A key element of the debate on women’s rights is the stealthy erosion of single-sex spaces, particularly single-sex wards in hospitals. These hard-won rights are vital for patients at their most vulnerable. Yet we have sleepwalked into a situation where gender self-identification, elevated by NHS policy in defiance of the law, trumps sensible decisions about patient dignity and safety.
Men who declare themselves women, even without the legal fiction of a gender recognition certificate, are being allowed into women’s wards. A fiction is being imposed on other patients, their concerns disregarded, even being smeared as bigotry. Nurses are left in a difficult position.
This is insulting to patients and a safeguarding disaster. That is why tonight in the House of Lords debate on the Health and Care Bill, Lord Blencathra and I have introduced an amendment with cross-party support. This requires that NHS guidance for trans people in single-sex wards be reviewed. It must take proper regard of the opt-outs included in the 2010 Equality Act, and not wilfully ignore them.
There is a wider point about the corruption of official data in hospitals but in prisons and crime statistics too. According to Dr Nicola Williams, of Fair Play for Women, although the NHS has an IT system to register both sex and gender identity, it is not using it. In fact, it has not used the sex category for years and has data only on self-declared gender. It is shocking that the NHS does not know something as basic and important as the sex in which patients were born. It’s why females who identify as males do not automatically get called for cervical screening.
Other amendments to recent bills have sought to ensure that violent sex offenders of the male sex are held in male prisons; and that police record the sex registered at birth, rather than gender, of those arrested and those reporting crimes.
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For 35 years, debates in parliament have said there should be single-sex wards. There was a huge fight 20 years ago to stop mixed-sex wards. Yet here we are: the NHS, captured by lobbyists, is implementing, outside its authority, a one-sided policy. If it wishes to recognise gender self-ID it has a duty to report to parliament, just as it has a duty of honesty and candour to all patients, not some above others.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is a Conservative peer