In the face of NHS guidelines, there is growing concern as individuals can gain access to female-only wards based on transient gender identification, prompting urgent calls for the Health Secretary to intervene. The Mail has the story.
The Health Secretary faced pressure tonight to scrap ‘shocking’ rules that mean patients who only occasionally identify as women can share female-only hospital wards.
NHS guidance uncovered in a major audit by the Daily Mail means transgender women can use the facilities they wish, regardless of whether or not they have had surgery or legally changed sex.
Many hospitals make it clear that patients need only ‘temporarily’ present as women to enter female-only bays and bathrooms.
One NHS trust’s policy states: “People who are not living full-time as a woman have been on women’s wards with no issues at all.” Some liken anyone who objects to the policy to racists, while others make it clear that if another patient complains, it is they who must move rather than the trans person.
Campaigners warn it makes a mockery of strict rules that ban hospitals from placing men and women in neighbouring beds.
They want Health Secretary Steve Barclay to take urgent action after a review was launched two years ago amid concerns about the policy but never published.
An investigation by this newspaper into the extent to which ‘woke’ gender ideology has infiltrated the NHS can also reveal:
- Midwives are told that they could harm trans people who have given birth by calling them ‘mother’.
- Staff are given long lists of baffling terms from ‘abrosexual’ to ‘third-gendered’, some of which have been written by lobbying groups such as Stonewall.
- Official policies mis-state equality law, experts say, as well as ignoring women’s rights and gender-critical beliefs.
Tonight, leading campaigner Maya Forstater, Executive Director of Sex Matters, said: “These policies are shocking. They put the health of transgender patients at risk, and undermine the rights of everyone else.
“If there is one place where it should be obvious that no one should be confused about a person’s sex it is when they are receiving medical treatment.
“These hospital policies have clearly been developed by ideologically committed staff who have captured the process.”
She urged the Health Secretary to “take responsibility” and rewrite guidance on mixed-sex accommodation as well as “provide clear guidance to the NHS on what the law actually says”.
Heather Binning, founder of the Women’s Rights Network, said: “In 2010 the Government announced it would end the ‘indignity’ of mixed-sex wards, yet wards that are organised by gender may well become mixed sex in the current climate.”
Former Cabinet minister Ranil Jayawardena said: “For any part of the NHS to issue diktats to their staff that put biological males on female wards is wrong. Single-sex wards should be just that.”
Mixed-sex wards were banned in 2010 in order to protect patients’ dignity, until the rules were quietly relaxed in 2020. But Annex B to NHS England’s 2019 guidance on ‘Delivering same-sex accommodation’ made it clear that placing transgender women – who were born male – on a female-only ward did not count as a breach.
It stated: “Trans people should be accommodated according to their presentation: The way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use.”
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