IT may be that the courts do know better than health chiefs what amounts amounts to an illness - as with the Court of Appeal's ruling that the North West Lancashire Health Authority was wrong to refuse three men sex-change operations because it did not regard transsexualism as a serious illness.

But no matter how many eyebrows may be raised in doubt at this verdict, it is a departure that ought not, we think, to give this condition any higher priority for treatment.

There are, surely, many more illnesses which no court can dispute are manifestly more serious because they are life-threatening - cancer and heart disease for instance - and if the treatment for them is reduced because the finite resources of the NHS are, as a result of this verdict, employed on manifestly less-serious complaints, then justice will not have been done, no matter what the judges think.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.