The word woman could be removed from NHS services in Scotland under new guidelines that propose shifting away from “gendered healthcare”.
A report compiled by the Scottish NHS raises concerns that people who have switched gender may feel uncomfortable if clinics dealing with issues such as contraception, smear tests and maternity care are advertised in a female-orientated way.
"May feel uncomfortable"? Oh dear. Let's abolish women then.
Among the recommendations regarding services for trans patients, the report says: “Systems within NHS Scotland need to allow for increasing gender identities for patients, specifically including non-binary identities. This should be done as part of a general move away from gendered healthcare.”
The report, which has not been officially published, later adds: “Transgender individuals may be uncomfortable seeking reproductive health care or contraception when the services’ ‘target audience’ is advertised in a way that is incongruent to their gender identity (eg a trans man may be really uncomfortable attending ‘women’s health clinic’ for a coil or for a cervical smear).
“The procedures and investigations themselves may also provoke heightened feelings of dysphoria.” …
Louise Irvine, a retired GP and co-chairwoman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, told The Daily Telegraph she was concerned about references to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in the report. She said WPATH guidelines were “very poor” and potentially harmful for patients and questioned why respected Scottish experts had not been prioritised.
“Proposals to change whole systems of IT, language and clinics is timorous, unhelpful and potentially dangerous,” Irvine said. “It’s not clear what ‘gendered healthcare’ even means, so how can the NHS move away from it? You can’t move entirely away from sexed healthcare, because everyone has a biological sex, even if they take additional hormones to affirm or appear differently.”
Susan Smith, a director of the campaign group For Women Scotland, said: “Gender, including non-binary identities, are an irrelevance in medicine, but sex matters. This move will, almost inevitably, rebound on women.
“Progress to improve standards in women’s healthcare has been hard won — this will set the clock back on those gains by decades.”
The Scottish NHS has previously been criticised for omitting references to women from public health campaigns and instead using terms such as “people who menstruate”. A Scottish government-backed advice leaflet designed to teach young people about periods referred to “those of us that have both our ovaries and a womb”.
What on earth is going on in Scotland? The place seems to have been taken over by trans activists.
Mick Hartley 
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