But female staff had not been consulted

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

The NHS continues to be weird.

When Charlotte* discovered that a male colleague was using the women’s changing room at work, she raised the matter with her manager at the NHS. The colleague identified as a woman and had begun using a female name, but female staff had not been consulted about the effect on their changing arrangements.

“The matron spoke to HR and asked: ‘Where should this person change? They’re identifying as a woman.’ And HR said: ‘Well, they change wherever they want. If they want to use the female changing room, that’s what we need to let them do,’” she says.

Well, if people can change wherever they want, what even is a “female changing room”?

You can’t have both, you know. Logic forbids it. There are only two options: one changing room for each sex, for a total of two, or two changing rooms, both for both sexes.

Then came the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 that the words “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer strictly to biological sex. Charlotte’s NHS trust withdrew its gender identification policy immediately. But it was only this August, 16 months later, that staff were finally instructed to use changing rooms corresponding to their biological sex or the available unisex facilities.

16 months later…”Oh by the way, we forgot to tell you, the rules have changed.”

It’s especially ridiculous because it’s the NHS. They know from bodies. They know the differences. They’re not engineers or lawyers, they’re nurses and doctors. Bodies are their job.

It is a problem across the NHS. Despite last year’s Supreme Court ruling and the recently published EHRC Code of Practice, many NHS organisations have yet to produce clear, up-to-date policies.

The Telegraph has reviewed Freedom of Information responses from eight English ambulance trusts. None disclosed a policy clearly stating that women’s staff toilets, showers and changing rooms were reserved for biological women. Some retained policies permitting access according to “affirmed” or “social” gender, while others were reviewing or replacing their guidance. Several also supplied policies warning that repeated or deliberate “misgendering” could lead to formal action.

It’s so wearisome. If the medical profession can’t get it right who can? What is so difficult about this?

While changing rooms have become the most visible battleground in the conflict over sex and gender, they are just one symptom of a much deeper problem – an enduring NHS workplace culture in which challenging gender self-identification can still carry serious professional and social consequences, whatever the law says.

Apart from Hutchison, every NHS employee interviewed for this article has asked for anonymity, fearing complaints, investigations or damage to their careers. That alone is telling.

Yes it is, especially because [see above] this is medical care we’re talking about. It’s not religious institutions, it’s not academia, it’s not the arts, it’s not architecture. It’s bodies. It’s of the earth earthy. If medical professionals are willing to pretend not to know which bodies are which, how can anyone trust them to tell the truth about anything? Or even bandage a small wound?

Comments

7 responses to “But female staff had not been consulted”

  1. Sumi Avatar
    Sumi

    When it comes to NHS ward and changeroom policy, it’s the professional managerial class driving the trans bus. The ones like NHS Fife equalities chief Isla Bumba who told the Sandie Peggy tribunal she could not be sure of her own sex, because she had never had her chromosomes checked. Until some of these drones are fired, I doubt we’ll see compliance with the law anytime soon.

  2. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    I can’t help but wonder if at least a small part of the resistance to enforcing the law is that people don’t want to reckon with the sexual paraphilia aspect of trans. Backtracking on “gender identities” means admitting they were just make-believe fantasies, which comes awfully close to admitting that many of them were make-believe sexual fantasies. I think that on some level most people know that straight men who identify as women have kinky motives behind it, but they think the proper thing to do is to just block out any talk of sexuality when in public.

    Certainly with straight men, on some level most of them know that their straight brothers who “go trans” are doing it for sexy reasons. Straight men know the appeal of female bodies; they know that women’s clothes are sexy; they know how alluring women’s changing rooms are; they can tell what’s going on. To them, there’s a “bros before hos” mindset behind their complicity.

    With gays and lesbians, I think it’s more of a defensive aversion to any kind of outside scrutiny of rainbow politics. But underneath that aversion, surely they can tell that trans identities, at least among adult males, are sexual personae — in the erotic sense of the word.

    I think with straight women, on the surface, there’s a solidarity with anything that suggests “gender” oppression, a kind of misguided interpretation of feminism, but still, they must have some sense of the sexual thrill-seeking and voyeurism that’s going on with these men.

    When everyone actually has to admit it out in the open to each other: that’s a profoundly uncomfortable position for everyone to be in. I think people are trying to put off the inevitable because they’ve got an almost unbearably excruciating amount of humiliation and shame coming their way.

    Maybe that’s a paradoxical reason they cling to the “trans kids” narrative, too: it can’t be a sex thing if we deliberately invoke it in children! In a sense, that’s the steep down payment that keeps people locked in: there’s no going back once you’ve begun sacrificing children to it.

  3. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    Isn’t encouraging or promoting trans to kids akin to sexualization in the first place? I think of Jazz Jennings and how his parents practically forced trans on him at age 7! in order to get a television deal (read $$$). Then puberty blockers at age 11! Then having his genitals removed (at age 17!) in favor of a high maintenance wound where his genitals used to be? For what? So he can please some potential partner with intercourse? It’s very sexualized if you ask me, and a tragedy. All this done before the age of consent, and legal adulthood. Ghouls.

  4. Sumi Avatar
    Sumi

    Artymorty, you correctly point out the downsides of backing away from “inclusive” policy. There’s also the inevitable personal attacks that can be anticipated from TRAs, especially against women.

    This is why I say there must be firings. The cost of disobeying the law must be high enough to change behaviour. Until it is, nothing will change. Remember, it’s the firings and threats of firing that stopped all but the bravest from challenging these inclusion policies in the first place.

  5. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    I suspect there is also some feeling of uneasiness when they get the sense of it being a sexual fantasy or fetish. They know a lot of people were uncomfortable with gay men and lesbians, and history is not often kind to those who were against LGB rights. They assume that any feeling they have that there is something wrong with their support of trans is just the same ‘ick’ factor so many felt with LGB. They don’t want to be remembered badly by history, hence their constant refrain of TERFs ‘being on the wrong side of history’.

    The trans managed that without difficulty. All they had to do was add their T to the LGB, and voila! Instant history of repression, without ever having to actually be repressed.

  6. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    @iknklast

    Yes.

    I wish the gay movement did a better job from the outset, emphasizing that it’s okay for straights to feel an “ick” when they think of gay sex. I wish the gay rights movement was clearer upfront that it was never meant to be a movement to erode sexual boundaries or to make people afraid to speak up in defence of sexual boundaries. Rather, it was a movement to recognize that a small subset of people have *different* sexual and romantic desires — different innate, inborn “ick feeling” and “yum feeling” catalysts. Natural, unharmful ones.

    Normalizing a small subset of men having consensual sex with fellow men was never about giving licence to “pervs” to do their “pervy” sex things (or whatever). But we (the gay rights movement adherents) did a terrible job marketing that. Shortcuts were taken: any discomfort, any “ick” aobut gay sex was labelled a “phobia”. It may have been politically powerful and useful at the time. But that there was, I think, where it kinda branched off into moralizing about sex panic (“just turn your brain off whenever you feel a sexual ick: you’re not being kind enough”) instead of rationally examining sexuality, and actually digging it up and examining it.

    It seems like such a subtle difference. But here we are, decades later, and the nuance has compounded into a malignant cultural dead end, a strange universal acid which is — without exaggeration — threatening to take all of liberalism down with it. Trans ideology is genuinely dangerous, and its origins are rooted in the rhetorical shortcuts that the gay rights movement took to get where it is today.

    I can sympathize with their intentions. But all the same: look what it got us.

    In a sense, we’re paying the piper.

  7. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    In a sense, we’re paying the piper.

    For sure women are paying the piper…even if we weren’t the ones who got to dance.

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