Christian Concern has called upon the British Medical Association (BMA) to drop its opposition to new NHS guidance on trans staff and patients.
The guidance states that biological sex, rather than gender identity, must determine policy on sex-segregated spaces.
Christian Concern and its Christian Legal Centre have long advocated for such guidance, having worked on a number of high profile cases involving nurses penalised after objecting to “trans-inclusive” viewpoints.
One such nurse was Jennifer Melle, a nurse who was suspended after speaking publicly about an incident in which she refused to use male pronouns with a transgender patient identifying as a woman. She was eventually reinstated and told she had “no case to answer” by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).
Similarly, the so-called “Darlington nurses” objected to a biological male using the female changing rooms. After a lengthy legal battle, they received an apology and a six-figure payout.
It has been argued that implementing the NHS' new guidance will prevent further incidents like this.
The BMA takes a different view, saying it is “deeply concerned that this high-level guidance will result in local policies that are exclusionary to trans and non-binary staff and patients”.
Christian Concern argued that such a stance fails to recognise the harm caused to those who, like Melle and the Darlington nurses, are punished for “upholding biological reality”.
Andrea Williams, Chief Executive of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre, said, “The BMA should be listening carefully to what these cases reveal. Its response to the new NHS guidance is a profound failure of leadership. Women’s privacy and dignity deserve serious attention from the medical profession.
“The Darlington nurses should never have needed our help to take their employer to court to secure proper changing facilities. Jennifer Melle should never have endured such an ordeal over pronouns while the racist abuse and threats she suffered were compounded by the way she was treated.”
Williams further called upon the BMA to face up to the real harm caused “by policies that subordinate biological reality to gender identity”, adding that such policies undermined confidence in the NHS as a whole.
