Oliver Ryan

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire and Bedworth (Rachel Taylor) for securing this important debate. She is the champion we all deserve, and she almost brought me to tears with her passion in opening the debate. I commend her work and her advocacy. She is a modern-day LGBT icon, and I feel privileged to serve with her. In a world that feels increasingly divided, debates like this matter because they force us to confront and test a simple but critical principle: the great, objective universality of our healthcare system—who gets access to healthcare, and who is treated? My gut, my politics and my experience as an LGBT person say everyone. I am sure that all Members present would agree that healthcare is not a privilege to be earned; it is a right grounded in dignity, compassion and evidence-based care. It is an inalienable right of every citizen of this country. To get to the nub of this debate, that means transgender people too, such as constituents who have come to see me in my surgeries. They are not asking for special treatment; they are asking for the same thing as any of us would expect: timely, safe and respectful healthcare, and dignity. I am sorry to say, however, that healthcare falls short for them. Thousands of transgender people are waiting years for first NHS appointments. Those are not just statistics, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire and Bedworth said, but people spending years of life in uncertainty and distress—years when people put their lives and careers on hold, delaying their education and questioning whether they will even survive long enough to be seen. Where care is delayed, it is denied, and 48,000 trans people are currently on waiting lists. Many are pushed towards unregulated overseas routes, not because they want to bypass safeguards but because the alternative feels unbearable. Families make decisions out of love and desperation, often fearing self-harm or suicide if they are left without support. That is not a failure of those families; it is a failure of an outdated system, which apparently is unfortunately questioning its duty to these individuals.