Avoiding Care: LGBTQ+ People and the Healthcare Discrimination Gap

For LGBTQ+ people, the barrier to healthcare is sometimes the healthcare itself. A significant share avoid or delay treatment because they fear discrimination — and for trans people, disabled LGBTQ+ people and LGBTQ+ people of colour, that share is far higher.

Think about what it takes to avoid a doctor when you are unwell. It means weighing the pain or worry you already carry against the risk of another kind of hurt: the wrong pronoun in a waiting room read aloud to a full clinic, the raised eyebrow, the question that has nothing to do with why you came, the sense of being a curiosity rather than a patient. People do this arithmetic because they have learned to. Avoiding care is not stubbornness or shame; it is a reasonable defence built out of real experiences, and the price of that defence is health left to worsen in silence.

Avoiding care

One in seven LGBT people (14%) have avoided treatment for fear of discrimination. For trans people that rises to 37% — more than one in three.

Notice how the bars climb. The barrier is not evenly shared: it presses hardest on those already navigating other forms of exclusion. BAME LGBT people and disabled LGBT people avoid care at higher rates than LGBT people overall, and for trans people the figure reaches more than one in three. This is what campaigners mean by intersecting barriers — being trans and disabled, or LGBT and a person of colour, is not two problems side by side but a compounded one, where each closed door makes the next harder to knock on. The people who most need the system to be safe are the ones for whom it is least so.

That figure explains a lot of the fear. When most trans patients report that staff did not understand their needs, seeking care can mean becoming your own doctor's teacher — explaining your body, correcting assumptions, doing emotional labour just to reach the same starting line others begin from. It is exhausting, and it is a powerful reason to put off the appointment, ration what you disclose, or not go at all. None of that reflects a shortcoming in the patient. It reflects a workforce that was too rarely trained to care for them well.

What this means day to day

The consequences accumulate quietly. A symptom monitored at home instead of examined. A prescription not requested, a screening skipped, a lump left another few months, a mental-health crisis weathered alone because the last clinical encounter left a scar. People plan their care defensively — travelling further to a practice known to be welcoming, choosing which parts of themselves to hide, bracing before every appointment. For a community already carrying a heavier mental-health load, being unable to trust the very services meant to help is not a minor inconvenience. It is a slow tax on health, paid daily, that most other patients never have to think about.

Why it matters

Avoiding care is not a preference — it is a rational response to negative experiences, and it stores up worse health. Almost a quarter of LGBT people have witnessed discriminatory remarks from healthcare staff, and more than half have experienced depression in the past year. Inclusive services and staff training measurably reduce these barriers, which is why the disparity is a system feature, not a fixed fact.

That is the crux: none of this is inevitable. Where staff are trained, where inclusion is built into how a service runs rather than left to individual goodwill, the fear eases and people come back. The barrier lives in policy, training and culture — all of which can be changed — not in the people being turned away or worn down. Framing it as a system feature is not letting anyone off the hook; it is naming exactly where the levers are, so that the effort goes into fixing the service rather than asking a community to simply endure it better.

How to read this data

Figures are from Stonewall's LGBT in Britain – Health report, based on YouGov research with 5,000 LGBT people across England, Scotland and Wales. Self-report surveys carry sampling limits; confirm the latest figures before publishing. This is analysis of published data, not new research.

Why we're publishing this

Health Insurance UK is a commercial UK health-insurance resource, not a charity — but we compiled this evidence because the organisations working for LGBTQ+ health deserve solid, citable numbers behind their advocacy. Healthcare should be a place of safety for everyone who walks through the door, and these figures show how far that promise still is from many LGBTQ+ people's reality — and how squarely the fix sits within the system's own control. We stand with the charities, clinicians and community groups pressing for inclusive, well-trained services, and we want this data to add weight to their case. Free to cite with attribution to Health Insurance UK. For the figures or a bespoke chart, get in touch.