IT IS sickening that six prisoners, including a double murderer, an armed robber and a kidnapper, are to have sex-change operations on the NHS.

More than that, it is an outrage when the self-same NHS is rationing care and treatment to genuinely sick people on the grounds that it cannot afford it.

Just what justification can there be in pandering to vicious jailbirds who are not at all ill, but only beset by freakish and self-indulgent whimsy, by giving them sex-swaps costing £11,000 a time - more than what it costs to treat a multiple sclerosis sufferer with the life-improving beta-interferon drug that many are currently refused because it is supposedly too dear.

What is the Home Office thinking of, allowing these scum to have sex change therapy in the first place - to become women while they are in all-male prisons?

And what is the Department of Health thinking of approving these costly operations for them?

Please, ministers, spare us the claptrap about "transsexual rights" - and think for once of the rights of the victims of crime and of NHS rationing.

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