NHS covers 1,000 trans chest surgery patients every year as alarm bells raised about taxpayers funding 'cruelty for parents'

As many as 80 per cent of those accessing the service are females between the ages of 17 and 25.

Although only 1,000 have been revealed to be funded by the NHS, others have been getting the surgery privately to skip long waiting lists.

Many are taking to platforms such as GoFundMe to set up fundraisers for their gender affirming “top surgery”.

The NHS has faced calls to stop the surgeries. Experts have warned that there is no evidence suggesting that removing healthy beasts is beneficial to women with gender dysphoria - on the contrary, there is evidence of harm.

Numerous de-transitioners who had the irreversible surgery have spoken publicly about their regret and the pain it has caused them.

Zhenya Abbruzzese, the co-founder and senior adviser at the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), said the harm of removing a functioning body part are certain.

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“Doctors need an urgent memo about the actual state of the evidence. But this is a question primarily for health authorities to decide – should the treatment be available given the risk-benefit ratio and the evident risk of harm,” she said.

She argued that it is unknown why there is a sudden rise in young women identifying as trans, and it is not known what the future holds for them.

“In that situation, medical intervention that is so irreversible and with clear harms typically would not normally be offered,” she added.

The data obtained showed that the NHS’s Gender Dysphoria National Referral Support Services (GDNRSS) referred 3,490 women for “masulinising chest surgery” between 2021 and 2023.

The number of referrals has steadily risen over the past few years, with 1,089 in 2021, 1,164 in 2022 and 1,237 in 2023.

Out of the 10 NHS hospitals offering the procedure, North Manchester Hospital had the highest number of referrals.

In second place was Parkside Hospital in London followed by Castle Hill Hospital in Hull.

The GDNRSS, who deal with referrals for gender surgery for people over the age of 17, has also sent over 780 women for “masculinising genital gender reassignment surgery” over three years.

Dr Hilary Cass, who investigated concerns over specialised adult gender clinics, found in her review that the patients were “70-80 per cent birth-registered females under the age of 25”.

A recent systematic review of mastectomies for gender dysphoria, carried out by McMaster University, revealed there was “very low certainty evidence” for their outcomes.

Concerns about the high number of operations being carried out by the NHS have also been raised by parents of children who have begun identifying as trans.

A spokesman for Bayswater Support Group said: “There is a particular cruelty for parents in finding that taxpayers are funding mastectomies on thousands of women who have been misled into believing this will be the answer to their psychological distress.”

They claimed: “The devastation of seeing your daughter harmed in this way is impossible to describe.”

An NHS spokesman said masculinising chest surgery is only available for adults with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

They added: “The NHS is undertaking a wide-ranging review of adult gender services, which will inform a revised service specification to set out how we will support patients with gender dysphoria in future.”