Relevant bits in minutes (apologies for typos, I OCRd the minutes):
Dr Julie Maxwell speaks
As a community paediatrician, I deal mainly with children who are perhaps on the autistic spectrum, or with children in care as well. I have become increasing interested in the area of gender dysphoria and over the past couple of years as I became horrified as I saw what was happening with hospital seconds.
I have become aware, and these are just the children I have been involved with, a number of children in all sorts of ages, all under sixteen, who have had their name and their gender changed on the hospital records,
. In fact, some children, they even had new NHS numbers issued, which entail new medical records. Normally, a new NHS number is given when a child is adopted. I was quite shocked to discover this
The hospital records of these children, whether they have got a new NHS number or not, may therefore have no record at all of their biological sex.
As a community paediatocian, safeguarding is always on top of my list and this has huge safeguarding implications
. A young child is having this done by a parent or a carer, which means that they could tum up at a hospital and have basically a fictitious set of notes created in a new name, which could enable parents to shop around hospitals, child abuse to theoretically go unchallenged and could also enable somebody other than the parent to present the child at a hospital and pose as the parent because the records become effectively completely fictitious
Secondly, if the medical records do not have the child's biological sex recorded, and they do not have the fact that the child is transgender recorded, then it could lead to potentially distressing situations where it could be in the middle of a assessment or consultation that the
professional discovers that this child is not in fact the sex that they have been told they are And if the child has been led to believe that they see the opposite sex, it could be an extremely distressing situation all round for the child, the parent and the professional
I do not routinely examine genitals of a child unless there is a good reason. So, I might have no idea that the child I was dealing with might in fact be of the opposite sex
...
These falsified records, which is what they
effectively are, can lead immediately to child trafficking and child abuse Falsified records are the key to child trafficking globally. In the last five years, the amount of child trafficking out of the UK has grown exponentially. The UK has for the first time become a trafficking route and a trafficking hub. Nationally, child abuse has aho men. False records, particularly false medical records enable these crimes to pass unnoticed