Mick Hartley

They still don't get it. NHS trust policy ‘allowed biological men to use women’s changing room’.

Guidance issued by an NHS hospital would allow men identifying as women to use female changing rooms, despite warnings that the policy breaks the law.

Officials from the Royal College of Nursing wrote to senior administrators at the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust to warn that Darlington Memorial Hospital was breaching 33-year-old workplace legislation that requires the provision of single-sex changing facilities for men and women.

The row is the latest development in a legal battle over transgender policies at the trust, which a group of female nurses has claimed puts women “at risk”.

It puts women at risk by allowing a man into the women-only changing room, where he asks why they're not getting undressed yet while they can see his genitals through his underwear. But he claims he's trans, and so benefits from the holy mantle of inclusivity.

It has now emerged that in the last week of March officials at the royal college — the professional body for nurses in the UK — wrote to a director at the trust to complain that it was in breach of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992.

The college pointed out that those regulations required “the provision of single-sex changing facilities for men and women — the only exception being where the provision is of single lockable rooms (not cubicles)”.

The official said that the college was flagging the statutory position “given the ongoing legal dispute and internal investigation” around the dispute over a transgender nurse at the hospital. The letter added that “the regulations also appear to have been overlooked by other organisations”, before stating that the college “expects the trust to comply with these statutory provisions and provide single-sex changing rooms without delay”.

However, campaigners representing the women have said that three days after the letter was sent, the trust director re-published its “transitioning in the workplace policy”, without any changes to the guidance, which, it is claimed, said that a biological man can change in the female staff changing rooms.

The only sign of hope here is that at least the Royal College of Nursing seems to have got the message.