National Health Service (NHS) staff should ask transgender and “non-binary” patients whether they want to be treated on male or female wards.
New NHS guidance stipulates that hospitals should accommodate transgenders “according to their presentation” — i.e., “the way they dress and the name and pronouns” they use. It adds this does not depend on whether they have legally changed their gender and “may not always accord with the physical sex appearance of the chest or genitalia”.
The guidance, entitled Delivering Same-Sex Accommodation, reiterates those who have undergone transition “should be accommodated according to their gender presentation. Different genital or breast sex appearance is not a bar to this.” (emphasis original.)
If a person’s “presented gender” is not immediately observable, admission and triage staff should “ask discreetly where the person would be most comfortably accommodated. They should then comply with the patient’s preference immediately, or as soon as practicable.”
“Non-binary individuals, who do not identify as being male or female, should also be asked discreetly about their preferences, and allocated to the male or female ward according to their choice,” the document adds.
Dr Nicola Williams of the Fair Play For Women campaign group called the guidelines “shocking”. She told The Telegraph on Tuesday it means that “the privacy and dignity of women goes out the window”.
“There has been no consideration for the needs of women in this guidance at all,” Dr Williams added.
On Wednesday, Christian doctor David Mackereth lost his legal case against the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for refusing to use ‘preferred pronouns’ for transgenders.
Dr Mackereth was working as a disability assessor for the government department when he said he was forced to resign. He said management told him his job was at risk if he refused to refer to “any 6ft-tall bearded man” as “madam”.
He took the department to the tribunal on grounds it had breached his right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.
The judgement ruled his biblical view that gender is God-assigned, and the identities of male and female are unchangeable are “incompatible with human dignity”.
The doctor said in comments reported by the BBC: “Without intellectual and moral integrity, medicine cannot function and my 30 years as a doctor are now considered irrelevant compared to the risk that someone else might be offended.”
Confirming that he would be appealing the decision, he added: “I believe that I have to appeal in order to fight for the freedom of Christians to speak the truth. If they cannot, then freedom of speech has died in this country, with serious ramifications for the practice of medicine in the UK.”
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