THE Government

is updating the NHS Constitution to recognise that sex is a matter of biology, and to protect single-sex care.

This may seem obvious, but NHS managers have spent the past 15 years obscuring biological reality as they embraced the trans lobby’s flags, festivals, awards and jargon.

When the NHS Constitution was first adopted in 2009, the word “sex” was quietly replaced with “gender”, and ever since then activists have been pushing policies that view someone as a man or a woman – or both or neither – based on what they say they are.

Concerns about how this affects the dignity, safety and privacy of other patients were brushed aside.

The current NHS England policy on single-sex accommodation says: “Trans people should be accommodated according to the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they use. This may not always accord with the physical sex appearance of the chest or genitalia.”

A male patient only needs to identify as “non-binary” to be allowed to choose to be put in a bed alongside women.

While many patients welcomed the move to put sex back into the heart of the NHS Constitution, it has been met with fury by organisations representing professionals. The British Medical Association, which campaigned for female doctors to be forced to share showers and changing rooms with male colleagues who identify as wanting to use them, responded by expressing concern for non-binary and transgender patients, and none at all for actual women.

Matthew Taylor, of the NHS Confederation, which represents the top management of trusts, said the Government was engaging in culture war politics. But his organisation has led the charge by telling hospital managers to pick a side as an “ally” to transidentifying people.

This change should be a wake-up call to professionals across the NHS as well as the professions and the regulators who have dismissed and ignored women’s concerns.