Mick Hartley

This, sadly, is the NHS we're talking about:

Nurses have been sacked for speaking out about trans patients on single-sex wards, Parliament has heard.

Speaking in the House of Lords, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a Tory peer, warned that the dignity, privacy and safety of patients is being “diminished significantly” by NHS policies which allows male-born patients who self-identify as women to be placed on female-only wards.

Arguing for people to be allocated a bed based on their birth sex, she said that the controversial issue is now impacted on the ability of nurses to do their job.

One nurse said that her Trust’s policy makes it “impossible” because “she is obliged to advocate out for the vulnerable, but trans rights supersede all other rights and concerns”.

Medics are “inhibited” from speaking out for fear of being branded “bigots” or being sacked, Lady Nicholson told the upper chamber.

“I have met several nurses who have lost their jobs because of this”, she said. “A doctor says that he no longer feels able to make comments about sex and gender. He recently delivered a baby, he said it was a girl and he was accused of transphobia.”

A few years ago that would come across as simply unbelievable. Now? Who knows? It's certainly possible.

She also highlighted the case of a 14-year-old girl who refused a cervical smear as her mother had requested a female nurse and the person who was due to carry it out was “very clearly a natal male”.

The former Tory party vice-chair highlighted an NHS England policy which states that trans people should be accommodated “according to their presentation: the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”, rather than their biological sex at birth.

“Traditionally female patients in the NHS and in private hospitals have been allocated beds in single-sex wards accommodating only women patients,” she said.

“Transgenderism, and I speak as a woman, has undermined that provision with the 2019 NHS guidance authorising self-selection of patient gender on arrival in hospitals, something neither enshrined in law nor backed by public demand.

“Yet Parliament and our ministers have consistently declared that women both need and should have privacy, dignity and safety in their most vulnerable situations such as when sick or pregnant.”

Lady Nicholson argued that previous guarantees given to women had been “blown apart” by the provisions under Annex B, which contradict the guidance on providing same-sex wards of which it is a part.

“These two requirements are not only incompatible, they are irreconcilable,” she said.

She said that the policy “profoundly disadvantages women” across the whole of the NHS….

Lady Nicholson argued that “the rights of another group do not supersede the rights of the group that is already there”.

She added: “My contention is that the dignity, the privacy and the safety of women patients which has been fought over for several decades… is now being diminished significantly and their health undermined, their recovery from illness significantly undermined, by the imposition of new rights of others on top of women’s rights.

“It amuses me that nobody is suggesting they should be on top of men’s rights.”

Of course not. But the issue is clearly one-sided. Women in men's wards pose no threat. Men in women's wards, on the other hand…

Her amendment to the bill calling for patients to be housed according to their birth sex was rejected.

I'm no fan of the House of Lords, but at least these concerns get an airing there – even if they are rejected in the end.