Last week I made the decision to resign from the NHS LGBT Soundingboard. At this point some of you are probably going, ‘Huh, what’s that then?’, so some background is probably in order first.
The Soundingboard started about three years ago as an initiative between NHS England and LGBT Foundation, with the idea of providing LGBTQ+ people with lived experience and knowledge of health inequalities in the NHS an avenue to work with NHS England, in order to try and change how we are treated as a community. It’s also known as a PPV (Patient and Public Voice) partnership.
It was run by the wonderful folks at LGBT Foundation, who if I recall correctly, were also responsible for the NHS Rainbow Badge scheme and the Pride in Practice initiative, and we had a brilliant array of panel members from across the entire LGBTQ+ community.
Every couple of months we would meet to discuss issues we were facing, and would often have someone from an NHS service telling us about what they do, or an initiative they were working on, and we would work with them on how they could improve that for LGBTQ+ people. I was worried it would be a bit of a ‘talking shop’ and entirely performative, but it wasn’t.
It felt real, and for the most part I felt like we were contributing to something worthwhile.
The session with the gender services commissioners was particularly memorable, for all the wrong reasons. While I can’t talk about the detail, let’s just say that they got a massively hard time, made it worse for themselves across multiple fronts (which is what happens when you’re faced with service users who know what they’re talking about), promised to come back….and never did.
Which pretty much sums up the NHS approach to trans healthcare.
I digress. For the most part, it felt worthwhile. It reminded me that there are a lot of really good people in the NHS, and outside the NHS, who are trying to improve things for our community, and also willing to hear some really hard truths. And let me tell you that the members of the Soundingboard, especially on the trans side, did not hold back on those hard truths, me included. More than once I was worried I’d be kicked off the project because I’d gone too far, only to be met with encouragement and support.
Things started to change early in 2024, when the then Tory run NHS England decided to pull all funding for the project. LGBT Foundation had no choice but to stop running things, because like every UK LGBT organisation who are actually doing the work for our community, they were stretched thin and couldn’t afford to take on the financial burden of running the Soundingboard on behalf of the NHS.
Rather than stop the Soundingboard entirely, Dr Michael Brady, the National LGBTQ+ Advisor and head of the NHS LGBT Team, decided to carry it on ‘in house’, running it from their team.
Now I really want to stress that I have absolutely no concerns about Dr Brady or the NHS LGBT Team. They’re all committed to trying to make things better for all of us, they’re great allies and very receptive. They’re also doing this stuff while being ignored by NHSE Leadership and the Dept of Health and Social Care (DHSE), and doing it with no budget and no additional staffing. In many ways I feel really sorry for them, because they’re really trying their best, and are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s the most thankless work, often putting them in the firing line from the community, politicians and NHS leadership all at the same time. But they really are great people, and I have genuinely enjoyed working with them all.
But meetings became sporadic, we were bringing up the same stuff time and time again, and nothing actually changed. Things started to go backwards. I heard rumours (which I was unable to verify) that the NHS LGBT Team & Soundingboard were being deliberately excluded from input into LGBT, and specifically trans, projects like Cass & Levy. Input that had been promised. Other stuff I’d worked on, like the GIC Performance Report I’d put together in 2024, had been promised to be discussed with the relevant people in the NHS, and again never happened.
I missed the meeting in December 2024 as I was ill, and due to many reasons out of their control the latest meeting was only held on 31st March 2025. Between that, and completely out of the blue, we got told that we had to ‘onboard’ again to continue to be part of the Soundingboard now it was being run by the NHS.
Lets just say that the amount of paperwork we were asked to complete for the ‘onboarding’ process was thoroughly ridiculous, stupidly convoluted and absolutely labyrinthine. I’ve done job applications with a third of the paperwork needed in comparison to what we were being asked to fill out, and successfully debugged code that was more indecipherable. Worse still was how it was handled – specific questions remained unanswered, and instead were replied to with patronising reminders to complete the paperwork by a set date. At this point I was already in two minds about continuing, when I got a message from one of the other panel members, another trans woman, asking if I was going to continue as she was quitting.
We chatted for a bit, and found we were having the same issues. After mulling it over for a few days I decided that between the ‘onboarding’ process and the lack of action, I was done. In a weird coincidence, and to the best of my knowledge, all the trans women on the panel have now quit, leaving a huge gap in that experience base.
So I sent Dr Brady my resignation on the 26th March, as follows.
‘Dear Dr Brady
I am writing to inform you that I will no longer be taking part in the NHS LGBTQ+ Soundingboard, but rather than just disappearing I would like you to understand the reasons why I have come to this decision, which are complex and multiple.
Firstly, and most prominently, it is because the NHS is a deeply transphobic and abusive organisation, one that has been deeply politicised in recent years, a factor which is now only going to worsen with the recently announced changes to NHS England, bringing services more directly under the control of a deeply transphobic and abusive UK Government.
This transphobia is deeply embedded and endemic throughout the NHS, from the lowest clerk to the highest leader, and no one with the power to do so has the slightest interest in addressing the issues faced by my community.
Instead they do everything they can to make trans lives immeasurably worse – from the fraudulent, scientifically illiterate and internationally discredited Cass Review and Puberty Blocker Ban, to implementing conversion abuse centres on the NHS for trans kids, the ongoing, beyond crisis level issues with accessing and maintaining gender related healthcare at every level from GPs to surgery, to the latest drive to categorise everyone by a meaningless measure of ‘birth sex’, putting trans lives and health at serious risk under the false, dangerous, unscientific ideological assumption our biology never changes.
All of these issues are longstanding, well known, well understood, and have been discussed within the Soundingboard over the years with zero material effect. Promises of input into further fraudulent NHS ‘reviews’ have come to absolutely nothing, and activity has become both sporadic and essentially meaningless since NHS England took over the Soundingboard function from LGBT Foundation.
While I have absolutely no doubt of your and your team’s commitment and support for the trans, and wider LGBTQ+ community, support is nothing without action. It is clear however that the only actions the NHS intend to take are those that continue to actively harm trans people of all ages, and until that wider situation changes, the NHS will find it increasingly difficult to engage with the trans community in any meaningful manner as it has now fully destroyed any remaining vestige of trust that existed after decades of abuse.
As it now stands, I can no longer devote the precious time I have to such an organisation or programme which functions as little more than an ineffective, performative talking shop to provide a shield for the abusive transphobia of NHS practices and the political lackeys in NHS senior leadership.
The recent ‘onboarding’ process was the last straw for me, and many others. Badly designed, poorly explained, extremely difficult to navigate, questions ignored, coupled with constant terse ‘reminders’ to complete paperwork – all I suspect done intentionally to discourage participation – further outline just how unseriously the NHS takes this PPV programme.
You will probably be unsurprised to discover that I am far from the only member of the Soundingboard that feels this way, and who has resigned for similar reasons.
I do wish you all your team all the best for the future, however uncertain, and I would like to thank you for being one of the few voices who have actually tried to change things.
Kind Regards
Claire’
By the time the next meeting came around I hadn’t had a response from Dr Brady, but out of interest, and to say goodbye to some of the other longstanding panel members, I decided to jump on the last meeting. I was half expecting not to be allowed in, but I was.
I stayed pretty quiet throughout, offering some comments in the chat but largely letting the new and remaining members talk things through. I don’t know what I was expecting really, but what I found was everyone basically rehashing the same issues we have been talking about for the last 3 years. Again.
It was utterly demoralising, but confirmed that my decision to quit was the right one for me. Near the end of the meeting I had the chance to speak. I told the whole Soundingboard I was quitting, and exactly why, and pointed out that they no longer had any trans women on the panel.
There were quite a few shocked faces, a fair bit of applause for speaking out bluntly (which was thoroughly unexpected) and a lot of kind comments, including from Dr Brady and the LGBT team, and an impromptu discussion about whether the work the Soundingboard did was valued.
And that’s the sad thing. At one point I think that work was valued, but no longer, at least outside of the NHS LGBT Team. It’s certainly not valued by NHS leadership and those who make the decisions. And I feel really sorry for Dr Brady and the LGBT Team, who really are allies in the best possible sense, trying to make the most of a bad situation while being stuck between a rock and a hard place, and facing an uncertain future themselves thanks to Streeting getting rid of NHS England so he can directly impose his anti-trans ideological beliefs on the NHS.
At the end of the meeting, one panel member asked me directly what it would take for me to stay and continue participating.
‘Actions, not words.’ I replied.
I was going to leave this article there, but received a response from Dr Brady to my resignation. I’m not going to share it as that would be a breach of trust and confidence, and I wouldn’t do that to such a fantastic ally.
What I will say is that there were no areas of disagreement on my reasons for resigning.
Not one.
