The Telegraph recently exposed some very shoddy research done by the LGBT Foundation for NHS England.
Derived from the experiences of just 121 self-identified “trans and non-binary users” of maternity services in England, whose experiences the LGBT Foundation then misrepresented, the NHS came close to implementing staff training based on the report’s recommendations. According to the Telegraph:
- The 121 respondents to an LGBT Foundation survey had given birth over a 30-year period, with many not even actually presenting as trans or non-binary during their pregnancy.
- But based on their survey responses, the LGBT Foundation said that “30%” of the trans and non-binary service users had received “no care at all” during their pregnancy. Yet elsewhere in the same survey, 82% said they had received antenatal care.
- Nevertheless, the LGBT Foundation used the 30% claim to suggest that pregnant trans and non-binary people were “being put at risk” by the NHS. That’s quite an accusation.
- On the back of research as flimsy, as flawed as this, the LGBT Foundation urged maternity services to consider using more ‘inclusive’ language such as “chestfeeding” and suggested implementing “visible markers of inclusion such as posters, badges, including name badges with pronouns, and lanyards”.
LGBT Foundation also seems to have had a complete disregard for the impact of its recommendations on the 99.9% of other service users.
A full critique of the “unreliable and invalid” study can be found here outlining its “methodological issues, biased assumptions and unsubstantiated recommendations”.
NHS England initially announced plans to spend £100,000 on staff training based on the report. It only changed its mind following a petition by clinicians expressing concerns. Astonishingly, the CEO of the LGBT Foundation continues to defend the report saying: “We’re very proud of our research which sets out clearly – and for the first time – trans and non-binary people’s experiences of maternity care.”
This exposure of the LGBT Foundation’s disregard for rigour in its research or balance in its recommendations matters. Because, as outlined by Martin Beckford in the Daily Mail last week, the same LGBT Foundation is currently bossing around dozens and dozens of NHS Trusts across England via something called the Rainbow Badge Scheme.
By signing up to the Rainbow Badge Scheme, NHS Trusts invite a group of gender ideology lobby groups to grade them on their compliance with gender ideology, and then to bully them to go further. NHS England pays the lobby groups to do their lobbying. An initial contract of £220,000 was awarded in 2021 to LGBT Foundation, Stonewall, LGBT Switchboard, LGBT Consortium and GLADDUK to run the scheme. It is not transparent how the funds were shared between these groups, used by these groups, nor how NHS England assesses their work. There is no dedicated public facing website describing the working of the Rainbow Badge Scheme – LGBT Foundation provides some background here and there is an X (Twitter) feed here, but that is the beginning and end of the transparency.
The Daily Mail did a great job of exposing the lunacy of these ideologue’s demands of the NHS. But to really understand their brazenness and absurdity it is better to see it face to face. Have a long look at the ‘NHS Rainbow Badge Assessment report‘ provided by the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust. It contains the Rainbow Badge’s assessment of how the Trust is insufficiently compliant with gender ideology along with dozens of bullying recommendations for more ideology and quackery – full summary in the Action Plan at page 60 .
Highlights:
1. Despite the Trust having a “zero-tolerance” approach to bullying and discrimination that’s not good enough for the Rainbow Badge team.
2. Pregnant women are “carrying parents” and she/her pronouns should not be assumed for pregnant women. This is insulting and unhinged. Plus see the bullying “Actions” – no consideration of wider impact.
3. Why on earth should patients be asked their sexual orientation?
4. LGBT Foundation and colleagues want every single one of us to be asked about our trans status when we go to hospital:
5. They want clinical staff to avoid using gendered language. Again, this is unhinged. How dare they attempt to over-ride our common language?
6. They want everyone using the hospital to be “asked to confirm your gender”. This is, again, unhinged. These groups want to not just change language and law, but how we actually view reality.
7. One person – ONE PERSON – has experienced “transphobic behaviour”! But language, law, how we perceive reality, everything, must be upended:
8. Remove all signposting to women’s health services that women actually understand. Throw proportionality out of the window:
9. They ask for guidance to support a parent who didn’t carry the child to breastfeed. This is surely unethical and unsafe:
10. This “resource library” is at the end of the report if anyone can bear to work their way through it:
11. Reality fights back! Ordinary people hate this, the next response indicates. Why does NHS management participate in the grift?
11. Ordinary people must be told what to do: to “start consultations with a pronoun introduction”.
12. Apparently, one service now refers to “birthing people” is all documents and leaflets. This is disgraceful and disrespectful to women. Shame on RUH Bath:
13. Another ‘demand’ for patients to be “routinely asked what their pronouns are”. This is disgraceful and ridiculous. What do we do about corporate cowardice in the NHS?
14. They want “non-binary” available as an option on staff registration forms. Let’s institutionalise fads and infantilisation:
15. When it comes to monitoring complaints, nothing is ever enough. This is bullying. That is how to keep the grift going.
16. Six painted rainbow walkways! But that is not enough.
There is much more.
Some good comments from staff who have had enough. (These came with a content warning!)
How can we stop the promotion of this quackery across the NHS? We must face the fact that it is impervious to Steve Barclay’s periodic ‘letters’ – the Secretary of State is seemingly not in charge.
Here is what we need to grapple with. Institutions can be controlled by market mechanisms or by democratic mechanisms. But we have outsourced much of our massive state infrastructure to ‘quango’ status where it is untouchable by either mechanism. And the budget is billions.
Ideology, quackery, and grift flourish – and there is nothing to stop them. In fact, a powerful tool has been set up to keep them in place – accusations of hate, phobia, and risk of losing your job. Much of the quackery happens under the heading of EDI, emanating from the HR Department. But the other chancer’s saloon from which ideology, quackery and grift emanate are the organisations which fund research – they have no real outputs or anchoring in the real world, just the dissemination of funds.
Senior managers within the NHS know that sex is real and that it matters – I am certain of this. They go home and refer to their mother as “mother” and do not check for her latest preferred pronouns. My guess is the folks at LGBT Foundation also know the truth. But no-one inside the system is capable of closing the chancer’s saloon – the personal costs have been made too high, there are zero incentives in place to persuade anyone to take on the challenge. There aren’t even mechanisms in place to slow it down or challenge its activity in any way.
Institutional reform is needed. We need to look at the levers of control that we can reinstate over the NHS. The old-fashioned Left will favour greater direct democratic control and accountability within a state system – that would be better than the current situation. I’d like to hand more control back to individuals. Do we need a voucher system whereby people take life-long entitlements to healthcare, to healthcare providing organisations, public or private? If proper market mechanisms were reinstated, my guess is 99.9% of women giving birth would prefer institutions that recognised them as women giving birth.
Hundreds of thousands of us who care have collectively now spent millions of hours exposing gender ideology and associated grift and quackery. We thought simple sunlight would suffice. But we were wrong. So now we need to do more than just shine sunlight. The press and the wider public will get bored of the stories, the irresponsive silence of the institutions will continue, and ideology, quackery and grift will prevail.
We need to shift focus to serious policy work that looks at mechanisms to take back control of our institutions. The tail – gender ideology and its exemplification of quackery and grift – must now wag the dog: institutional reform of our unaccountable quangocracy.
Caroline ffiske is co-founder of Conservatives for Women.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Well researched, but im Sick of all this crap!
Shocking. But completely unsurprising. Our public services are lost, and the last people they serve are the public who serve them.
…and those who pay the taxes to enable it…
Complete ideological infiltration. And will be implemented irrespective of concerns, because “be kind” (and screw the rest).
Voucher systems for health and education are a superb idea……
‘Examining the experience of vouchers and contracting to expand health services through engagement with private sector providers in the Asia Pacific found positive effects with regards to access and utilisation of health services’
Effectively engaging the private sector through vouchers and contracting. Science Direct 2015
‘To those who are sceptical of education vouchers, it should suffice to say that the policy has already been successfully tested in many countries across the world, including New Zealand, Australia, areas of Italy, several US states….’
‘Those who have benefited most include students from less wealthy families…’
The education voucher: a proposal for excellence IEA 2020
But they take power away from Whitehall/local councils/the public sector so none of the main parties will adopt them as a policy.
You’ll have to vote for independent candidates….
The bureaucrats are much better placed, intellectually and morally, to know what I want to do than I am.
Time for another shout out to somebody I admire for being outspoken about the whole gender ideology circus and safeguarding of children, who has ‘lady balls’ ( defo not a penis ). Here’s Helen Joyce being followed by the rent-a-mob, shouting ”f*ck Helen Joyce” ( because tolerance must only be received, never given, evidently ), whom you can identify, if not by their excessively hostile manner, but by their facial accessories symbolic of their collective madness. The ill-mannered intellectually-challenged loons were actually protesting to free that misogynist, eunuch bloke in a dress who was sent down again, but not for saying ‘TERFs’ should be punched in the face, but they saw Helen and latched on to her.
”If women cannot stand in a public place and say ‘men cannot be women’ then we do not have women’s rights at all.”
https://twitter.com/MForstater/status/1701515723665736070
Off topic but friggin’ hell…talking of tolerance and hostility, the parents have obviously taught the kids here plenty of the latter and none of the former. What I find ironic is that I don’t even believe in anyone’s god or deity and I’m more tolerant of everybody’s religious beliefs ( excluding the radical Islamists, which goes without saying ) than those who are devout and do subscribe. I just walk past ‘manic street preachers’, or even the non-manic ones, and they don’t even register, but with others there’s obviously just all out aggression and intolerance, but I draw the line at teaching your kids that such ugly behaviour is acceptable. These adults should be ashamed to teach and encourage such hatred to their kids.
https://twitter.com/CensoredMen/status/1701410107714572556
Any person who is pregnant is a woman. It’s as simple as that. Anything else is insane.
We should be allowed to be respectful and kind towards trans people without having to believe nonsense which is insane.
It doesnt take much for anyone to see that this is lunacy. But here is the problem.
If you are on the board or management committee of an NHS trust and this report is brought to your attention, what are your options?
1. You can ignore it or dismiss it as the insane garbage it is and potentially face the wrath of a lobby drunk with power and hatred ready to gun you down. This could mean public humiliation, loss of job, destruction of your career, anything really.
2. You can adopt the recommendations and cover your arse in the knowledge that doing nothing can get you into serious trouble whereas the worst thing that can happen to you for implementing the recommendations is well, nothing at all. You can just claim you are trying to be inclusive.
The key question is how do we put an end to the witchunting, not just by woke activists but by the general population when an official males an honest mistake.
The case of the head.of the Spanish FA is a perfect example. How do we put an end to these orchestrated, directed mob lynchings.
If we can crack that nut we can put an end to the madness.
“when an official males an honest mistake” – slight Freudian slip there, given the subject.
Do they care that using medical terms can prevent people from accessing services. For example how many people who’s first language isn’t English don’t realise that they’re a person with a cervix and need to be routinely screened for cervical cancer. English is my first language but I haven’t got a clue if I will ever need a coloscopy or attend a coloscopy clinic, although I think it might refer to the colon so most people may need these services at some, but using the term might be offensive to people who’ve had a colostomy (should they be referred to as bag users?).
Exactly – in the examples above, what’s a “non carrying” parent? One who is unable to pick up the baby and tote it about the place? That’s what it means to me.
So 30% received “no care at all”, or claimed tor receive no care at all, during their pregnancy.
What proportion of women overall (sorry, birthing objects) receive no care? Without knowing this, the 30% statistic is meaningless.
And what are they claiming, that these trans people turned up at the midwife for the usual antenatal appointments, banging on the door for help, but were turned away because they are trans?? Or are they claiming that the atmosphere was too unwelcoming so they chose not to attend?
This is loosely related because it’s about the NHS.
I was at a family gathering the other day (Saturday 9th September) and a cousin of mine who is a trainee psychologist for the NHS told us that they’d received a memo or warning the other day.
something along the lines of – there are more people trying to suicide by eating cherry pits (which apparently give off cyanide fumes) so they should (if they suspect their patient of such) wear a surgical mask when giving therapy in person.
I’m obviously naturally sceptical but she was adamant that this could happen and that a mask would help.
Anyone here have any idea if it is possible? Would a mask help?
My wife is an ex-NHS Clinical Psychologist and was interested to hear your tale. In brief her response is as follows:
[1] I have no idea whether masks would protect against cyanide fumes but a brief search of the internet reveals that ingestion of cherry pits may lead to poisoning. There is no mention of these pits exuding cyanide fumes. If masks don’t protect against minute Covid-19 particles, it’s unlikely they will protect against cherry pit fumes.
[2] The idea that a psychologist would put on a mask to protect themselves from a suicidal patient is very troubling. It sounds both untherapeutic and unethical. One would hope that a psychologist would have taken the trouble to properly assess a patient for risk of suicide and have discussed intention and method/s before it got to the stage that they were actively attempting suicide in the psychologist’s consulting room. What would they do if the patient brought a rope into the room or a handful of pills and a bottle of whisky? What message does putting on a mask give to the patient? Presumably; “You are a threat to me and I am scared of you”. How is that going to help a patient who has come to believe their life isn’t worth living?
[2] ‘Safetyism’ is becoming a real problem in the NHS. The case of Lucy Letby shows how staff were more concerned about protecting their staff than their patients.
[3] As an author of a chapter in the book Cynical Therapies and co-author of a report on the infiltration of critical theory into UK psychology training courses (The Politicisation Of Clinical Psychology Training Courses In The UK) I would be interested to know which training institution your cousin is attending if you are prepared to share this information.
A Rainbow, used to be a fun thing to teach kids to draw ( which is also mentioned in Genesis) Now it’s a CULT CARTOON!
I have raised related matters with my local NHS Trust:
Firstly, in relation to a campaign called ‘#Call Me…’ ostensibly concerned with how patients wish to be referred to when in hospital. The campaign was based on one carried out by Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust following the mis-gendering of one patient by a consultant anaesthetist, and which was undertaken by a simple adminstrative ‘cost-neutral’ protocol being adopted. My local trust went ahead and spent £20,000+ for the making of two videos by an external supplier. Despite extensive correspondence with, staff, the executive and local governors, I am yet to discover what proportion of this money was funded by NHS England. Quite why the trust is being so coy about this remains a mystery.
Secondly, earlier this year I took part in the annual Equality and Diversity System (EDS) Audit as an assessor. EDS measures trusts’ performance “to review how well the NHS supports patients and their families form the nine protected characteristics” as set-out in the Equalities Act 2010. This experience was salutary: deadlines were missed throughout without any apparent concern from the Head of Patient Experience and her team; the administration and presentation of the scoring forms and evidence was full of basic errors and totally inadequate for the task. Evidence comprised predominantly of huge tracts of policy/best practice in the form of aspirational aims rather than evidence that they were demonstrably effective. The on-line briefing sessions revealed that no more than four people were involved in the assessment (amongst which I was the only non-staff/governor); indeed, one governor was ‘doubtful if it would result in any improvement in patient care’ i.e. that it was a completely pointless exercise. An FOI request to the trust suggested that at least 96 hours of staff time was spent on EDS 2022 which at a conservative estimate would be sufficient to fund a common surgery procedure such a knee or hip replacement. Not only was there any evidence of EDS2022 providing benefit to patients, but also I question the ethics of attempting to obtain feedback data from patients when they are sick or suffering from dementia or mental illness.