The NHS No Longer Recognises the Reality of Biological Sex

 The For Women Scotland Judgment in the Supreme Court clarified that for the purposes of the Equality Act, a woman is an adult human female. It also confirmed that women’s single sex spaces and services must be single sex. This has increased pressure on the NHS to re-establish science and sanity on all matters related to biological sex, whether that be the provision of single sex spaces and services, including hospital wards, the dignified treatment of staff who need single sex spaces, accurate language to describe men and women and their medical conditions and treatments, accurate recording of whether users of the NHS are in fact male or female, accurate recording of the sex of medical staff, and safeguarding and evidence-led treatment of vulnerable individuals impacted by gender ideology – the list is long.

Campaigners who expected to see progress on this issue in the NHS in the wake of the judgment are becoming frustrated. The NHS seems unwilling to budge. A typical response in the wake of the judgment is from NHS Fife, which said it “notes the clarity provided by today’s Supreme Court ruling regarding the legal definition of a woman. We will now take time to carefully consider the judgment and its implications”. The Daily Mail has gathered examples of NHS intransigence, including from NHS England. More are reported here in the Telegraph.

However, if we continue to expect rapid movement from the NHS on this issue we are likely to be disappointed. The working model of campaigners to date has broadly been to assume that gender quackery exists in ideologically-driven pockets of an otherwise sane NHS, which remains firmly anchored in science and common sense. We have imagined an ideological tail and a sane dog.

This has been a mistake – we have been using the wrong model. We are a sexed species, sexed in every cell of our bodies. There is probably no institution where sex matters more, for the safety of all of us and the sanity of our society, than in the day-to-day operations of our national health service, the NHS. However, at some point over the last decade or so, gender ideologues fully expelled the notion of biological sex from the ‘operation manuals’ of the NHS. It doesn’t exist anymore. Only gender self-identification exists. What is more, it is not gender self-ID anchored by the underlying reality of biological sex. It is gender self-ID in and of itself – full stop....<<<Read More>>>...