Royal College of GPs forced into U-turn after cancelling gender-critical doctors’ conference

I think people can't underestimate the amount of general checks that NHS staff have to do under often pressurised imperfect conditions. Having a confusing ambivalence about gender and sex is just asking for errors to occur and the NHS as a body puts patient safety at it's core so this is concerning.

There should be error reporting mechanisms in place to evaluate how many errors can be attributed to this policy to gauge it's effect.

Exciting to see that the in-person conference has sold out despite the uncertainties. (There is a waiting list.)

Livestream is still free. There is a confusing note about livestream tickets but I think this is to streamline making donations to offset the cost of the event.

The point of the GRA wasn't to make sex and gender the same thing.

The point of the GRA was to allow people to legally 'change sex' or change gender. I'm not sure which because they made sex and gender the same in law. But conflating the two terms wasn't the 'point' of the GRA, it was a by-product.

But people working in the NHS are supposed to 'know' that sex and gender are not the same, even though the law says that they are.

I think that if you stopped enough people the street to meet the requirements for a proper scientific sample of the population at large, and asked them what the difference between sex and gender is, not even one percent would know.

Or if you asked them to explain the meaning of ‘gender’ the great majority would answer that it meant whether someone is male or female.

Meanwhile even the Oxford dictionary, which defines English according to how it is being used in practice ( probably including in America), now defines homosexual as ‘same sex or gender’ attracted.

Among those relatively few who do know the difference, there are TRAs, and some politicians manipulating it in an Orwellian way. Behind the scenes of the GRA bill where there was a disgraceful, highly manipulated mish mash of the two words and the Equality Act is not clear enough either.

Depending on context.

Sometimes it's really important that they're the same.

Sometimes it's really important that they're different.

It's also really important that everyone knows when they're supposed to be considered the same thing and when they're supposed to be different. And we should all know this even though it's never explained to anyone when they're supposed to be the same and when they're supposed to be different.

Sex and Gender. The same only different.

No one has ever asked the gender of a cat or a dog, or indeed any other fluffy animal. It is a social construct for humans. In the past it wasn’t such an issue. Harmless really. But today it is utterly misused and misunderstood - purposefully and otherwise.

Well obviously as that was the whole point of the Act!!!!!!!

That wasn't actually the point of the GRA.

The implication here is that sex and gender are the same thing.

Well obviously as that was the whole point of the Act!!!!!!!

But now, everyone's supposed to know that sex and gender are completely different. Why have an Act which insists they're the same, and then try to convince everyone that they're two completely different things? And somehow everyone is supposed to know that these two things are completely different, when even the law says they're the same.

In fact I think it was a grammatical term. I don’t think it was a social construct at all.

It was ‘the fair sex’ not gender.
I think we just stopped liking the word sex for anything other than fornication!

30 years ago I was an NQT. I was asked by a 9yr old the difference between sex and gender. I said one I thought one was used a lot in grammar and that perhaps one was a noun and the other a verb/activity. I was totally wrong. But it wasn’t that clear cut even then.

Really annoying, given that gender is a purely social construct. The fact that organisations are asking for ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ shows how far this toxic culture has gone.

I think that most people (excluding FWR regulars and people steeped in trans ideology) who were given an NHS form which asked for their sex and their gender, would think they were asking for the same thing twice. NHS staff who haven't been given specific training about what the two terms meant would probably think the same.

Yes, I agree. That's why there are so many threads here for "can you guess my unborn baby's gender from the early scan photo".

I said 'a long time', but I wasn't thinking of as far back as the 1970s when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, I was thinking of things like this, from the GRA (section 9):

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

The implication here is that sex and gender are the same thing. Also on forms, for some years now, 'gender' has often been used instead of sex when they are really asking for people's sex. I'm sure many people are unaware of the recent goalpost-shifting.

When someone gets a GRC I believe that medical records are changed, the GRC holder will get a new NHS number. I work with these numbers, when I see one beginning with a 7 I think that is a baby/child, or a recent immigrant or extremely rarely someone with a GRC, I have never come across someone with a GRC in my role but I noticed this when a well known trans Twitter/X personality posted pictures of himself in hospital with his ID band visible.

Babies born today will have an NHS number beginning 733 as an example.

Prof Kaltiala's one of the authors of this study and is a speaker at this conference.

Ruuska S, Tuisku K, Holttinen T, et al All-cause and suicide mortalities among adolescents and young adults who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland in 1996–2019: a register study BMJ Ment Health 2024;27:e300940.

https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e300940.full

Mary Harrington comments on the study.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/new-study-trans-youth-not-at-elevated-risk-of-suicide/

Thanks for the link. I'm adding it to my file of documents to read when I can give it the time it deserves. I got as far as:
'There is evidence that male blood transfusion recipients face higher mortality rates if their blood donor is female and has ever been pregnant. Transplant donor/recipient sex matters. Sex matters. '
I never knew that about blood donations - another thing to investigate further!

This is from 2018, but I don't know if anything's changed.

https://medium.com/@anneharperwright/sex-gender-the-nhs-bb86b0c3ebb

I submitted my Subject Access Request to my local hospital to look at my own medical record data.
And what I found was this.
My personal medical record sex field is BLANK. Unpopulated.
In a disturbing turn of events, the hospital that cared for me in pregnancy and childbirth, twice, doesn’t know what physical sex I am.
It is sure, however, that I have a ladybrain, though. Because there it is on my medical record. I have definitely never discussed my inner femininity with any doctor that I recall. I don’t remember asking that my adherence to stereotypes, or ladybrain mentality be captured on my medical record. Nevertheless, here it is, my female ‘gender identity’ that I didn’t know I had

Edit: I just reread your post and realised that you were asking specifically about people with GRCs or diverse gender identities, but this shows that they don't always record sex for anyone.

Does a person's NHS and GP record always include their sex (as observed at birth) even if that person later has feelings of being something else or has medication or surgery to alter their physical body to approximate to that of another sex, and/or changes their pronouns and name?

Are people with GR certificates able to change their sex on their NHS and GP records so that no trace of their original sex is recorded anywhere?

Interesting how my local surgery are doing it.

She didn't actually say that the sex/gender of babies was being recorded incorrectly, just that there was a field for gender identity for babies. I assumed the next bit about changing the sex categorisation when they change the gender identity was for older patients who had declared a new gender identity.

My employer allows gender identity to be recorded on fucking new born babies. And I've observed several times that those doing data entry aren't just changing the gender identity box but are also changing the sex categorisation too. I think it's because they don't appreciate the difference between gender identity and sex.

But you're blaming the wrong people. The employees who are filling these forms are ordinary people, many of whom won't be familiar with the new meaning of 'gender'. They're not the ones who are stupid or dangerous. The people to blame are the employers who haven't trained their staff how to fill in the form and what 'gender' or 'gender identity' means, and that it has nothing to do with a person's sex. Even many of those who have heard of 'gender identity' think that it has something to do with a person's sex.

The really stupid, dangerous people are the ones who put 'gender identity' on the forms in the first place. It has no place in a medical setting.