Cooking: Pretty decent
Whistle: Learned in my 20s
Draw: Badly
Paint: Even worse
Swim: Casually
English: If nationality, I prefer British; if language skills, excellent
Dance: Rarely
Sing: A lot
Drive: Nope
Gifting: Thoughtful
Write: Not as much as I'd like
Guitar: Never
Speaking: Depends!
![The NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (NWJCC), which represents all seven health boards in Wales and is responsible for commissioning NHS adult gender services in Wales, met on Monday to discuss WGS’s high referral rates. The decision to suspend operations and pause referrals was made on Friday.
David Fluck, executive medical director at Cardiff and Vale University health board, which is responsible for WGS, said that NWJCC had asked the board to “pause referrals for gender affirming surgery and scheduled surgeries through the Welsh Gender Service while an independent clinical review is undertaken”.
He added: “The pause applies specifically to referrals for gender affirming surgery, surgical assessments and surgery. Other elements of care provided by the Welsh Gender Service, including hormone therapy support, endocrine review and psychological support services, continue to operate and are not affected by this decision.”
NHS Wales said that the action followed “concerns [that] have arisen from referral data from 2025-26 indicating significantly higher rates of referral for gender affirming surgery from the Welsh Gender Service compared with English gender services”.
About 17 per cent of the 4,900 referrals for genderrelated surgery across the UK in 2024 and 2025 came from the Welsh Gender Service despite Wales representing less than 5 per cent of the UK population.
After the decision was made to pause surgery in Wales some patients received the news hours before they were due to undergo operations.
“My partner’s top surgery [to remove breasts] was cancelled with less than 12 hours warning. We’re devastated. We had accommodation booked and medical leave arranged and everything,” one message read on the TransgenderUK page of Reddit on Thursday.
Another user of the social media forum wrote: “Girlfriend just had a call to cancel her surgery. It was tomorrow. Everyone is cancelled no matter how far along you got.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cyefpiziml7b24sxpd74axq7/bafkreihyhndcsu5tnzuagd2fnfb3rvhc2ycnk3wctxxmac3bntv5cjpaiu)
