Trans NHS Patients can access every women-only space in London!

[TheRealHousewife]

I’m sharing the following gifted link … I hope it works!

Telegraph article:- Trans NHS Patients can access every women-only space in London

How long before other trusts refuse to comply with single-sex laws?

Im getting increasingly confused as to what protection single sex spaces are being afforded; what protections is there for biological women if the law is going to be so blatantly flouted by such a national institution as the NHS.

Do you think that they will change their policies in light of the SC ruling and the EHRC statement that the NHS must change and new statutory guidance will be issued by the summer?

@Bunpea My post was meaning that rape survivors and those with religious/ cultures needs are SEPARATE groups, that both have implications and considerations for NHS staff when planning and delivering services, including single sex accommodation. Sex based rights are of course necessary for all women (and men) regardless of religion .

In which case we will fight them every step of the way (again). Off to check the policy of my local trust.

If you’re in the Midlands, you could contribute to the audit if you like:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5291237-nhs-policy-audit-working-party

I’m happy to do one Trust … I’m old school and not overly confident. Has anyone time to do a ‘Cheat Sheet’ of tasks and I’ll do it tonight 👍

The overriding qualifier is that we are all of the female sex. I see only problems in introducing other qualifiers (religion etc), since this risks creating a divisive hierarchy for who has first dibs on the safest bed, the side room etc.

At risk of going off at a tangent: the whole idea of wards, where several strangers sleep in the same room, is past its sell by date IMHO. Most if not all hospital accommodation should be single en-suite rooms (though I can imagine there are a few patients who are glad of company). We’re a long way from that in the UK I think, though I visited my brother recently in a swanky PPI built hospital, and it was all nice separate rooms with en-suites.

I think it’s going to take quite a few more legal challenges and compensation payouts before the penny drops for a lot of organisations. I also think actually enforcing it, even when they accept that’s what they have to do, is going to be hellish for the people having to do it , particularly for female gym/changing room attendants etc confronted with an aggressive large TW. The police used to see men in women’s spaces as a public order offence and would intervene. I think it’s going to take some time before this starts happening again, particularly if mayors and politicians drag their feet.
Sadly Starmer has been feeble on this subject so can’t see him helping to implement it.

If you hop over to this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5291237-nhs-policy-audit-working-party

and go to the last page, there’s a list of trusts that need doing. Post on there and someone will set you going.

@Bunpea thats the wrong way round to think of it though, it’s the trans person who should be accommodated elsewhere rather than breaching single sex rules ( which has long been the law) . It’s not just about bed spaces in the nhs, we run groups for eg.where we have to balance people’s needs according to ALL of the protected characteristics.

I’m not optimistic TBH. I’m sorry to sound gloomy but the NHS has spent years embedding this ideology. They’ve spent a lot of money on it. All the staff have been trained in it. They’ve had their rankings on the Stonewall schemes published and celebrated. The Stonewall rainbow lanyards and calendar events and staff/ally networks are all culturally embedded. Unless the cabinet sign off on de-radicalisation training, theres literally thousands of staff who have signed up. It’s going to be a long March bavk from that… hence why we need to record these policies now. Firstly to show who moves and how far. Secondly so as many people as possible understand and so can make sure their local trust doesn’t quietly backslide in a year or two.
If they slid these policies in once, then why not again in the future?

(apologies for my paranoia but the single sex policies regarding the secure mental health health facilities really really upset me. Vulnerable women with male “forensic patients”. (Google it) How could they?!)

Agreed - there was a south London trust which was really alarming. They’d clearly written their whole policy around one known trans patient who was a risk to women when “well” but had to be kept out of single sex spaces when having an episode. So unfair to the patients and staff. It read to me like Russian roulette with patient safety and some nurse was dumped with making the call week to week. Terrible

Agree, the trans identified male patients should be accommodated elsewhere. I don’t know how nursing staff manage to balance the demands created by all the protected characteristics - must be a nightmare.

@TwoLoonsAndASprout Thank you … I did follow a link up thread so I’m already reading that one; looking forward to offer any assistance 👍 I’ve screen shot the list of information headers to be populated to the spread sheet.

Im looking for a list of Trusts still to do … no doubt it will be on the thread you shared. I’m scan reading through it now.

@KnottyAuty I’m no longer working but having worked in mental health for part of my career, those experiences ( including having a patient raped by another patient) have really informed my opinions . My parent was also on a mixed sex mental health inpatient unit and they can be scary places to be. It should be a never event for a patient to be sexually abused when in NHS care. Apart from the risks of those situations, it’s also about the dignity and privacy of ALL patients, whether that’s the elderly man with dementia who tries to get in bed and be intimate with a woman he thinks is his wife, the man with a head injury who is openly masturbating in a mixed ward or the trans woman who’s having hallucinations and wandering around half naked.

The forms have evolved a bit as we’ve got better at this, so some of the information you’ll be asked for might be somewhat different from what’s on your screenshot. But don’t worry - there are lots of us to hand hold over there!

Thank you very much to MNetters who have and still are investigating and communicating this.

I am in South London, are you able to say which trust this is please? Or if I name one can you say yea or nay?

And another massive thank you to @KnottyAuty and her MN colleagues for this work.

I will be completely honest and say that I can't remember off the top of my head.
However I would be a bit reticent to say which trust because it was so specific, it might be possible to identify the individual. I think they reserve the right to privacy so I will leave it to the journalists who are trying to write it up, to decide the best way to release the information to hold the NHS to account rather than the patient. At the moment I've been told that they are struggling with the volume of information we dug up for them just on London.... more stories to come. And we are about the complete the Midlands hopefully just before the local elections there. Bit like a firehose of trans info - unfortunately or fortunately depending on your POV and the timing I suppose...

I’ve just checked the policy of my local trust and the first few pages are all about how single sex spaces are important then as soon as you get to the part about transgender patients, it’s a complete about turn and they must be accommodated according to their presentation. So the first few pages are a load of bollocks then basically.

Yup! If I can speak for the auditors, I would hazard a guess that we will find that every single NHS trust in the country has this sort of two-tier system of presenting their single-sex/mixed-sex policies.

If you want to come over and join us, it looks like
you’ve already done half the work!

Now the EA has been clarified I’m pretty sure what they’re doing is illegal. Before they used weasel words like Starmer. They can’t do that now. So they’ll need to update their policies.

It was always unlawful but the control of language in terms of pronouns and not being able to say a man was male etc made it difficult to say. But it was always the truth and the EA was only unclear if you started ignoring what "sex" meant. Which is why almost all the trusts conflate sex and gender - once you have done that you have a word salad that noone understands and self ID by stealth.

It is a shocker and the letters sent to NHS staff and Unison announcements etc so far indicate that there will be solid resistance to winding these policies back. The audit thread is partly about recording that they all took this unlawful stance and then being able to measure against that to see who changes. I fear that like NHS Fife the policies themselves will be disappeared but the practices will live on undocumented... I am hopefully being unduly gloomy

Hi @TwoLoonsAndASprout Thank you, im just catching up in between cooking evening meal. I intend to be back later depending on level of pain 🤞

Happy to join you if you let me know what info you need.