Juno Dawson

Juno Dawson

I am often quite embarrassed to be British. I want to remain positive, so I won’t go into why, but I sometimes will think of things I like about being British.

1. The NHS.

2. Yorkshire puddings.

3. Our sense of the absurd; I truly believe no other nation in the world could have come up with The Rocky Horror Show, Absolutely Fabulous or Fleabag.

4. We make the best pop music. This is indisputable.

5. Sarcasm.

6. Our cavalier attitude to alcohol consumption (and how it horrifies Americans).

7. We have all the different weathers.

8. We swear LOADS and have the most colourful curse words. Again, it thoroughly appals the Yanks.

9. The Spice Girls.

10. The vast majority of people employ a robust, inclusive and tolerant ‘live and let live’ approach in their communities. They have open hearts and minds and treat people with politeness, at worst, and go so far as kindness on a good day.

But I’d like to return to the first one. The NHS is the best thing about the United Kingdom. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong, sorry. People all over the world point to our National Health Service as best practice. Politicians (Trump) who don’t want to provide free healthcare for nefarious economic purposes are terrified of their citizens coming here and seeing what we have and demanding it back home.

The NHS isn’t perfect by any stretch, but that’s on a practical level because – spoiler alert – some politicians would rather strip it back since running something free is phenomenally expensive. The very richest people in the country often complain that they’d like to keep their money or buy golden helicopters instead of paying for the NHS via their taxes. Those people are the pits.

Anyway, rant over. The NHS is brilliant. It has done brilliant things for everyone I know. During the coronavirus pandemic, my father became very sick. We don’t know what caused it, but he fell into a diabetic coma. Although the NHS was already stretched to breaking point, paramedics came to his house and saved his life. No, really. After he was admitted to his local hospital, and feeling a bit better, the consultant told him he had been mere hours away from kidney failure or death. Even during the worst crisis in the service’s history, those doctors, nurses and paramedics saved my father. I get my dad for longer because of those people, and they did not charge him once he was discharged.

Like most of us, I started my life in an NHS hospital – Bradford Royal Infirmary. Since then, they have patched up my head when I fell against a radiator as a kid; they took out my janky wisdom teeth; fixed a broken nose; gave me medication to aid my panic attacks and, yes, supported me in becoming a woman.

For me, becoming a woman required more medical intervention than it does for most. I’m sure there are some people who think my medical gender transition was a zany use of NHS resources, but I take it to be evidence that we have a system that cares about people. Whole people.

Each of us will need the NHS for different reasons. We all play hard and fast with all sorts of things that are bad for us: sunshine, booze, cake, bacon, fags, casual sex, Instagram. I think we should never question why people need the NHS because we all will. I needed the NHS for my gender.

I was deeply unhappy pre-transition. I could not find peace. It manifested in a smorgasbord of mental health issues and risky, ill-advised behaviours. In July 2014, I went to my NHS GP ready to be laughed out of his office. I wasn’t. Instead, he listened, for half an hour and in great detail, to my story of how I’d come to this conclusion over the course of thirty years.

My GP referred me to a specialist clinic in Northampton where a further two doctors agreed I had something called gender dysphoria and told me they could offer me medical assistance if I wanted it. I did, and the rest is history. I take two pills a day, a nurse gives me an injection every three months and I pop back to Northampton once a year so they can check how I’m getting on. Needless to say, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Transition was the medicine I needed.

So when I say, ‘I wouldn’t be who I am without the NHS,’ I really, really mean it, on a literal level. They enabled me to live. They saved my life.

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