Transgender EuroStudy: Legal Survey and Focus on the Transgender Experience of Health Care (April 2008)

This research project, commissioned by ILGA-Europe, follows a similar large-scale study conducted in the UK in 2006. During July 2007 and December 2007 the researchers undertook a mixed quantitative/qualitative approach to collecting and analysing information on transgender and transsexual people’s experiences of inequality and discrimination in accessing health care in Europe. This was a large undertaking given the time scale; even more so as we had to recruit translators from 13 different countries as well as conduct focus groups and get translations done. This report is an analysis and summary of the results obtained and it details the barriers that trans people face when accessing health care. The work undertaken is certainly the largest and most comprehensive data collection on trans people’s lived experience to date. One can never claim that research data is entirely representative of a community; even less so when the community being studied consists of many small sub-communities, as is the case with trans people. However, as is detailed in the data analysis section of this report, the statistics we have on the profile of respondents do generally match data of the population of Europe (e.g. the percentage of those with a disability). Other statistics that do not match the European population (e.g. educational attainment) are consistent with the large-scale study of trans people in the UK – hence it could be argued that these features may be anomalous to trans people. We are confident then that the size and quality of our sample of the population is sufficient to draw upon for our claims and that the experiences of trans people accessing health care detailed in this report are credible.