December 12, 2024 - 7:00am
Yesterday was a good day for children. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has announced that following expert advice, puberty-blocking drugs will no longer be prescribed to under-18s who are confused about their gender. A loophole allowing private providers based abroad to dash off prescriptions has also been closed. This marks the end of a medical experiment on some of the most vulnerable children in the UK, a scandal that ought to prompt a reckoning. Clinicians who turned a blind eye to the evidence, who broke their oath to “first do no harm”, must now be held accountable.
But while the children have finally been protected, transgender ideology remains deeply rooted throughout the NHS. Walk into any NHS hospital, and you will not only be confronted with rainbow lanyards, badges and vapid posters about identity, you will be subject to policies influenced by transgender activists. And away from the frontline, roles such as the National Advisor for LGBT Health ensure ideologues are reserved a seat at the top table. It has been left to ordinary people — patients, carers and NHS employees — to push back against the might of the equality, diversity and inclusion industry.
Staff have become campaigners for simply expecting to be treated with dignity at work. When a female group of nurses, known as the Darlington Five, complained about a trans-identified male colleague who insisted on changing alongside them, their employer, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, allegedly responded by telling the women they needed to broaden their minds. They are now suing the trust.
It is not only staff who are impacted by “trans inclusion” policies. Should a patient be lucky enough to secure an appointment, there is no guarantee that a wish to see a clinician of the same sex will be respected. When this was raised by Sex Matters executive director Maya Forstater, who highlighted the case of Kamilla Kamaruddin, a male trans-identified GP who she said “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent”, Forstater was investigated by the police.
But it is women-only NHS services, such as maternity, where the ridiculous overreach of trans ideology is most apparent. Over recent years, there has been a concerted push to strip back sex-specific language and to claim that “all genders” give birth. This is apparently so as not to offend a tiny minority of expectant mothers who identify as transmen or non-binary, women who are apparently triggered by words like “female” but not by pushing a baby out of their vagina. It seems clear such policies are not really about including a vulnerable group: rather, they are an offering thrown by anxious EDI managers to stuff the gobs of complaining trans activists.
Ultimately, the prioritisation of trans activists’ demands is not surprising, for today’s doctors are being indoctrinated before they even set foot in a ward. Nearly every medical school in the UK has signed a controversial charter written by GLADD, the Association of LGBTQ+ Doctors and Dentists. The document commits signatories to support the banning of “so-called LGBTQ+ ‘conversion therapy’ in the UK” and to ensure that curricula stress the “importance of working with LGBTQ+ patients” by affirming and respecting their gender identity. While this sounds anodyne, colluding in a patient’s identification as the opposite sex, or belief that they are neither sex, is based on ideology, not evidence.
The harm inflicted on thousands of children by NHS professionals is the nadir of corporate acceptance of transgenderism in the UK. It is right that Streeting has finally called an end to it. But this end should mark a beginning. It is now time to reclaim the public services taken over by ideologies which hurt us all.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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SubscribeAgree that Wes Streeting’s decision is only a step, albeit an important step, in returning the NHS to sanity when it comes to Trans ideology. Sensible article.
It’s really the most important area of concern. Compared to the risks involved in destroying lives, referring to pregnant women who think they are men, as men, is pretty small beer.
If calling an individual pregnant woman “sir” because she demands it was all that was implied by the undermining of sex based language then you might have a point.
Personally I don’t use “preferred pronouns” for the same reason I don’t speak to their imaginary friends. I refuse to be coerced into affirming something I know is not true. However, I understand that, for example, midwives have to focus on the safe delivery of the child and mother, not fixing the mental health of delusional people.
But that’s not where it ends is it.
Accommodating these fantastical beliefs has led to the attempted “de-sexing” the language of health information, making it confusing or even unintelligible to people not familiar with the current Newspeak. In circumstances where clarity of information is fundamentally important, the NHS is asking people to navigate an ideological language which seeks to obscure and overturn basic biological facts.
And as I mention above, prioritisation of gender over sex in record keeping is playing havoc with the data and statistics which public services, including health, rely on for planning.
What started with “being kind” and respecting people’s identity has very quickly (and predictably) led to clinicians not being able to do their jobs properly and an astonishing rise in the number of female rapists being processed by the courts.
I agree that accurate data is important. So something like F(S) M(G) would make sense.
I get your point, but we all collude in this sort of stuff all the time. Have you never been to a leaving do where everyone applauds as the speaker says that an obnoxious and useless member of staff will be “sorely missed”. It’s a language game.
That’s a false equivalence in multiple ways.
In the circumstances you describe we are expected to abide by the vague social convention of applauding, but nobody is being forced to do so under threat of sanction.
Also, the value of that staff member is a matter of opinion. Even if they are objectively useless at their job, some may value them for other reasons.
It is also of no particular significance, because they are leaving. Please note that I would not go along with the pretence that they are valued in other circumstances where there are consequences, such as a salary or performance review.
As we are increasingly seeing (though should have been obvious all along) coercing society into affirming that men are women (and vice versa) if they say so has a demonstrable negative impact on things like women’s rights, safeguarding of children, and freedom of speech.
Excellent reply.
I thought it was a good reply too, though I wasn’t claiming an exact equivalence. Just making the point that our lives are full of fictions of all sorts. We really don’t live our lives n the pure light of truth.
That’s not even the half of it. Its about forcing everyone else to affirm what they know is a lie, that men can become women if they say so and vice versa. The bigger and more ridiculous the lie that you can coerce people into accepting, the more control you have.
As so often, Orwell saw this coming:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If the policy simply stopped at “respecting a patients gender identity” at a clinician-to-patient level, then it might be defendable. There are circumstances in which a doctor will legitimately judge that it is preferable to refer to a patient by preferred pronouns, for example in order to expedite treatment for a distressed patient.
But of course it doesn’t stop there. As with so many other areas, once you allow men to self-identify as women, then it becomes functionally impossible to maintain a separate women’s category. Sooner or later – normally sooner – a man will self-identify into that service, sport, refuge or whatever and it is no longer a separate women’s service.
I was at a Future of Government IT conference recently where a delegate (who turned out to be Maya Forstater) raised a point from the floor that NHS radiographers are having to double-check whether every patient might be pregnant because gender is being recorded, not sex. They simply can’t trust that the patient record contains the correct information they need for their clinical purpose any more. Not only is this a waste of valuable NHS time, it risks having a catastrophic impact on health service planning if some of the most important data can’t be relied upon.
Increasingly it is women identifying as men – hence the pregnant man stuff.
Would it really cause so much outrage if NHS staff simply asked about biological sex? They could simply ask everyone. Certainly quicker than pretending biological men can be pregnant.
It only causes outrage to the type of dimwit idealogues who think that recognising biological reality is “violence”.
Unfortunately that group has disproportionate influence.
But do we know that is the case, or are we just assuming it is?
You may well be right, and that’s my experience of activists in general. But do we know that the average trans person behaves like that?
It only takes one to complain and then all hell breaks loose.
Perhaps – but that’s our fault for taking fools seriously.
I don’t think the average trans person behaves like that at all. Certainly the limited number I have met in my life haven’t.
Just as I don’t think the average black person is bothered on a day by day basis by white privilege.
I do think that a proportion of highly vocal trans people and activist fellow travellers have had a disproportionate influence in this area.
On that we agree. Though this isn’t new with trans. Activists have been up to this nonsense for as long as I can remember.
Interesting that you mention Orwell.
Current ‘wokeness’ will propel us into very dangerous conditions in the near future and beyond. Control is coming in the form of the ‘social credit system’ that is being adopted from China. Canada will unfortunately be one of the first countries to implement these draconian measures that closely parallel Orwell’s 1984…
I look forward to the law suits for “child mutilation” hitting full flow.
And watch all those doctors involved go into hiding, change their names, and scurry off overseas. Like all such people, when the tables turn, they’re the first to say it wasn’t them and that, secretly, they were against it all along. It would be a moot point to call them gutless creeps, of course!
Congratulations to Wes Streeting on doing this. I do wonder however about the design of suggested future studies. Which group of children would be selected for possible mutilation in these experiments ?
It’s an outrage that the NHS uses resources to push political ideas.
I doubt that the NHS would save much money from ditching EDI but it would, perhaps, focus minds back to their reason for being.
But when did it start doing that?
Perhaps you should read the article again
Many years ago men married women and they had babies together. Perhaps things were better then and perhaps they weren’t, but things have changed and become more complex since then. A child can now have two dads or two mums.
But I’m not sure we can really turn the clock back now to those simpler times. So why call a sudden halt only with trans? Is pretending that a child can be born of a man so different to pretending that a child can have two mothers?
Yes, it is. A child who has two mothers is not having their body pumped full of chemicals that will irreversibly alter their bodies, lead to healthy body parts being cut off for ideological reasons, and ensure that they’ll never have a satisfactory and/or fulfilling sex life. So, I would say that there is a BIG difference.
There are multiple issues here with varying degrees of seriousness. My comment is about the language issue. If we refer to two women as the mum in relation to a child, is that so different to referring to the mum as a man. Both deny biological fact.
The issue you refer to is a far more important one, and I think Wes S is right. I also think we need to know far more about what trans is as a phenomena.
It’s like I said on the Pink News story: ‘his husband’ directly led to ‘her p*nis’.
I noticed your comment, and agree.
. There’s a real misconception that this all started with trans. There are even people who treat woke and trans as synonyms. Either they were quite literally born yesterday or they have no cultural memory.
Took a Labour Minister to do the obvious. Good.
There is a degree of EDI twaddle in NHS, but it doesn’t impact vast majority anywhere near the amount commentators may suggest. We’re too busy. And furthermore managing Trans patients is not new. There have been trans patients for years and usually sensitive commons sense approach adopted.
As well as trans patients not being new it’s probably true that NHS attracted and employed a higher proportion of LGBs for decades too. Diversity per se doesn’t frighten most NHS workers in quite the way it seems to frighten others, esp the keyboard warrior types, because it’s the norm.
Thanks for a sensible post.
There have been trans patients for years and usually sensitive commons sense approach adopted.
So why did society deviate from those approaches to ones that defy common sense? It’s not ‘diversity’ to pretend that a man is a woman or that a guy can get pregnant.
The issue with Minors does seem to have been driven by a particular group of clinicians whom Cass Report rightly excoriates. The rest aren’t really new issues, although perhaps social media and greater awareness has led to some potential abusers using a Trans identity and Sturgeon got it all wrong in Scotland. However it’s wrong to lump all Trans into this. They are not new and in the NHS we’ve handled their care needs quite sensitively in the past without all the bandwagon jumpers. Most just want to quietly get on with their lives grappling with what they’ve been given. You see all types in hospital when folks are vulnerable. There is little in the human condition one doesn’t come across.
“They are not new”. They are exactly that. Before 1990 there wasn’t a single transgender person in the world.
The concept ‘transgender’ hadn’t been invented.
I don’t know about the concept, but there have been trans individuals throughout history and across cultures. You can’t base your arguments on ignorance.
For an entertaining example, read the account of Gaugins arrival in Tahiti.
And I guess you would contend there were no Gay people until 1967?
Keep posting. You’re making sense, in spite of the down votes.
This will be the Wes Streeting who worked at Stonewall as Head of ‘Education’?
Perhaps journalists should ask him why children are taught LBGT+ in primary school?
‘Normalising’ LBGT+ is part of the answer.
Why is this not ever mentioned or discussed in Unherd (stupid title)?
If you teach children what it is to be trans, some will decide they are.
Once again, you’re being ridiculously negative about Unherd for no good reason.
Unherd doesn’t exist to meet your individual requirements in the commissioning and publishing of articles. If you’re unhappy with the content, you have two obvious options:
1) Unherd asks for potential writers to submit their work and credentials for publication. Why not do so yourself, perhaps on the very topic you accuse it of not dealing with?
2) Unsubscribe.
In the end, making these whingeing requests of Unherd detracts from whatever other points you’re making, so you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
1. I have done this, obviously with no success.
2. Perhaps I will one day.
But, in the meantime,
I am perfectly entitled to call out Unherd (stupid name. Replace it with Herdthinking please) on the fact they feature no writer to explain what Gender Ideology is, and by doing that, they protect that Ideology.
How many articles are you unable to read that’ve centred around gender ideology? If not since you subscribed, try looking in the archives, under Kathleen Stock, for instance.
You’re welcome…
I am waiting to see an article that will criticise Gender Ideology. I don’t count the hundreds of articles that say it is absurd or gobbledegook or nonsense etc etc. Those have about as much value as someone crying and waving their arms about.
Stock argued that gender identity is a fiction. The trouble is someone will turn round and say “for me, it isn’t”.
Stock did not explain what gender is, where it came from and why. She did not explain why academic feminists created the concept of gender and support it to this day. She did not explain why they replaced sex with gender, and why gender is now taught in schools, and how it is being taught. She did not explain how Gender intersects with Race. This is vital if you want to refute the concept. You have to set out clearly what the Ideology is before you can rebut it.
No one makes the effort in Unherd.
Although KS does touch on this in her book. Perhaps she should cover on Unherd.
BTW – wrote comment above before reading your comment. It is irritating to see some of the originators of this taking a “nothing to do with me guv” approach.
My concern on this one is that it’s too one sided. And KS excepted, too much ranting and polemic.
I think what RL might feel is missing is an honest acceptance that gender ideology is rooted in feminism. Clearly it is, but the second wave feminists who appear on here would rather sidestep that uncomfortable fact.
The midwives always had the right idea about gender. Look between their legs
It is not only staff who are impacted by “trans inclusion” policies. ——-> How typically Orwellian. The demand for including one group and its wishes necessarily means excluding another group and its beliefs. It’s how we end up with stupidity like ‘pregnant people’ and ‘chestfeeding.’ Ideological capture is never pretty but the people in its grasp are quite stubborn about staying there.
The description of ” …a tiny minority of expectant mothers who identify as transmen or non-binary, women who are apparently triggered by words like “female” but not by pushing a baby out of their vagina” well captures the absurdity of gender ideology. As a lesbian weary of seeing the gay rights movement forcibly teamed with homophobic, misogynistic trans activism, I hope the insanity perpetrated under the nonsensical guise of “LGBTQ+” is coming to an end.
Adding this 12/13, because it gave me a much-needed laugh. Nellie Bowles of The Free Press in her rollicking Friday round-up. (Bowles and wife Bari Weiss are former NY Times writers who founded TFP. Weiss recently did an excellent interview with Keme Badenoch):
Forced puberty for all: The English must now all go through puberty, per vicious and fascist new NHS policies that ban the use of puberty blockers. Yes, even if your daughter plays with trucks, you cannot sterilize her with puberty blockers. If your son wears a dress, he must still be allowed to grow to a typical adult height and bone density. Horrible. What next? Gays having children?!
Important piece.