At 8am on Wednesday, The Dyke Project — the lesbian collective that has become a vital and imaginative activist voice in British queer politics — staged a die-in at NHS England headquarters, bringing the building to a standstill. They were joined by members of ACT UP London and Trans Kids Deserve Better, with placard gravestones reading “Let Trans Kids Live” and “Failed by Wes Streeting,” and a large banner that said: “SILENCE = DEATH. HRT SAVES LIVES.”
Protestors chanted: “NHS, blood on your hands!” and “Come on Streeting, no more lies, don’t play games with trans lives.”
The action was sparked by NHS England’s decision this month to pause prescriptions of gender-affirming hormones for 16 and 17-year-olds — part of an accelerating rollback of trans healthcare that is costing lives. It follows the ban on puberty blockers outside the NHS, the ongoing closure of the Tavistock gender clinic, decade-long waiting lists for gender services, and the news that NHS England is now reviewing adult trans healthcare, raising fears of further cuts.
The Dyke Project Makes Noise
This is not The Dyke Project’s first time making noise. The collective was founded in 2023 in direct response to the Lesbian Project, Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock’s trans-exclusionary initiative. When the Lesbian Project held its first event, The Dyke Project showed up with hundreds of people and held a party outside. Last year, when the same group held a panel at UCL on the Supreme Court’s gender definition ruling, The Dyke Project sent in the clowns — literally. Activists in full clown costumes cavorted through the room, chanting, “You’re not feminists, you’re all clowns”, as the speakers looked on in horror. As Lindsay Lorde told Dazed at the time: “Trans people are an integral part of our community and always have been.”
The NHS England action carries the same logic but a harder edge.
Leslie Lorde, spokesperson for The Dyke Project, told QX, “This decision by NHS England is the final nail in the coffin of trans healthcare for young people. Hundreds of trans young people will be forced to pay for private care or detransition against their will. HRT is life-saving care and is already prescribed to non-trans young people when needed. This decision is based on Wes Streeting’s scapegoating of trans people for his own political ambition.” She added: “We know these changes will hit working-class young people and young people of colour hardest. The NHS should be free at the point of need for everyone — yet right now trans kids are being left to die.”
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The backdrop to this action is devastating. A Freedom of Information request to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database — published by the Good Law Project in February 2026 — revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide in England between 2019 and 2025. The spike is stark: five in 2019–20; four in 2020–21; then 22 in a single year, 2021–22 — directly following the Bell v Tavistock ruling in December 2020, after which NHS England effectively shut down gender-affirming care for under-18s. The government’s own Appleby Report had acknowledged only 12 deaths, by examining only Tavistock patients, excluding the many young people who died waiting to even get through the door.
Suicide Prevention UK has said clearly: “Being trans is not a mental illness. Gender-affirming care saves lives.“
The Trevor Project’s 2024 UK survey found that 72% of trans and non-binary young people who experienced gender-based discrimination had considered suicide in the past year. And the rate of suicide attempts among trans youth is more than double that of their cisgender peers.
Meanwhile, a 2022 Lancet study found that 98% of trans youth who accessed gender-affirming care continued their treatment into adulthood — undermining the “regret” narrative that underpins so much of the opposition. For comparison: the regret rate for gender-affirming surgery is between 0.3% and 1%. Knee replacement surgery has a regret rate of 17–30%. No one is proposing to ban knee replacements.
And as a parliamentary debate in December 2025 put on record, the average wait for gender services in England is now 12 years. At one Scottish clinic, the waiting list is three times longer than the average British life expectancy.
ACT UP: History Repeating
ACT UP London’s presence at the action is deliberate and loaded. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power — the group whose die-ins in the 1980s and 90s forced governments to treat HIV as a public health emergency rather than a moral judgement — sees this moment as continuous with their own history.
ACT UP’s spokesperson told QX, “Trans people living in the UK today are on the receiving end of the same kind of deadly violence, misinformation, scapegoating, stigma and discrimination that gay people were subjected to during the AIDS crisis,” They added “Trans people — disproportionately vulnerable to HIV — are abandoned without essential healthcare, or driven to kill themselves.”
“ACT UP exists because direct action saves lives when governments won’t,” their spokesperson continued. “We fought for healthcare when the state called us disposable. Trans people are being treated as disposable now by the same biased logic, dressed up in the same fake concern for safety. We stand with every trans person who has been told to wait, to detransition, to disappear. We are not going anywhere. And neither are they.”
Trans Kids Deserve Better
The third group in the coalition, Trans Kids Deserve Better — a British action network made up primarily of trans youth — offered perhaps the most personal testimony of the day.
“I’m doing this action because I have had to witness NHS England’s backwards policies on trans healthcare almost kill far, far too many of my trans siblings,” their spokesperson told QX. “Trans kids should not have to pick up the slack of your carelessness. I will not stand by and watch trans children lose all hope because of a government that doesn’t care if they live or die.”
The Review Behind the Restrictions
The policy that prompted Wednesday’s action traces back to a review commissioned by Wes Streeting last year into gender-affirming hormones for under-18s. Its findings led to the prescription pause, now in effect for 16- and 17-year-olds. Critics of the policy include the British Medical Association, WPATH, and the Endocrine Society
Critics have also consistently argued that the Cass Review, on which much of this policy direction is based, was authored by a paediatrician with negligible clinical experience, research history or publications in trans healthcare, and that its methodology has been widely criticised by gender specialists internationally.
Dr Helen Webberley, a gender specialist, filed a formal referral to the General Medical Council in February 2026, raising concerns. The Endocrine Society — whose clinical guidelines cite over 260 research studies — stated explicitly that the Cass Review contains “no new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care.”
None of this made it into the government’s messaging.
The Bigger Picture
The activists who made noise outside NHS England last Wednesday are part of a longer lineage. The Dyke Project’s politics are rooted in the understanding that feminist and queer liberation are indivisible — that the forces attacking trans healthcare are the same forces cutting domestic violence services, opposing reproductive rights, and dismantling the NHS. Leslie Lorde put it plainly: “The attack on access to care for young trans people is part of a broader assault on public healthcare by the government, pushing austerity and privatisation at the expense of our collective wellbeing.”
It is also worth noting what Britain’s history says about gender diversity — not as a liberal import, but as something this country actively destroyed. British colonial law criminalised hijras across South Asia, labelling them a “criminal tribe” and jailing them for appearing in public. It suppressed Two-Spirit identities in colonised North America. The rigid gender binary now being used to refuse trans children healthcare is not ancient wisdom. It is a colonial export, returned home.
The slogan on the banner in Waterloo on Wednesday is fifty years old and still true. SILENCE = DEATH.
And so does delay.
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Act Up London is fundraising for trans charities via their T-shirt sales:
All images supplied.
