Guidance for NHS completely misrepresents the law. Again.

This is awful, I suffered sexual abuse in childhood and am going through my first pregnancy. I've already been sent a birth plan to begin filling out. Do I even bother?

@LonginesPrime @Ereshkigalangcleg @SinnerBoy Another example of people who self-identify as Good Folx being able to justify any amount of mendaciousness because it's for the Right Reasons, aka Pious Fraud.

I can edit 😂

Dm me your thoughts on annex b and I will let nhs England know anonymously your opinion regarding lack of safeguarding

An excellent article by Naomi Cunningham: https://archive.ph/la2R7

It is difficult to imagine a sense of grievance more unjustified than any affront felt by a man whose employer refuses to let him undertake intimate care of a woman who does not consent to receive it from a man. It makes no difference if the man in question says he is a woman, dresses as a woman, believes himself to be a woman, or even holds a government certificate declaring him to be a woman. The question of consent is for the female patient in this scenario alone. Any man who positively wishes to provide such care despite the absence of consent is unfit for any work with vulnerable patients.

Absolutely!

A great piece on this by Sonia Sodha in today's Observer: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/11/new-nhs-guidance-could-prevent-same-sex-care-for-women

Wasn't it an aim of one lgbt organisation to attempt to remove the sex by deception clause?

Yes, Stonewall. See the work of Professor Alex Sharpe.

They've completely misrepresented the Forstater case on p65 too, in the tiny section on gender critical beliefs.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. It seems completely deliberate to me, as with many such "explanations".

@tillyandmilly @TheBiologyStupid
I think selections from the Baroness's collected letters should be studied as part of a social responsibility or politics module in the school curriculum for kids in the last two years. They are perfect.

An excellent letter from the baroness!

This is a partial and prejudicial report. I have no doubt a survey of dog lovers would recommend everyone must take their pets to work, but this is hardly a sound basis for workplace practice.

😂

👏

This is Baroness Nicholson's letter to Steve Barclay. She is very well informed as always.

https://twitter.com/Baroness_Nichol/status/1667207590785286144/photo/1

What do the Patients’ Association think about this?
if individual ICS or NHS Trusts build it in as their policy wouldn’t they become the objects of legal cases by patients?

It's unlikely to be illegal as it's just a training manual - usually the way these things play out is that a manager will rely on the guidance, it gets taken to an employment tribunal and then the guidance will be quietly amended once the lawyers get involved and it becomes clear that it was incorrect advice in the first place. Hopefully I won't get to that stage if we make enough noise about it now, though.

Obviously if the NHS commissioned a third party to write the guidance and the third party did this, the NHS could take it up with them under the commissioning contract. However, here it appears to be presented very much as a collaborative piece between the NHS and the LGBT foundation, so no-one's going to take responsibility for any lies or misinformation.

It's similar to what happened in Sweden where the collaborative medical guidance on transitioning children quoted a high figure for trans kid suicides, but when the documentary makers of The Trans Train investigated the source of the suicide statistics in the report (that doctors were using as their main rationale for medically transitioning children), none of the doctors took responsibility for the inclusion of the stats and one doctor eventually admitted "oh, that's an unfortunate mistake, it was just supposed to refer to mental health issues more generally" (or words to that effect).

That's the trouble with all these collaborative guidance reports being relied on by medical and other professionals in the absence of actual peer-reviewed science and authored reports from actual experts (legal, medical or otherwise) All kinds of batshit hyperbolic claims creep in and no-one checks them as they assume someone else will, and none of the individual authors are worried about their professional reputation or credibility because it's a collaborative piece between several organisations and their individual names aren't anywhere near it.

Also, because the big idea with gender ideology is to listen to trans people and treat them as the experts on themselves, the people putting together this kind of guidance often forget that while the trans person obviously is an expert on how they feel, they might not actually be an expert on the law and might be misquoting a case as that's not the thing they're an expert in. Similar things seem to occur in psychology, etc, where despite psychologists knowing how psychology works, they throw all their training out the window when a trans person says "oh, but that doesn't apply to me as I know how I feel".

As quoted by OldCrone above:

"From the document (p60):
For employment purposes, guidance from the British Medical Association supports the view that a trans person’s assigned sex at birth is irrelevant to their
working life. For this reason, they conclude that a patient has no right to be told a healthcare worker’s assigned sex at birth."

There it is again, trans people getting institutional protection akin to witness protection - as if it won't be glaringly obvious in the vast majority of cases what sex someone is. Ofc sex is relevant to your working life where you might be performing intimate care on another person!!

Reminds me of this story from 2018:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5224421/NHS-apologises-woman-allocated-transsexual-nurse.html

LonginesPrime · Today 08:12

It's laughable (and scary) that the NHS doc actually quotes the judgment but inserts the crucial additional word "cannot" where it actually said "can" because it was clarifying what the judgment didn't cover.

Does anyone know if it's actually legal for them to produce a guidance document like this, with a deliberate mis-quote of a legal judgement, to pretend that it said something different? It must surely be a disciplinary matter, at the very least.

There isn't one as far as I'm concerned

The BMA guidance says:
A patient does not have a right to know if a healthcare worker has a gender different to the sex they were assigned at birth. In some instances, a healthcare professional may not physically present in a way that could be assumed to be any gender.

That seems a lot more ambiguous than the way they have interpreted it.

It could mean that patients don't need to know anything about the Health Care Worker's gender identity (or religion, football team, hogwarts house, enneagram, Myers Brigg classification, horoscope, or favourite flavour of ice-cream) but that possibly the physical reality of their sex still matters for the purposes of intimate care.

Unfortunately it isn't clear which interpretation is correct.

What really worries me about this is that it doesn't take patient consent into account at all.

Patient consent seems to be irrelevant if a trans identified staff member is involved. It's all about the rights of the trans identified staff member, their choices and how they shouldn't be forced into doing things that make them uncomfortable.

P60 again (my bold):

If a trans woman or trans man is assigned to provide care, they should be
made aware of the patient’s request, and given the choice of whether they feel comfortable treating or caring for the patient.

A non-binary person would not be prevented from administering care in this circumstance; however, the comfort of the staff member should be prioritised.
If they feel safe fulfilling care and presenting in a particular gender towards said patient, this is acceptable, however they should not be forced to deliver care if this would cause undue distress or invalidate their lived experience of gender.

No mention of the patient and whether they are comfortable or caused undue distress.

This is all it has to say about the patient:

The patient has no right to be told that the person treating them is trans or non-binary.

Lots of rights for the staff not to have their feelings hurt or their 'gender' invalidated, but the patient doesn't have the right to refuse care from someone who makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

What really worries me about this is that it doesn't take patient consent into account at all. Patients should be entitled to not consent to treatment with anyvprofessional and ask for someone else without being penalised for it. If someone makes you uncomfortable for whatever reason then you should be able to say no to them providing personal care without the threat of being discharged and accused of discrimination.
I've only once had to ask for a different HCP as a patient. It was because of comments they had made previously that sent my mental health into a downward spiral. If they had been trans then who is to say I wasn't making that request based on their gender identity and discharge me without care. Or coerce me to consent to treatment which isn't consent at all.