Thread by @Frances_Coppola

Very misleading tweet. The report is from the right-wing Policy Exchange. The "government tsar" (who has resigned) only wrote the foreword to it.

https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1609824920149655553

Here is the actual report, and in the attached image, its recommendations. My points to follow. policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

My first, and perhaps most important observation, is that this report is written by a single author who is evidently supportive of gender-critical arguments and hence hardly an unbiased researcher. This statement could have come straight from Sex Matters.

Firstly, let's deal with the dogwhistle. This statement insinuates that allowing trans staff to treat people of the opposite sex (not gender), and allowing trans patients to use accommodation for their gender, is a threat to children.

In other words, it insinuates that trans people - or, rather, trans women, since the context is same-sex provision for women - are paedophiles. This is a common transphobic allegation which has no basis in evidence and no place in this report.

In this context, it is obviously ridiculous, since it ignores the fact that "children" includes boys, and that children are not usually accommodated on adult wards.

It is, therefore, a transphobic dogwhistle.

Secondly, the researcher's evident personal bias leads her to misuse statistics and misread the law.

Firstly, the statistics. In response to a FOI request, Avon and Somerset Police said that 30 sexual assaults of varying degrees of severity had been reported on the premises of a large hospital since 2019. Only one of these reports has resulted in charges being brought.

The police warned that the numbers included cases where the hospital was the place where the incident was reported, not where it actually happened. However, 19 incidents did take place on wards.

But the FOI response only asks how many of these were committed by "biological males" and "biological females". It does NOT say how many of these alleged offences were committed by trans people. I doubt if the police could have provided this information.

Since these statistics do not separately break out alleged offences by trans people, we do not know if ANY of these assaults were committed by trans people. So what are these statistics even doing in this report? They tell us nothing relevant.

It is hard not to conclude that this is another dogwhistle. The only possible reason for including undifferentiated statistics about alleged sexual assaults by "biological males" on hospital premises is to insinuate that these assaults were committed by trans staff or patients.

In other words, that trans staff and patients are sex offenders. This is another defamatory allegation frequently made by transphobes on the basis of thin and/or fabricated evidence. In this case the author didn't even bother with fabrication. There is literally no evidence.

These statistics are, therefore, another transphobic dogwhistle.

Now to the misreading of the law. I would be interested to see comments from @moira_robin and @truesolicitor on this.

@moira_robin @truesolicitor This section seriously criticises the NHS's guidance regarding the application of EA2010 in relation to gender reassignment. It argues that EA2010's specific exception permitting single-sex wards should be interpreted as a blanket ban on trans people using wards for their gender.

However, the NHS's guidance seems to be consistent with the law as it stands. There is a loud and vocal campaign to force providers of single-sex services to ignore the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but afaik EA2010 doesn't currently permit this.

The author also contends that in a letter to a member of the public, the former Chief Executive of an NHS Trust laid out "policies that misinterpret sex and gender, and therefore explicitly disregard the need for same-sex accommodation and same-sex intimate care."

The report does not include the actual letter, though it does include screenshots from it. However, it does state the context of the complaint to which the letter responds.

This demand goes FAR wider than the question of accommodation for trans patients or the duties alllocated to trans staff. It amounts to a demand that no male nurse, doctor or other staff should ever enter a ward containing female patients.

This would make it impossible for male nurses to work in an ICU or an operating theatre (ICUs are not usually single-sex). It would even make it impossible for male surgeons to operate on female patients. It is, frankly, absurdly reactionary and totally impractical.

Presumably recognising the sheer absurdity of this demand, the Policy Exchange researcher reinterprets it to make it about consent.

She uses the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to argue that patients can only consent to treatment if they know the biological sex of all those treating or caring for them. I am unfamiliar with this Act, but it seems unlikely to me that it limits consent in any such way.

And she then claims the fact that the NHS doesn't require clinicians to reveal their biological sex means patients can't consent to treatment.

I sometimes wonder whether those who bang on about women's right to privacy realise that trans people also have a right to privacy.

Notably absent from this report is any discussion of the implications of single-sex provision for trans men and non-binary people. It is as if they don't exist.

But the NHS's guidance does discuss this, in detail. Annex B includes paragraphs specifically addressing the need of trans men for privacy and safety when receiving healthcare related to their female biology.

These paragraphs would disappear from the guidance if Annex B were removed as the researcher recommends. It is not clear what benefit there would be in removing it, and there is potential for considerable harm to trans people as a result of the ensuing lack of clarity.

The researcher says "discrimination and hostility towards transgender people is of course unacceptable and should not be tolerated", but appears wholly unconcerned about the potential harm to trans people, both patients and staff, from the changes she recommends.

unroll please @threadreaderapp