Royal College of GPs forced into U-turn after cancelling gender-critical doctors’ conference

[IwantToRetire]

Baroness Hayter, a Labour peer, subsequently wrote to the college to warn it that gender-critical beliefs were protected under the Equality Act 2010.

She told The Telegraph: “I’m shocked and disappointed that a medical body – indeed a Royal College – which should promote evidence-based treatment tried to close down debate on an important clinical issue. This is not in patients’ interests. Open, academic discussion is essential if all patients and their carers are to be guaranteed best treatment by their GPs.

“The RCGP needs to explain why it sought to silence certain senior medical practitioners and thus deny their own members the opportunity of hearing current findings on this subject.”

Prof Mike Holmes, the chairman of the trustees for the RCGP, said: “Our initial concern… was that it was being marketed and publicised in a way that could give the impression the college was hosting, sponsoring or supporting the conference and having an active role in the content and programme.”

The college said that after CAN-GS agreed to remove the college’s name from promotional material, it “decided to honour the booking”.

Full story here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/16/lgbtq-rcgp-conference-on-sex-and-gender-cancelled/

It doesn't seem to be behind a paywall but in case it disappears it has been archived https://archive.ph/rJjsH

“A spokesman for the Association of LGBTQ+ Doctors & Dentists said: “The existence and rights of gender-diverse people are not up for debate and the community currently does not feel safe as the result of actions of groups like CAN-SG. This is not about wokery but about decency.”

🙄 The irony.

You would have thought anyone working in the area of health would be interested in finding out if current practices are safe, and if not reviewed.

Let alone feel unsafe because of "Science-based Dialogue"!!!!!!

LGBTQ+ campaigners approached the college to express their concern that it was allowing the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG), a group of psychiatrists and doctors who campaign for <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/rJjsH/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/17/richard-dawkins-interview-trans-ideology-genetic-book-dead/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">science-based dialogue on gender issues, to use its conference space.

The event, titled First Do No Harm, aims to explore “current controversies in the care of <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/rJjsH/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/04/children-aged-seven-nhs-transgender-treatment/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">children and young people with gender-related distress”.

i am attending this. i am a paediatric health care professional working in child protection in the NHS.
the speakers are well informed and look to be bringing an interesting and useful message to the world of children's safeguarding and well being.
closing down debate is no different to the behaviours of dictators the world over. i received an email last week from the organisers asking for public support for the event to go ahead due to pressure form the TRA side. i was still deciding how far i was willing to go when I heard of the developments.
interestingly the team i work with are very keen for me to go and feedback the learning. there are many of us who want to look at the issue through a broad lens and keep children's welfare first and foremost. but many are scared to speak out. we were forced to attend 'unconscious' bias training recently that was in fact a TRA telling everyone about there 'wrong think'. Well i say everyone, i happened to have annual leave that day for something very important that couldn't be changed 😉
i will be booking my train to attend this and will feedback here after the event.

i am attending this.

I'm attending virtually via the livestream. I'll make a donation to the conference for its costs. (I've worked with one of the speakers and know another.)

I am attending via live stream as I can’t be in London on that day. This topic is tangential to my practice, but a colleague I have a lot of respect for is speaking and I want to show support. And I hate the world upside down notion that discussing evidence about what is safe versus not safe is somehow “unsafe”. If people expect doctors to prescribe these drugs, then the evidence base must be established (or not)…

Thank you to those who are attending - please do report back! Presumably much of what is discussed in relation to children/young people could also apply to adults? The 'treatment' for GD is still harmful whether to an adult or a child's body.

I am also attending.

I work in a major children's hospital and this is tangential to my clinical practice but extremely important. The lack of evidence based practice in the UK is deeply concerning. The speaker line up is very impressive.

It is deeply ironic that there are attempts to shut this conference down and sad that it was only the risk of legal action cf. Joanna Cherry/ The Stand that made the RCGP back down.

I worry that my current GC stance will prove to be on the wrong side of history - do the Gender ideology brigade not worry about this too? There is a culture of fear about discussing GC opinions in the current NHS. My employer allows gender identity to be recorded on fucking new born babies. And I've observed several times that those doing data entry aren't just changing the gender identity box but are also changing the sex categorisation too. I think it's because they don't appreciate the difference between gender identity and sex.

There is the potential for so much harm. If your biological sex is recorded incorrectly on the NHS computer system changes it's highly likely that you will miss out on sex based health interventions in the future e.g breast/ cervical/ prostate cancer screening?

No amount of wishful thinking about your gender can take away those risks. It may be that extensive exposure to high levels of exogenous hormones modifies the risks. But again, we need to know that!

Thank you.

Another thanks from me.

Place marking as very interested to hear how this goes. And really pleased it’s going ahead.

My employer allows gender identity to be recorded on fucking new born babies. And I've observed several times that those doing data entry aren't just changing the gender identity box but are also changing the sex categorisation too. I think it's because they don't appreciate the difference between gender identity and sex.

I think this is now, as it were, an additional problem. So many institutions have been captured, that there are those who have grown up thinking sex and gender are the same.

Bad enough having to confront those who have a "belief" about this, but nearly as hard in a different way, is getting those who have never known anything different to unlearn what they have just assume is correct.

And I too add my thanks to those attending.

And of course to those who were brave enought to organise the event, and not cave in when confronted with being banned.

And I've observed several times that those doing data entry aren't just changing the gender identity box but are also changing the sex categorisation too.

So they think the two have to match? Why would you have two different boxes then? Surely it's common sense that if there are two boxes, they can be different.

Isn't that frightening - that there are those working in the NHS so stupid that they don't understand the difference between sex and gender and are incorrectly categorising babies! And colleagues daren't speak up becuase they'll be bullied and no doubt reported.
How have we allowed this to happen?

'Gender' is commonly used as a euphemism for sex, and has been for a long time. So there are a lot of people who think it's the same thing.

'Gender' as an indefinable quality, distinct from a person's sex, and chosen by the individual, is a new meaning of this word, and one which has only come into common usage in the last 5-10 years. There must be many people who are not aware of this new meaning. That doesn't mean they're stupid.

I think that most people (excluding FWR regulars and people steeped in trans ideology) who were given an NHS form which asked for their sex and their gender, would think they were asking for the same thing twice. NHS staff who haven't been given specific training about what the two terms meant would probably think the same.

OK. How about dangerous instead of stupid? These people are incorrectly recording sex / gender of babies - as the poster I was responding to (medic working in a children's hospital) pointed out:

"If your biological sex is recorded incorrectly on the NHS computer system changes it's highly likely that you will miss out on sex based health interventions in the future e.g breast/ cervical/ prostate cancer screening?"

She didn't actually say that the sex/gender of babies was being recorded incorrectly, just that there was a field for gender identity for babies. I assumed the next bit about changing the sex categorisation when they change the gender identity was for older patients who had declared a new gender identity.

My employer allows gender identity to be recorded on fucking new born babies. And I've observed several times that those doing data entry aren't just changing the gender identity box but are also changing the sex categorisation too. I think it's because they don't appreciate the difference between gender identity and sex.

But you're blaming the wrong people. The employees who are filling these forms are ordinary people, many of whom won't be familiar with the new meaning of 'gender'. They're not the ones who are stupid or dangerous. The people to blame are the employers who haven't trained their staff how to fill in the form and what 'gender' or 'gender identity' means, and that it has nothing to do with a person's sex. Even many of those who have heard of 'gender identity' think that it has something to do with a person's sex.

The really stupid, dangerous people are the ones who put 'gender identity' on the forms in the first place. It has no place in a medical setting.

Interesting how my local surgery are doing it.

Does a person's NHS and GP record always include their sex (as observed at birth) even if that person later has feelings of being something else or has medication or surgery to alter their physical body to approximate to that of another sex, and/or changes their pronouns and name?

Are people with GR certificates able to change their sex on their NHS and GP records so that no trace of their original sex is recorded anywhere?

This is from 2018, but I don't know if anything's changed.

https://medium.com/@anneharperwright/sex-gender-the-nhs-bb86b0c3ebb

I submitted my Subject Access Request to my local hospital to look at my own medical record data.
And what I found was this.
My personal medical record sex field is BLANK. Unpopulated.
In a disturbing turn of events, the hospital that cared for me in pregnancy and childbirth, twice, doesn’t know what physical sex I am.
It is sure, however, that I have a ladybrain, though. Because there it is on my medical record. I have definitely never discussed my inner femininity with any doctor that I recall. I don’t remember asking that my adherence to stereotypes, or ladybrain mentality be captured on my medical record. Nevertheless, here it is, my female ‘gender identity’ that I didn’t know I had

Edit: I just reread your post and realised that you were asking specifically about people with GRCs or diverse gender identities, but this shows that they don't always record sex for anyone.

Thanks for the link. I'm adding it to my file of documents to read when I can give it the time it deserves. I got as far as:
'There is evidence that male blood transfusion recipients face higher mortality rates if their blood donor is female and has ever been pregnant. Transplant donor/recipient sex matters. Sex matters. '
I never knew that about blood donations - another thing to investigate further!

Prof Kaltiala's one of the authors of this study and is a speaker at this conference.

Ruuska S, Tuisku K, Holttinen T, et al All-cause and suicide mortalities among adolescents and young adults who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland in 1996–2019: a register study BMJ Ment Health 2024;27:e300940.

https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e300940.full

Mary Harrington comments on the study.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/new-study-trans-youth-not-at-elevated-risk-of-suicide/

When someone gets a GRC I believe that medical records are changed, the GRC holder will get a new NHS number. I work with these numbers, when I see one beginning with a 7 I think that is a baby/child, or a recent immigrant or extremely rarely someone with a GRC, I have never come across someone with a GRC in my role but I noticed this when a well known trans Twitter/X personality posted pictures of himself in hospital with his ID band visible.

Babies born today will have an NHS number beginning 733 as an example.

'Gender' is commonly used as a euphemism for sex, and has been for a long time. So there are a lot of people who think it's the same thing.

This isn't true. A relatively recent example is the sex discrimination act. ie it refers to sex not gender.

And if you look back at old newspaper articles they would never refer to gender.

However in more recent years as students who are products of queer influenced teaching at universities, enter journalism this began to change. And it wasn't necessarily a conscious TRA intention, but an unconcious learnt pattern of thought.

And only once it was established as part of everyday language, did the overt political message of gender (identity) and (biological) sex being the same thing.

Just as the arguement about stopping Women's Studies being Women's Studies and turned into Gender Studies was argued from a TRA position but a sex discrimination position ie to admit that women needed more than men special acadmic investigation got through and well established MRA social politics. But it is whether the consequences of that were unintentional, or a concealed step towards eradicating sex as a distinguishing marker.

As said many times, one of the reasons the TRAs are so sucessful is because the MRAs create a base on which to further extend anti woman policies and ideas.

I said 'a long time', but I wasn't thinking of as far back as the 1970s when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, I was thinking of things like this, from the GRA (section 9):

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

The implication here is that sex and gender are the same thing. Also on forms, for some years now, 'gender' has often been used instead of sex when they are really asking for people's sex. I'm sure many people are unaware of the recent goalpost-shifting.

I think that most people (excluding FWR regulars and people steeped in trans ideology) who were given an NHS form which asked for their sex and their gender, would think they were asking for the same thing twice. NHS staff who haven't been given specific training about what the two terms meant would probably think the same.

Yes, I agree. That's why there are so many threads here for "can you guess my unborn baby's gender from the early scan photo".