New NHS guidance on same sex accommodation

However we have two very vocal trans women working at the trust and they had a lot of input I think

Glad to hear you have a diverse Trust. However this ‘input’ is lobbying and particularly for one interest group. On that basis alone those individuals should not be allowed to remain.

The purpose of a trust or advisory board (if that’s where they sit) is to ensure policy is adhered to. It is specifically NOT to represent any interest groups.

I recruit to a fair number of boards and have seen this in applicants who think it’s a way to push their own agenda. I would bet my hat this is what’s going on here. Institutional capture.

@Barracker The original guidance was 2010. But most of the trusts' policies are recent.

Of those who stated their EIAs they were all tested against trans patients - so was the trans policy fair on trans patients because of their age, religious beliefs etc.

I've got the names of the organisations that advised individually but most seemed to be small scale, local or internal organisations. The main guidance came from GIRES.

@BadgertheBodger There are pdfs of the original piece on my website - click through to the rest of the story on page two which includes the story of a nurse who had a trans woman on her ward. I didn't put up the next day's story of trans girls going onto girls' wards. I'll have the pdf somewhere. The policy is the same as most of the individual trusts', but explicit.

joaniwalsh.com/portfolio-items/nhs-trans-row-as-men-get-access-to-womens-wards-if-they-identify-as-female/?portfolioCats=26

Joani thank you what brilliant work

That’s interesting Mini. Is it a specialist ward then, since it’s mixed anyway? Do you know if it’s the general practice in most wards

I’m not mini but the ward I was on was not specialist. It was three bays of eight beds each and two bays were male one female.

It demonstrates that women's rights are demolished by trans rights.

1. Women have a right to female same-sex spaces.
2. Men now have a right to access those same female same-sex spaces.
3. Women no longer have a right to female same-sex spaces.

What does your trust do with transmen, Philli? I'm especially worried about the young ones, who seem the least likely to put practicality before ideology.

That’s interesting Mini. Is it a specialist ward then, since it’s mixed anyway? Do you know if it’s the general practice in most wards? Seems sensible in many ways, though not great if there’s already a need for the room for another patient.

I work for the NHS. Our trans policy is terrible . I read it a few months ago and was going to post it on here but forgot. However we have two very vocal trans women working at the trust and they had a lot of input I think.

As an aside. I went to town this weekend and there was a very distressed homeless trans woman sitting on the pavement. 6ft tall, very overweight, stubble and quite clearly a man. No top, flowery skirt and bows in their hair. Self harm cuts everywhere (some actively bleeding at the time). Drunk and screaming a passers by to stop looking at her and then loudly weeping.

It was horrible horrible horrible to witness. I asked the zone wardens to go and help them (or at least remove them, very distressing for the kids to see) and they said they were known to them, very violent and they had already been picked up by the police twice that weekend. Mental health and trans issues out of control

So a really poorly/highly contagious patient could be moved from the best place to protect them and everybody else on the ward to a suboptimal place because a bloke who gets his thrills from dressing in a nightie (AGP) is more important than the result poorly patient or the rest of the ward's protection. Got it.

And the alternative is the scenario in the comment above, where the same individual is allowed to make the lives of the women in their ward miserable to the point where their care will be compromised.

I feel like there's no way out of this situation until society is willing to admit that it's the male individual who likes wearing frilly nighties and who thinks that makes them a woman who's the problem, and stops trying to distort the entire system to accommodate their preferences. Why can't they go in a curtained off part of the men's ward.

Also, what's currently done with the many teenaged female transitioners? Because putting them in with the men would be so obviously dangerous that I can't imagine their parents would allow it. Surely there are limits to being woke.

I was in hospital for a week earlier in the month on a mixed sex ward - single sex bays but you had to walk past the men to get to the showers. Also the women’s bay was full of male visitors all day and well into the night. It felt really uncomfortable and made a stressful visit worse.

99% of the time if someone is trans they are given their very own side room which is usually used for either contagious patients or really poorly patients

I have known really poorly patients been put back into the bay so a trans patient can have the side room.

So a really poorly/highly contagious patient could be moved from the best place to protect them and everybody else on the ward to a suboptimal place because a bloke who gets his thrills from dressing in a nightie (AGP) is more important than the result poorly patient or the rest of the ward's protection. Got it.

MIL recently spent a week in a ward with a 'lady' who had a penis, stubble and chest hair. This lady loudly farted at will and scratched her scrotum whilst she wore pink floral pyjama bottoms, no top but open pink gown make up.

This lady's manner was verbally aggressive to staff who were treating her as best they could. Their stand off attitude was more to do with her vile behaviour than her penis!

This is terrifying reading. I wad in hospital last week on a mixed sex ward, but bays were sex segregated. I didn't realise that it was mixed sex until I walked down the corridor to the loo. It wasn't a problem.

Our bay of 6 women was lovely and supportive. The more well lady of the ward wills go and sit by the most distressed (at a guess early dementia) lady and encourage her to eat, find her hearing aids etc. I exchanged pleasantries with my neighbours, and rang the buzzer to tell the staff when the most poorly lady on our bay had a fit. I was able to feel that a curtain was enough privacy to discuss my embarrassing female organ symptoms with the doctors and nurses.

If the person opposite me had been as described there is no way I would have relaxed. I would probably have kept quiet about some of my symptoms and would have been baying for an early discharge, which given that it took 6 days for doctors to work out why my body was failing I dread to think what would have happened.

People like him don't belong on women's wards. It's as obvious as the day is long.

99% of the time if someone is trans they are given their very own side room which is usually used for either contagious patients or really poorly patients
Which is fabulous kind of, except for the really poorly patient who may need the room more.
Once this info gets out there
Everyone will identify as non binary to get a private room and or, the type of men that think women are just to be used will self I'd as nb or trans to get on a ward with them. In hospital where they can be very vulnerable, this seems like a shitty idea.
Curious about trans men? Do they get a side room in the mens wards?

I haven’t read the replies on here but I’ll post anyway

I work for the nhs. We have wards where half is female the other half is male

99% of the time if someone is trans they are given their very own side room which is usually used for either contagious patients or really poorly patients

I have known really poorly patients been put back into the bay so a trans patient can have the side room.

Did Equality Impact Assessments come into existence at the same time as the Equality Act? Or did they follow some time after the act was made law?

Because the original policy was written in 2009/2010. This may be why no EIA was carried out. The policy may have preceded the requirement.

If, on admission, it is impossible to ask the view of the person because he or she is unconscious or incapacitated then, in the first instance, inferences should be drawn from presentation and mode of dress. No investigation as to the genital sex of the person should be undertaken unless this is specifically necessary to carry out treatment.

So, bunch of male uni students out on the piss, dressed up in women's clothes because they think it's a larf. Alcohol poisoning ensues/party bus gets into an accident, everyone unconscious. Put them all in the women's ward? What could possibly go wrong?

Exactly OldCrone. Arguably not doing that is a failure of Public Sector Equality Duty.

I can't remember any that undertook an EIA that didn't test the impact on other trans people - so the impact of trans policy on a trans religious/elderly/gay patient.

Does this mean that they only looked at the effect on other trans people? The EIA should look at the effect on all the protected characteristics.

I'd sooner wards were fully mixed sex than this.

Exactly. I'd feel safer in the bed next to Dave who had nothing to do with any of this and who may well be just as uncomfortable as I am than in the bed next to Davina who actively pushed for this situation to happen and who may want to have a chat about how we're all girls together.

“The policy commitment relates to foxes, not chickens. But to promote better public understanding of the difference, we’ll just call them all chickens”

@Knewmee I FOId every trust in England for this piece so I already have all their answers (well, of those that replied). Matt Hancock announced the review as a result of the storm created by the piece - only, by the looks of it, to reaffirm what it discovered. Most don't answer questions, just send the policy documents for you to wade through. I had to read 3000 pages which took months. So many headlines came out of it they kept out one element to run the next day that got lost in the hooha over the main story - that male children are also allowed onto girls' wards if they identify as trans.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/10/nhs-trans-row-men-get-access-womens-wards-identify-female/

I'm a subscriber so I don't know if it's still behind a paywall. If it is I'll try to get it on the blog but that will take some time.

I did separate FOIs on who advised each trust but didn't do anything with it.

GIRES provided the baseline info for the guidance/policies.

And the only time trans patients would be naturally placed on a same sex ward was if they were undergoing sex related treatment - so a hysterectomy on a trans man, for instance, would see them on a woman's ward.

@BoomBoomsCousin I wrote the piece that prompted the review behind this announcement and went through 100+ policy documents for individual trusts. I can't remember any that undertook an EIA that didn't test the impact on other trans people - so the impact of trans policy on a trans religious/elderly/gay patient. This looks to be a repeat of the original guidelines and confirmation of the individual policies. If I have time tomorrow I'll post the original story in full on my blog - it was more than 2000 words that were cut by half.

By 'better public understanding', they apparently mean, 'er, it's better that the public has the wool pulled over their eyes'.