Britain’s taxpayer funded National Health Service (NHS) has increased its budget for “treating” the transgendered to £22.72 million a year, up from £17.13 million last year. The budget is rising with demand, as the number of children seeking medical attention for transgenderism has shot up by 400 per cent in the last five years.

The reason for increased referrals has been put down to the “large amount of media attention” that the in vogue topic is now receiving.

The average cost of a “gender reassignment” is £19,236 per patient, including hormones, support and surgery – the starting wage of a nurse in the NHS in £21,000. The NHS is currently facing a chronic a funding crisis, with some hospitals told to only fill vacancies “where essential” to save money in August.

The transgender lobby, however, has complained that the new budget is not enough. Jess Bradley, from Action for Trans Health told ITV News: “We are at a point of crisis.”

“There are approximately 20% more people coming in to the system, but the system doesn’t seem to be responding to the growing number of people wanting to access these services.”

A spokesman for NHS England said: “We have put additional funding into gender reassignment services for the last two years and will continue to do so. We recognise the urgent need to bring down waiting times”

Figures from Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the only British clinic to provide “medical” treatment to transgendered children, show a five-fold increase in referrals over the past five years, up from 139 in 2010, to 697 last year.

The figures include 11 children under the age of five, as revealed by The Mirror.

The NHS maintains a policy of not treating prepubescent children under the age of 18 with powerful hormone blockers which stunt development and surgery, however there is building pressure for this to change.

The number of adults undergoing gender reassignment procedures on the NHS in England also rocketed, with a 74 per cent rise in the number of male to female procedures since 2002.

Tavistock and Portman Trust, which receives referrals from GPs, paediatricians, schools, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, says that it is “highly likely” that the massive rise “is linked to the large amount of media attention this topic is receiving.”

The media are not the only actors. As Breitbart London exclusively revealed in August, police and local authorities are funding and distributing documents designed to “empowering teachers to encourage and support” transgenderism in junior schools at the “earliest stages” after a four-year-old child identified as transgendered in a nursery in the county of Cornwall.

Although high suicide rates are often cited as the reason why a personal choice such as cosmetic surgery is a medical need—and is therefore justifiably funded by the taxpayer—there is no conclusive evidence that such invasive and irreversible treatment lowers such rates.

In 2004, a large scientific review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-op transsexuals by the University of Birmingham’s Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility (Arif) found no evidence that surgery had improved the lives of people who were confused about their gender.

Researchers found that 20 percent regret changing genders, over 40 per cent attempted suicide afterwards. Chris Hyde, director of Arif, who advises the NHS, said:

“There is a huge uncertainty over whether changing someone’s sex is a good or a bad thing. While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised – often to the point of committing suicide.”