19 hours ago
Threat to women-only wards as zealot doctors say: Defy trans ruling and allow trans patients to self-identify
NHS doctors will brazenly call on colleagues to overrule the Supreme Court and allow trans patients to self-identify, it has emerged.
Activist members of the British Medical Association want doctors to vote for 'identity-based care' at its conference later this month.
Campaigners fear this could lead to biological men who identify as women being put in female-only wards or other single-sex spaces.
And it would put doctors on a collision course with the UK's highest court after judges ruled in April that the term 'woman' referred to biological sex and not gender.
Last night, Bethany Hutchison, a member of the Darlington Nurses, who won a landmark battle for a female-only changing room after claiming NHS transgender policies breached their human rights, said the motion 'puts an extreme and discredited ideology ahead of the proper medical care of vulnerable patients'.
She added: 'Doctors and nurses are being dragged into an ideological conflict they didn't ask for.'
Andrea Williams, of the Christian Legal Centre, said if adopted, the policy 'could create chaos'.
Delegates meeting in Liverpool are due to discuss proposals to 'affirm the right of all LGBTQ+ patients and staff to identity-based care and working conditions'.
The motion presented by its London regional council calls on the BMA, which represents 200,000 medics, to produce 'guidance and a lobbying strategy to embed this principle' across the NHS.
But voting for it would go against the views of Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who admitted his previous comment that 'trans women are women' was incorrect.
Helen Joyce, of the Sex Matters charity, said some at the BMA want to 'abandon evidence and reason'.
The BMA was also criticised for opposing the Cass Review, which found children were being let down by gender identity services. The union later said it will undertake its own evaluation of the report.
