Survey shows need for training to ensure patients are listened to
When Ellen Mellor’s doctor said that her severe headaches were caused by the stress of being transgender, it did not sit right. “My life was at the calmest point it had been in a long time,” she said. A year and a half previously she had undergone surgery that reduced her gender dysphoria to “negligible” levels, and her work was going well.
Mellor, who is now being tested for coeliac disease, put down the phone feeling “very angry and quite upset”. “He didn’t take my issue seriously and just fobbed me off with, ‘it’s because you’re transgender’,” she said. She was “too bloody minded” to be put off going back to her GP altogether, but said the experience made her more wary.
