Mick Hartley

Debbie Hayton in the Spectator – Why is the NHS erasing women?

Cervical cancer and ovarian cancer only affect women. So why has the NHS been quietly erasing the word ‘women’ from information pages on its official website?

According to the Mail, NHS advice pages on these conditions were edited at the beginning of the year to remove references to the word ‘woman’.

Last year, women seeking information about cervical cancer were told that, ‘cervical cancer develops in a woman’s cervix (the entrance to the womb from the vagina). It mainly affects sexually active women aged between 30 and 45.’ But in 2022, the advice reads, ‘cervical cancer is a cancer that is found anywhere in the cervix, [and] the cervix is the opening between the vagina and the womb (uterus).’

Similarly, women looking for information online were previously told that ‘Ovarian cancer, or cancer of the ovaries, is one of the most common types of cancer in women.’ Now they are only informed by the health service that ‘Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer’.

The health service’s cancer advice and guidance is extensive, and rightly so. Women concerned about their health need to know about symptoms, causes, tests and treatment, and where to get help and support. But, crucially, they need to know whether or not the guidance applies to them. If this obfuscation of reality was hidden in some obscure academic paper, it might be forgivable – or at least ignorable – but the NHS has a duty of care to a wide audience, not all of whom might know that the information is aimed specifically at women.

Interestingly, the equivalent pages on men’s health have not been edited in the same way. Those searching for information on prostate cancer are told quite simply that, ‘Most cases develop in men aged 50 or older.’ No chances are taken with testicular cancer: the word, ‘men’ appears eight times on one page.

Well now, isn't that interesting? You could perhaps understand the reasoning if it worked both ways: trans men might be offended – the thinking would go – if they felt they were being excluded from advice on cervical cancer, seeing as how they have female bodies but have re-categorised themselves as men; and equally trans woman might feel excluded from advice on prostate cancer, having male biology but calling themselves women. But apparently it only works one way. Which suggests that the NHS have not only taken on board gender ideology, but its ingrained misogyny as well.

Women’s health, therefore, seems to be an ideological playing field that men’s health is not. In the guidance the word ‘woman’ has generally been culled, with two notable exceptions on another page of the website, which explains that: ‘Anyone with a cervix can get cervical cancer. This includes women, trans men, non-binary people, and intersex people with a cervix.’ and, ‘Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer. This includes women, trans men, non-binary people and intersex people with ovaries.’

But by framing the advice in this way the NHS appears to be re-defining women as a subgroup of people with cervixes or ovaries. How that helps anyone is hard to fathom….

Those in the NHS who signed this guidance off, perhaps blissfully unaware of what they were agreeing to, should in my view revise these pages as a matter of urgency. The NHS might have taken on board the LGBT rainbow for its branding and badges, but it must think critically before assuming the thinking of this particular strand of activism. Because where human bodies are concerned, human biology still matters, and we need clear labels to define the two sexes: women and men.