The NHS helps same-sex couples like us access IVF. But why must we first pay the ‘queer tax’?

Whitney and Megan Bacon-Evans launched a legal fight against their hospital trust over the requirement that couples had to try to conceive for two years. Photograph: Can Nguyen/Shutterstock

When my girlfriend and I decided we wanted a baby, we knew it would be a long and arduous journey. But as we skipped into our first fertility appointments, we had no idea just how financially and emotionally gruelling the process would be.

At first, there seemed to be myriad options available to us: from the rudimentary at-home turkey baster method (literally a syringe filled with donor sperm , which is as no-frills as it sounds), to medical interventions such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), where the best-swimming sperm are picked out before being injected directly into the womb, and IVF, where an egg is extracted, fertilised to become an embryo, and then implanted.