefs consultation (open until 11 June 2026): gmc-uk.org/news
Dr Hoenderkamp’s post on X: x.com/drhoenderkamp