Hospital staff advised police that a patient could not have been raped because her alleged attacker was transgender, the House of Lords has been told.
Officers investigating the attack, which allegedly occurred a year ago, were told that “the rape could not have happened” because no male was there.
Neither the hospital nor the investigating police force have been named.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, who raised the issue during a debate on single-sex wards in hospitals, said: “They forgot that there was CCTV, nurses and observers.
“Nonetheless, it has taken nearly a year for the hospital to agree that there was a male on the ward and, yes, this rape happened.
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“During that year she [the victim] has almost come to the edge of a nervous breakdown because being disbelieved about being raped in hospital has been such an appalling shock.
“The hospital, with all its CCTV, has had to admit that the rape happened and that it was committed by a man.”
Police are still investigating the case. Under the legal definition, a rape can only be carried out by a physically intact man.
Nicholson said that the case was a direct result of the NHS policy, known as Annex B, which allows patients to be placed on single-sex wards according to the gender with which they identify.
Speaking in the Lords, she said: “The result of Annex B is that hospital trusts inform ward sisters and nurses that if there is a male, as a trans person, in a female ward, and a female patient or anyone complains, they must be told that it is not true — there is no male there.
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“I think it is completely wrong that the National Health Service should be instructing or allowing staff to mislead patients to tell a straightforward lie. It is not acceptable.”
The peer called for the policy to be withdrawn, arguing that it “gives priority to trans people over women” and therefore threatens the “dignity, privacy and safety” of female patients.
The former Tory MP said that the policy “undermines” the provision of single-sex wards and protections for women that “took at least 50 years to come through”.
She said that by adding the self-identification clause in the policy on eliminating mixed-sex accommodation “parliament has been ignored and bypassed and surreptitiously something far-reaching has been brought in that affects all families, all faiths, all identities and all levels of society”.
Nicholson added: “In place of sex-based rights, we are giving priority rights to one special section of society.”
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She said that she had not seen such “filleting of legislation anywhere before in Britain” and it was “cheating the public”.
The NHS is now reviewing the policy. A coalition of women’s rights groups, including doctors and nurses, has written to the health secretary complaining that they were not consulted.
