I'd love every MP to be sent the Kavanagh thread. Perhaps it can be made into a TV comic skit. "People have been eyes" (and ears, because Lordy if you have bad eyesight you sure as hell get a second chance the second they speak. It's either the obviously fake baby voice or the booming Brian Blessed tones that give it away.)
Re wards.
The NHS have legal responsibilities to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all parents. As part of this they are obligated to provide single sex wards. But and there is a but, they are allowed to break this rule in specific circumstances.
This you don't put a transwoman on a women's ward. You redesignate a ward as mixed and put them on that instead of you can not find a single bay or room.
I've had a lengthy discussion with my BIL in the past. He is a senior doctor at an NHS hospital who also is on the executive body. His duty of care is to provide single sex accommodation. However there's a massive caveat to this. He points out that some departments just are too specialist or small to have single sex wards in the first place though they do they best to protect dignity and privacy by how they arrange the ward. In this case a woman can easily end up on what is otherwise a male ward due to who happens to be in one that day. He also pointed out that A&E and intensive care are generally mixed anyway.
He pointed out that, particularly during COVID, they had situations where if there was a single man on a ward and spaces in the female ward they couldn't manage both (staff/financials/infection control reasons) so they had to close a ward and merge as a mixed ward. They are 'not allowed to do this' whilst there simultaneously is no actual significant sanction or penalty for doing. They have to write down the number of times the trust has breeched the single ward directive and then write something up to justify each incident of a breech. But other than that it's pretty much merely inconvenient paperwork and finances and staffing generally are the overriding factor.
So this conversation is really limited by the practicalities of the NHS which is already limited by the fact we have a ward system in the UK. On the ground it will probably make little difference because trans patients are often treated with kit gloves anyway and already given the preferential accommodation for their own dignity. This is really our biggest issue in the UK. Our hospitals are poorly designed in the first place with the convention towards communal areas. It's much more typical elsewhere in Europe and the US to have private rooms. The argument here is always that this is lonely or unsafe because staff can't keep an eye on multiple patients all at once. Somehow these other countries maintain comparable if not better safety records so I suspect there may be some issues with NHS staffing and funding generally...
So in many respects the whole debate over hospitals and single sex wards is a bit of a misnomer in the context of trans patients. The real conversation here is why the privacy and dignity of patients of both sexes is routinely not remotely considered by the NHS because they don't seem it a priority in the first place. There needs to be conversations at government level about when we build new hospitals there are legal requirements at the planning stage to make hospitals fit for purpose and in the 21st Century so we can phase out the problems regarding privacy and dignity full stop. This isn't even on the radar of most. Certainly if you asked an MP about the issue they unsurprisingly, given the standard on display at that committee) wouldn't be able to hold a meaningful or accurate conversation about the topic.
I don't see my BIL often but over the years he's let slip a few of these type of eye popping issues within the NHS. It highlights just how much they are creaking at the seems and hanging on by their fingernails generally. Single sex wards are way down the list of his concerns. And we wonder why there's so many sexual assaults in hospitals....