When it comes to hair transplants, the NHS position is clear: "It's not available on the NHS because it's cosmetic surgery."

This would suggest that cosmetic surgery is not covered by the NHS as a matter of principle, and although this would be disheartening for those who want it (or rather, for those who psychologically suffer greatly in a way that would be resolved by it), it would at least be fair in gender terms.

However, the above principle is not applied consistently, as shown in the more nuanced position that the NHS has on coverage of breast implants:

You cannot usually get breast enlargement on the NHS

You'll usually have to pay to have breast implants.

There are some circumstances where you might be able to get breast enlargement on the NHS – for example, if you have very uneven breasts or no breasts.

(Bold and Italics mine)

In other words, some cosmetic surgery procedures are more equal than others, and it just so happens that, of the two mentioned, the one that the NHS privileges is the one whose beneficiaries are mainly women, while the one whose beneficiaries are mainly men is left in the dust.

Both are very comparable, since they are solely for aesthetic purposes. Actually, breast implants are more purely aesthetic than hair transplants are. Not only do breast implants serve no practical function beyond its aesthetic one, but they actually can occasionally interfere with breastfeeding and increase the risk of developing anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (ALCL). Hair transplants have no similar complications (at worst, the transplanted follicles simply wont take and a scar will be left) and at least serve a minor practical function, helping to protect their recipients' scalp from the sun's carcinogenic rays and providing additional warmth for the scalp in the cold months. In short, there really is no justification for allowing one to be publicly funded but not the other, and the fact that this inconsistency exists reeks of gender bias.

Really, the only potentially non-sexist argument I could see in favor of NHS coverage of breast implants but not hair transplants is that the estimated maximum costs for the latter are greater than the for the former (the NHS's cost range for breast implants is £3,500 to £8,000, while that of hair transplants is £1,000 and £30,000). Even then, since, as has been discussed here, men both pay more in taxes and receive fewer benefits from public spending, I think NHS coverage for persons (the vast majority who would be men, of course) whose hair loss has attained or ends up attaining a Norwood scale score of 2A or more before 40 years of age would be more than reasonable and manageable. Furthermore, the fact that the most expensive hair transplants cost more than the most expensive breast implants doesn't justify the blanket refusal to cover any hair transplants, even those that are within the cost range for breast implants.

Premature hair loss is a major cause of depression for men (especially young men), so if the government doesn't care about their well-being, can't they at least think of the potential productivity being lost to depression that could otherwise be extracted from those young men at their physical peak?

I get that this issue may seem frivolous or trivial to some, but this comparison says so much about whose happiness governments are willing to subsidize when there is no obvious economic benefit in doing so, and it's clearly not men's.

Indeed, if men in power really acted in solidarity with, and for the benefit of, men in general—as many feminists say they do—shouldn't we have expected the UK Parliament (a group skewing towards middle-aged to older men who surely know the woes of hair loss) to have corrected by now something as simple as gender-biased eligibility rules for public funding of (largely) gender-specific cosmetic surgery?