The High Cost of Gender Reassignment

From the Daily Mail:

A transsexual has won the right to have £8,000 breast implants – following a battle funded by £10,000 of legal aid.

Miranda Lee, 40, had gender realignment surgery costing £60,000 in 2009, paid for with NHS money.

The process was due to be completed with the breast augmentation, but she was then told the money would not be made available.

Miss Lee, who complained that she had been left ‘half man, half woman’, attempted suicide and has been on anti-depressants.

She decided to fight the decision and was granted legal aid in June.

Her case was heard by an NHS review panel last month, and it has now ruled in her favour.

The charity shop worker, from Southend, Essex, said she was delighted at the U-turn but wanted compensation for the stress of her ‘inhumane and insensitive’ treatment.

‘The way my case was handled was appalling,’ she said. ‘These people haven’t a care in the world about people. It’s all about money to them.’

Miss Lee, born Raymond Harwood, first felt she was the wrong sex when she was 16 but went on to marry three times and have two children.

Her last marriage ended in 2000 and in 2005 she went to her GP about gender realignment.

She began living as a woman in 2007 and had a series of operations at Charing Cross Hospital in London from July 2009, including having her male genitalia removed and her voice altered.

She was already receiving hormone therapy in the form of oestrogen to help her develop breasts but this was not working, meaning she needed implants.

The East of England Specialised Commissioning Group, which had paid for the sex change out of a £700million annual fund raised from contributions from the 13 primary care trusts in the region, refused to approve the procedure.

Although it pays for a range of care, it said breast augmentation as part of a sex change was not part of its remit...