The government should assess the impact of transsexual rights activism on the NHS

Three news stories since the New Year show how the NHS has been infiltrated over the years by transgender activists and how they have spread their ideology across management to the detriment of patients’ dignity and healthcare. They point to the need to assess the impact of transsexual rights activism on the NHS in the last twenty years. 

When is a woman really a man?

On New Year’s Eve 2017 the Times reported that a woman who had asked for a female nurse for her cervical smear test in England was sent a nurse of obvious male appearance who identified as a transsexual. The incident happened on 16 September 2017 at a clinic belonging to the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust. The woman claimed she was made to feel ‘like a bigot’, which is not surprising given the extraordinarily arrogant statement put out by the trust in response to this scandal:

'Trust policy for all services is to consider seriously all requests for clinicians of a particular gender; it allows patients to feel more supported; we will deny a request if we believe it to be sexually motivated or where there might be a risk to a member of staff, but we will always explain ourselves.'

This really was a shockingly inappropriate statement to put out, as it is all about protecting the member of staff and there is nothing there about protecting the dignity of patients at all. In the Brave New World of the NHS as run by transgender ideology, the rights of male transgenders to ‘feel like women’ comes before women’s rights to dignity in receiving gynaecological treatment.

Mother of two children put in secure psychiatric ward with a male patient

More recently the Sunday Times reported that Philippa Molloy, a married mother of two children suffering from an abnormal fear of men as part of her psychosis, was put in a high security psychiatric ward in Burnley General Hospital which was single-sex. However, four days later a male-to-female transgender patient was admitted. This was an extraordinarily unwise decision on the part of the hospital concerned as it put the transgender patients’ ‘right’ to ‘identify’ as a ‘woman’ before the actual need of this woman to be away from men altogether in order to recover from her problems. His presence of course only exacerbated her problems. Two days later, she was moved to another hospital in Lancaster. After being discharged her symptoms unfortunately came back, but scared by her initial experience she did not want to return to hospital.

Caving in to transsexual rights activism has bred distrust in the NHS

Clearly this woman had lost trust in the NHS system because of callous disregard for her condition and her needs. This callous disregard is clearly systemic, the result of successive governments caving in to the demands of activists. The whole situation makes a cruel mockery of single-sex wards; after all the category of sex in the Equality Act 2010 is meaningless if it is constantly eroded by transgender status or identity. Hospitals of all places, supposedly experts on treating the human body as well as the mind, should know better.

Perhaps the most shocking problem here is the nurse reportedly being ‘surprised’ by her ‘opinions about trans people’, as if it were any of the nurse’s business to draw conclusions. This does raise questions as to what kind of medical ethics, if any, nurses are being taught, or whether this has been replaced by equality and diversity training delivered by transgender campaign groups.

Understanding the debate over cervical smear tests for transgender patients

During the past week the press has made much of a story about a Public Health England leaflet for transgender patients. The leaflet, published on 4 July 2017, was explicitly based on a similar leaflet originally published by Public Health Wales in 2014.

Female-to-male transgenders (‘trans men’) have to be registered as female with their GP if they want a routine cervical smear test. As most female-to-male transgender people do not undergo a hysterectomy and therefore still need a cervical smear, these guidelines may just encourage women with gender problems to register as female rather than male with their GPs. Arguably a small step towards dissuading girls and young women from ‘identifying’ as ‘male’. Those criticising the leaflet for not offering routine tests for female-to-male patients have not understood this.

Upon reading the press reports, it appears initially as if a double standard is at work, with male-to-female patients being ‘routinely invited’ for cervical smears whereas female-to-male patients are not. In fact the leaflet first tells male-to-female patients ‘you do not have a cervix’, which is obviously correct of course. Given that facts about people’s sex are ‘controversial’ thanks to transgender campaigning, this is a welcome reality check.

Then the leaflet says this:

‘If you are registered with a GP as female, you will be routinely invited for cervical screening unless your GP has already told us you’re not eligible. We can update our records so you are not invited unnecessarily.’

The important question is why would NHS bodies require patients to get their GPs to tell them that they do not need a cervical smear? There are several possible answers, especially given that the leaflets were produced in co-operation with transgender groups. I think one answer is so that there is a central record of male-to-female transgender patients, as none have a cervix so all have to be recorded as not having one. By the same token as most female-to-male patients have not had a hysterectomy they still need to have a cervical smear, and the current arrangements may encourage more to register as female.

An opportunity to estimate the true number of people with gender dysphoria

The whole field of transgenderism in the United Kingdom has created a problem with patchy record-keeping. Activists often complain that there isn’t an accurate estimate of the number of transgender people in the United Kingdom. This is partly why they have been campaigning for a question on ‘gender identity’ in the next Census. Mandatory records by the NHS would be the obvious way of getting this done, and would be more effective than the Census which is carried out once every ten years and cannot be relied upon in case an individual is out of the country or otherwise unable to fill the form in. Not only that but the NHS keeps a lifelong record of patients and thus has information on their sex at birth, something other official forms allow transgender people to avoid providing by providing alternative options to ‘male’ and ‘female’.

All this flies in the face of the current push to get rid of ‘intrusive medical checks’ to allow people to change gender. Instead it points to the need for a reassessment of how the medical profession deals with gender dysphoria.

Government should inquire into the impact of transsexual rights activism on the NHS

Even though I understand the debate over cervical smear tests differently than other commentators, I think the whole topic ultimately points in the same direction as the other two news stories. This is because the above-mentioned leaflet does what all official literature now has to do, which is to distinguish biological sex from ‘gender identity’ in a way which still partly plays along with a person’s (false) sense of self as ‘truly’ belonging to the sex opposite to their sex at birth.

The advent of transsexual rights and their effect on the NHS has meant that more and more people have come to consider themselves as transgendered and consequently requested gender reassignment surgery and cross-sex hormones. It has become clear that many people do not have full genital reassignment surgery. Rather people are being recreated as sexual hybrids.

All of these point to the urgent need for the government to assess the impact of the Gender Recognition Act back in 2004, and to review the steps taken to implement it. However that is not enough. There needs to be a thorough assessment of the effect of the Court of Appeal judgment against North West Lancashire Health Authority in 1999, which prevented NHS trusts from refusing to provide gender reassignment.  

The whole process of the appointment of NHS managers needs to be scrutinised, as does the history of which transgender lobby groups have been allowed to draft NHS policies, their links to the Department of Health, and what legal advice has been given by those public bodies responsible for doing so. The very fact that public bodies have to use convoluted language to try to get people who consider themselves transgendered to register as members of their sex with their GPs says it all.