Exactly this. I'm both enraged that the NHS has fallen for this garbled, unscientific ideology, and worried for those it has harmed. Also worried that this will further undermine our precious health service. What a mess.
Anne Harper-Wright
(extract)
The birth of Legal Gender; the death of Legal Sex. The Gender Recognition Act.
In 2004, a piece of legislation called the Gender Recognition Act quietly became law. The primary purpose of the act was ostensibly to allow approximately 5000 mostly biologically male transsexuals, via a tightly controlled and medically certificated approval process, to be treated as if they were female so that they could marry another man. In the era when same sex marriage was prohibited, there was a greater appetite for creating an apparent ‘heterosexual’ marriage from a same sex relationship, than there was to legalise same sex marriage. A ‘legal fiction’ was approved. Birth certificates were altered. Biologically male became legally female. ‘Gender’ became legally recognised, and, it was agreed, gender trumps sex.
The Act in essence changed the definition of male and female from a biological definition to a psychological one.
This set in motion the re-categorisation of an entire society into two psychological gender groups instead of by the sexes.
Gender gradually REPLACED sex. For all of us. People started to be sorted by purported ‘psychology’, not biology.
The votes for the Gender Recognition bill were split down party lines. A Labour Government whip resulted in 289 labour votes for the bill. Most conservative MPs however, voted against the passing of this bill that enabled the concept of ‘gender’ to supersede sex. A conservative MP, Andrew Lansley, however, rebelled and voted aye.
Andrew Lansley was in no doubt of the distinction between sex and gender. He voted for gender to legally outrank and overwrite sex.
Six years later in 2010 Andrew Lansley rose to the role of Health Secretary within the coalition government. (continues)
The claim: Elimination of Mixed Sex wards.
In 2010, to great fanfare, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley of the Conservative party announced the Coalition Government’s laudable commitment to place all NHS hospital patients in single-sex wards — with any mixed sex breaches made public and financial penalties imposed.
“It should be more than an expectation, it should be a requirement that patients who are admitted should be admitted to single-sex accommodation,” the Health Secretary told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme.
“Patients should be in single-sex accommodation, meaning that all of their period that they are admitted they should be in a bed or a bay which only consists of people of the same sex.
“And they should be able to come and go, for example to all their washing and toilet facilities, without having to pass through a part of the ward or another ward where there might be people of a different sex… so to that extent they would have the kind of privacy and dignity people have a right to expect.”
And he added:
“Patients should not suffer the indignity of being cared for in mixed-sex accommodation. I am determined to put an end to this practice, where it is not clinically justified.”
Categorical statements such as these from Lansley were uttered in the same year that a new Act; the Equality Act 2010, committed to continuing to protect biological SEX based rights, with sex being one of 9 protected characteristics that would be monitored to stop discrimination. ‘Gender reassignment’ was one of the nine protected characteristics, and biological sex was another, protected in its own right. The two characteristics are differentiated and distinct in law.
So when the Government announced the characteristic for NHS ward segregation would be ‘sex’ that was an unambiguous statement relating to a specific protected characteristic. Biological sex is a tangible, physical reality. NHS Wards were promised to be explicitly single sex, not single gender. Bodily dignity and privacy for the biological sexes, not segregation by invisible personality type. The government’s commitment to respecting the privacy and dignity of the sexes, they reassured us, still remained unassailable.
Mr Lansley’s choice of the word SEX rather than gender was very deliberate.
Sex and gender are not the same thing, after all.
The truth: “The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex”.
Despite what the public were told, the policy was always explicitly based upon segregating by ‘gender’ and not sex, right from its inception.
NHS documents and records dated from 2010 show that before the policy was implemented, whilst still in its design stages, the specifications always related to gender, not sex. And yet the name of the policy, and all references to it to the general public were explicitly instructed to be sex, not gender. The opposite of the truth."(continues)
The deliberate use of the word SEX to name the policy, whilst using GENDER to facilitate it, was a Department of Health mandate from Andrew Lansley.
The NHS Information Standards Team who were tasked with creating the infrastructure to execute monitoring and reporting on breaches of this policy understood their task. To utilise patient data relating to gender, not sex. To segregate wards by assumed or self-declared ‘gender’, not sex. Discussions at that time between the NHS team and the DOH left no doubt; what was being created was a standard that measured breaches in mixed-gender, not mixed sex wards. Mixing people of differently sexed bodies was acceptable, whilst ‘psyches’ were separated.
The NHS team told the Department of Health that the name of this policy was misleading. They insisted it should truthfully be called “Eliminating Mixed Gender Accommodation’. A source within the NHS confirmed that they fully understood that this policy related to gender, but that the DOH was explicit in its directive:
Segregate wards by gender. But definitely tell people it is by sex. “To ensure a better public understanding”. (continues)
medium.com/@anneharperwright/sex-gender-the-nhs-1e8f4e6363a6