Why that ‘unsafe’ gender clinic for children is just one example of NHS wokery that puts patient care at risk
THE sudden shuttering of London’s Tavistock clinic, which wrongly prescribed powerful puberty blockers and other drugs to thousands of vulnerable children, will be marked by history as the moment the tide turned on the NHS’s obsession with extreme trans ideology.
No public institution has embraced this dogma more fervently — and now, we see, so damagingly — than our ‘precious’ Health Service.
Biological reality, let alone women’s hard-won rights, have often been flung aside by those who run the NHS, with devastating consequences.
At the Tavistock, which was obsessively championed by trans-rights activists, children were ‘fast-tracked’ into changing gender, with many suffering permanent physical and mental damage.
Yet despite this much-needed closure, which will make the lives of many confused children far safer, the bullying of woke warriors and transrights obsessives in the NHS continues.
Managers often seem to have an insatiable appetite to
transform the health service into an instrument of political correctness.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for example, holds that trans women should be placed on female wards, even if they retain male sex organs.
As the Mail has also revealed, the NHS’s online ‘advice pages’ have been rewritten to contain desexed terminology straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The term ‘women’ has been ditched from guidance about the menopause, while the NHS also states tautologically that ‘anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer’.
‘People know when they are pregnant,’ the bizarre website continues, scrupulously avoiding the word ‘women’.
Critics point out that those behind this revolution are guilty of misogynistic double standards. For while the NHS downplays womanhood, it typically fails to do the same with men.
Official advice on erectile dysfunction, for example, states that the problem is ‘particularly common in men over 40’ and that ‘most men occasionally fail to keep an erection’. No gender sensitivities there.
Sometimes, the issue can be truly absurd.
Take Leslie Sinclair, a 66year- old retired driver for an engineering company from Scotland. Over the past five decades, he has selflessly donated 125 pints of blood to the transfusion service. But his altruism counted for nothing when he turned up at his local Albert Halls clinic in Stirling for another act of life- saving generosity and was asked to fill in an official form.
One question jumped out at him: ‘Are you pregnant or have you been in the last six months?’
Unsurprisingly, Mr Sinclair considered the question ridiculous and refused to answer.
Yet, incredibly, staff told him that his blood could not be accepted.
It was yet another case of politically correct box-ticking triumphing over common sense — all the more shocking as the transfusion service desperately needs blood.
The episode could almost be a metaphor for what is happening across the NHS — which is why the closure of the Tavistock is so striking. The NHS has at times resembled nothing so much as an instrument of social engineering, rather than somewhere we go to have our health needs met.
The former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson famously said that the NHS was the closest thing that English people had to a religion. But today, the service — especially its management — has looked more like a cult.
Fixation with transgender issues is one example, with expectant mothers referred to as ‘birthing people’ or ‘childbearing individuals’.
The Royal College of Midwives refers to ‘gender-diverse individuals’.
Understandably, one midwife last month said she was ‘ ashamed’ by the college’s stance, which she called ‘nonsense and offensive’.
Meanwhile, Baroness Nicholson warned in the House of Lords recently about the impact of this dogma on the safety of female patients. The respected peer referred to a shocking incident in which a hospital covered up an alleged rape by a transgender patient on a single-sex ward.
At times, this woke agenda is used to obscure or excuse systemic failings.
Last month, Dr Nick Watts, the NHS’s ‘chief sustainability officer’, declared that for GPs to abandon face- to- face appointments — a move that has caused so much of the public to despair — was better for the planet because the switch to online and telephone consultations reduced carbon emissions.
Doctors’ withdrawal from their essential duties was presented as a pathway for social justice, as part of the NHS’s stated mission to create a world- class zero- emission health service.
If the NHS delivered decent healthcare, much of this would not matter. Yet — and perhaps in some cases as a direct consequence of its new-found priorities — it is failing in its prime duty to keep the nation healthy.
The more NHS chiefs trumpet their commitment to diversity, ‘inclusion’ and the environment, the more badly they seem to perform at their real jobs.
The number of people waiting for hospital treatment has reached an extraordinary 6.5 million. Thanks partly to the breakdown in the GP service, pressures on accident and emergency units are intense. At least five per cent of those admitted to such units have to wait 12 hours before being seen.
In April, a study by the thinktank Civitas found that the UK was ranked 17th out of 19 advanced nations for life expectancy: far behind Germany, Spain and Japan.
As researcher Tim Knox said: ‘Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality.’
These problems are not down to underfunding, as so many Left-wing campaigners pretend. In fact, in 2019, Britain’s expenditure on healthcare, at 10.2 per cent of GDP, was in line with the European average.
Moreover, NHS spending is due to increase dramatically from £124 billion in 2020 to more than £160 billion in 2025, helped by the recent 1.25 percentage point hike in national insurance, which will help raise £12 billion.
Yet so much of the extra cash is wasted through mismanagement, empire-building and low productivity. And with health outcomes in Britain worse than many other rich countries, you might think that following non- medical priorities and changing official language in line with woke thinking might be jettisoned. But, no.
The woke agenda continues, spawning a bloated and evergrowing class of officials whose prime job is not frontline healthcare.
It is no exaggeration to say that the NHS has become the biggest branch of Britain’s diversity industry, employing hundreds of ‘ equality and inclusion officers’ paid for by taxpayers.
According to one recent study by the Mail, the number of such posts in the NHS has soared by 50 per cent in the past year alone, with more than 400 now estimated to be on the public payroll.
Among recent NHS job adverts have been a ‘Head of Organisation, Development, Culture and Diversity’ at the North West University Healthcare NHS Trust in London, on a salary of some £81,000, to ‘ build diverse leadership thought and facilitate change’.
In South- East London, Oxleas NHS Trust felt it needed a ‘Head of Equalities and Human Rights’ on about £ 69,000, ‘ leading cultural change and working in partnership with key stakeholders to create an inclusive service’.
Some organisations are explicit about their political mission. ‘You will support with raising awareness across the Trust at all levels to shift behaviour and thinking,’ proclaims the Solent NHS Trust as it seeks a £53,000 ‘Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging’.
That the NHS bosses advertising these jobs have become entrenched in their new beliefs was seen in the depressing outcome of a review into NHS management conducted earlier this year by the ex- Royal Marines leader General Sir Gordon Messenger, who twice won the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) on missions to Iraq and Afghanistan.
With his remit to shake-up the service, Messenger could have inspired a rethink about the woke take-over. Sadly, he became its ally.
As former Tory minister Lord ( Peter) Lilley pointed out: ‘This terror of the Taliban and
Terminology straight out of an Orwellian dystopia
Wokeness is used to cover up systemic failings
scourge of Saddam was no match’ for the social justice brigade, who ‘reduced him to spouting every fashionable nostrum instead of showing his military skills’.
In part, Left-wing politicisation has so easily found a home because of the health service’s innate righton ethos and its centralised command structure.
Wokery is now woven into its fabric. Staff networks increasingly act as engines for the juggernaut of the diversity industry. The Faith and Belief (FAB) group, for example, at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, extends its embrace to ‘Paganism’, which supposedly covers ‘Heathen, Druid and Wiccan’ lifestyles.
In May, the NHS Employers quango held an ‘Equality, Diversity and Human Rights Week’. This featured a talk on ‘multiple sources of oppression’ by a doctor from the NHS Muslim Women’s network and a conversation on ‘the challenge of transitioning [changing sex] while still employed in the NHS’.
Bullying the public into changing its beliefs about issues such as trans rights often appears more important than the public’s health.
A report from Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust’s ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ team ‘partnered’ with the ‘LGBT Foundation’ to deliver a ‘Pride in Practice Programme’.
The programme is a kind of purity test for officialdom, where public bodies compete to be awarded medals by the Foundation that assesses ‘their commitment to providing inclusive services’.
A similar but even more extensive initiative is run by Stonewall, which began as a pressure group for gay and lesbian equality but has been transformed into an aggressive advocate for transgender issues, using its ‘Diversity Champions’ accreditation scheme
— described by some as a ‘protection racket’ — to make money and intimidate corporations into adopting its narrow outlook.
Such radicalism is now common in the NHS.
Far from promoting harmony, some staff have been left feeling guilty about their ‘white privilege’, the ‘microaggressions’ they may have committed and their ‘unconscious bias’.
One NHS diversity course told its participants that ‘white people will need to see themselves as racial beings’.
There was widespread outrage last year when it was revealed that the NHS had created a guide to approved terminology and even
‘White people will need to see themselves as racial beings’
opinions, covering ‘ cultural appropriation’ and ‘patriarchy’.
The glossary attacked ‘white supremacy’, ‘white centering (the conscious belief that whiteness is the norm)’, and ‘white fragility’ (‘a range of defensive moves by white people’), ‘ misogynoir’ (‘misogyny specifically aimed at black women’) and ‘ intersectionality’ (‘multiple impacts of discrimination’).
This much-criticised document was subsequently withdrawn.
The irony behind all this frenzied activity? The NHS is probably already the most diverse employer in Britain. More than 42 per cent of medical staff already come from ethnic minority backgrounds.
But that reality never seems to halt the advance of the zealots.
Like Marxist ideology in the creaking Soviet Union, this woke dogma serves as a gigantic distraction from failure. Poor performance becomes the justification for ever- greater emphasis on equality and diversity. In this way, the NHS becomes trapped in ‘permanent revolution’ — the term championed by the Soviet Marxist Leon Trotsky.
So officialdom grows and the managers seize more power — and those who the NHS was set up to look after, the patients, risk not being treated and, instead, become its political pawns.