NHS Scotland advised health boards not to ban biological men from women’s spaces despite last year’s Supreme Court ruling, documents show.
In April last year five judges unanimously agreed that the legal definition of a woman was based on biological sex. It confirmed that men who identify as women were not allowed to access single-sex spaces, including lavatories and women-only hospital wards.
Yet legal advice issued by NHS Scotland’s Central Legal Office to human resources departments in May 2025 — one month after the ruling — warned boards not to change single-sex policies. Citing “the hard reality” that any shift could prompt legal action, it said HR departments needed to consider “employee relations” and the “reputational risks” of following the judgment.
When in doubt always err on the side of shafting women. What about legal action if there is no “shift”? Why is the resistance of team trans-everything important while the resistance of women is just fluff?
Another memo from the health board flagged “a number of concerns” about an interim update from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which said men who identify as women should not be allowed in women’s spaces.
It instead advised staff to follow its existing policy around “supporting trans staff and gender-inclusive workplaces”, which states “staff should treat trans people according to the gender role they present”.
These are medical people, who work with bodies not spirits, with sex not gender, yet they chose the fantasy over the reality.
For Women Scotland (FWS), the campaign group that secured the Supreme Court clarification of the law and a legal victory banning male prisoners from female jails, said it would sue the Scottish NHS unless it protected women’s single-sex spaces.
Susan Smith, a director of the group, said it “beggars belief” that more than 15 months after the Supreme Court ruling, Scottish health boards were “carrying on as if nothing has changed”.
“We are putting the NHS on notice that if they do not urgently scrap their unlawful ideological policies and start following the law, we will take them to court and force them to do so,” Smith said.
“It should go without saying that women, and especially those who have found themselves in need of medical care, should be entitled to the privacy of single-sex spaces where necessary.”
Yet medical carers refuse to see it. It’s grotesque.
The Supreme Court ruling explicitly cited changing rooms or female-only hospital wards as settings where women “might reasonably object” to the presence of men. However, the Lothian policy stated “staff should treat trans people according to the gender role they present”.
NO, because that gets you right back to men in women’s spaces. Staff should treat women as if women were human beings too.
It added that refusing to allow a trans person to use facilities they feel “comfortable” with “could be unlawful discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment”.
But letting men use women’s facilities could be unlawful letting men use women’s facilities.
An admissions policy for the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, which caters for severely ill mental health patients, said trans patients had “equal rights to access single-sex wards as any other male or female patient and therefore should be admitted to a ward in accordance to their preferred gender”.
Oh come on. They can’t be that stupid. The logic is toddler-level. Yes, they have “equal” aka the same rights to access single-sex wards as any other male or female patient. What they don’t have is the right to access the wrong single-sex wards. Will they ever stop with these idiotic word games?
