Quietly withdrawn

The rewrite team has been allowed entry at last.

NHS chiefs have been forced to rip up their pro-trans guidance after it was rendered illegal by the Supreme Court ruling.

The NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, has quietly withdrawn guidance telling hospitals that they should allow trans people to use their chosen toilets and changing rooms.

Guidance they should never have issued in the first place. I still, after all this time, cannot understand how adults managed to convince themselves to be so gullible and stupid about this issue.

The group told The Telegraph it had taken the guide down from its website because it had become “dated” since the Supreme Court judgment that the word sex in the Equality Act means biological sex.

Yeah right. What they mean is, the judgment made it untenable to keep lying about what sex people were. It should of course have been untenable all along.

On Thursday night, women’s rights charities demanded that the confederation apologise for the guidance, which they claimed may have led to unfair decisions, such as the case of Darlington nurses who were disciplined for demanding single-sex facilities.

They said that rather than deleting the guidance, the confederation should actively inform all trusts that it was now null and void.

Damn right. The guidance didn’t suddenly become ridiculous, it was ridiculous all along. An apology would be appropriate.

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, said: “Its guidance encouraged a hostile, humiliating and unsafe environment for NHS workers and patients. It was published with much fanfare but withdrawn by stealth.”

Nailed it.

The confederation’s now-withdrawn guidance stated: “In all types of workplaces, trans and non-binary people should be supported to use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable using. At no time is it appropriate to force staff to use the toilet associated with their assigned sex at birth against their will.”

But of course at all times it is appropriate to force those horrible people who don’t have a luxury gender to use the toilet with the other sex in it against their will. Trans people get to choose; no one else does. That’s fairness.

A spokesman for the confederation said: “We have withdrawn our guide from our website as elements of it were dated following the ruling of the Supreme Court in April and interim guidance from the EHRC.

Mmmmmmno. Not dated. Wrong. Always wrong. Wrong from the outset. Wrong then as now.

“The withdrawal of our guide does not change our explicit commitment to support our members to reduce the unacceptably high levels of bullying, abuse and discrimination at work that trans and non-binary staff and patients face.”

So the NHS continues to ignore the unacceptably high levels of bullying and abuse at work that women face.

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