Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph – Female NHS workers ‘humiliated’ by trans guidance in hospitals.

Sex Matters, a women’s rights group, said dozens of NHS trusts were “breaking the law” by continuing to allow trans women to use female facilities in defiance of last month’s Supreme Court ruling.

It has written to the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, to demand that it withdraw guidance that says trans people can use whichever lavatories and changing rooms they wish….

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, said in the letter: “Those that are following the current guidance from the NHS Confederation are breaking the law. There is no reason for delay. The fact that your guidance is ‘informal’ is no excuse.

“It encourages NHS employers to uphold policies that create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for staff who do not wish to share single-sex spaces with members of the opposite sex and to breach workplace health and safety rules.”

In her letter, Ms Forstater said the NHS Confederation’s trans guidance was “legally illiterate” and “encouraged NHS employers to break the law”.

The guidance states: “In all types of workplaces, trans and non-binary people should be supported to use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable using. At no time is it appropriate to force staff to use the toilet associated with their assigned sex at birth against their will.”

It also tells management, senior healthcare leaders and human resources directors to take a “zero-tolerance attitude” to transphobia, even though this approach led to NHS staff such as Sandie Peggie and the Darlington nurses being disciplined for asserting their rights to single-sex facilities at work.

They – the NHS Confederation – got the law wrong. The Supreme Court ruling makes that clear. They're now muttering about how "elements of our guide on trans and non-binary allyship are now dated":

We will update the guide more fully as soon as the Government has responded to the EHRC’s updated code of practice after it has been publicly consulted on, so that the implications of the judgment for NHS services are fully known.

“We will continue to work with our members while we do this. The resource on our website remains as guidance and is not official policy for the NHS.”

The implications are clear enough: their guidance is wrong. Why the prevarication?