Say ‘women’ not ‘people with ovaries’, Sajid Javid orders NHS as experts warn woke language puts patients at risk

[yourhairiswinterfire]

-The NHS quietly removed terms like women from three cancer web pages.
-These are the pages for ovarian cancer, womb cancer and for cervical cancer.
-Collectively these cancers kill about 7,500 British women every year on average.

Sajid Javid is prepared to wage war against gender-free language after he demanded the NHS stop dropping the word 'women' from its online health advice.
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The minister, 52, has repeatedly said he does not agree with the health service removing the word from its ovarian cancer guidance webpage.
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NHS Digital bosses have been warned future changes to gendered language must be rubber-stamped by officials at Mr Javid's Department of Health, reports The Sun.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10925093/Sajid-Javid-orders-NHS-bosses-stop-dropping-women-online-advice-pages.html

Hooray! About time too! 👏🏼

Just future changes? So the penis-owner pages are safe but the 3 most common female cancer pages are staying as ovary/cervix/womb owner cancers?

'When men and women have finished their periods'. Another inaccurate page. Surely men bleeding from any orifice is a worry, not a period??

To be fair, I think that’s more like a grammar mistake. It should be “men, and women who have finished their periods” I think

🥳 Well done sajid Javid

You've misquoted it. It says 'for men and for women whose periods have stopped'. However, the fault is their daft unclear wording. They could easily have phrased it unambiguously eg "for women whose periods have stopped, and for any man...."

Agree with @lassof - what about NOW?

This nonsense is harming women NOW.

time to write to Mr Javid, I think, to double down on removing all gender free language from the nhs now, not just future stuff. Part of the problem is that the civil service/nhs etc have been so completely captured that they are unwilling to reverse back on what they are doing. The government needs to show real leadership on this and take back control if the "public servants " won't respect ministers directions.

Too damn right. Women have to start correcting and complaining about this!

Of course some already are correcting and complaining

I am thinking I will write to my Tory MP and ask him to support Sajid Javid in keeping sex based language in NHS general information and communication with separate resources for trans and non binary identifying people.

I might send him a copy of this.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864964/

Good idea Pomegranate.

There HAS to be some legislation put in place that gender woo has NO place in the medical world.
We are dealing with sexed bodies, not identities. It has NO place in any medical setting except (perhaps) psychology.
However, I fear the NHS are totally and utterly captured by this.
My 71 year old CLEARLY FEMALE Mother had a stroke a few months ago. Guess what one of the FIRST questions they asked her while she was confused, unable to walk, and after being parked in A&E for 13 hours on a trolley because there was no space on the stroke ward?
"How do you identify?".

That's where we are now.
The doctor took one look at my face and apologised.

Excellent news but he also needs to reverse what's been done already.

I think letters at this moment are a good idea. We seem to be reaching a tipping point.

I know that MPs don't reply to people who are not their own constituents but can you write directly to a minister in the person's capacity as a department head? Do ministers reply if directly addressed at his or her department rather than the House of Commons? Or are we better just writing to our own MPs (mine is useless and just sits on the fence)?

I am glad he's spoken out. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for transmen who would rather compromise their health rather than admit that biologically they are women.

I note of course that they didn't change the pages about prostate havers and cancers, and surely the TWAW brigade are just as likely to get this as a biological man.

Javid has been great on this. Not fast enough but he’s getting there. Next the Rainbow Badges scheme. NHS institutions shouldn’t be measured against how many of their staff are outing themselves at work.

If the NHS or any other body dealing with medical matters including charities won't change back to sex based language then there will have to be legislation to force them to do so and that is what I think needs to happen now.

I will write to Mr Javid, his words are not enough he needs to make it implicit and non negotiable, why the fuck should women pay taxes to a body that erases them and the medical conditions that ONLY affect them?

i cannot believe anyone of sound mind would ask that question of an elderly, confused, worried patient. How is she helped by that?

Women's health isn't given the support it needs anyway, so the last thing we need is time wasted on fudging the language around it.

E.g. I forget how many maternity scandals I have seen in my adult life, with the same mantra, lessons will be learnt, improvements made, until the next scandal with exactly the same causes comes along.

Last time I wrote to my MP was to ask him to support Liz Truss in maintaining single sex spaces for women, he passed on a copy of my letter to Liz Truss. He had a letter back from Kemi Badenoch asking him to thank me for raising this important issue and to reassure me that maintaining access to single sex spaces is important to the government. The letter also outlined the issue briefly for him. I consider all that positive because now he has it from a minister for equalities as well as from a constituent.

I also emailed Liz Truss on a separate occasion (not my MP) and received a reply. As I understand it MPs may reply to those who aren’t constituents but are not obliged to.

I wrote to Sajid Javid and the head of NHS England, Amanda Pritchard back in March, enclosing a printed out copy (as well as the link) of this paper, demanding they write to all NHS trusts and instruct them to maintain use of sexed language except for specific areas where that was not the most appropriate language.

Neither of them have replied to me.

But I like to hope that my letter may have contributed in some small way to this statement from him.

I suppose I ought to do a follow up letter really.

internal-journal.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2022.818856/full?fbclid=IwAR1GmMyg9yC58i3SargXSSpsw1NgaVoD6raB8cz40YuEgx9VxFTr5A4m4OQ

ChristinaXYZ I write to my MP and he then writes to a relevant minister. He gets replies - usually a response from a useless civil servant who's drunk the Stonewall kool aid but more recently there are signs of rationality and intelligence emerging in responses.

Yes you can, and yes they will (well the civil servants will reply at any rate) 😊

Good. And about time too. The NHS spent decades making their publications clear so that more people, including non-native speakers and those with learning disabilities, could understand them. In the last few years this has all been cast out by an excess of woo.