“Trans women have no place in women’s [hospital] wards or indeed any safe space relating to biological women,” says Home Secretary Suella Braverman. “This is about protecting women’s dignity and women’s safety and privacy.”
She’s right to be concerned about women’s safety. Just last week, Elianne Andam, a 15-year-old girl, was stabbed on her way to school. A 17-year-old boy has been charged with her murder. In the year ending March 2022 (the most recent data available), police recorded 1.5 million domestic abuse-related incidents and crimes in England and Wales. Oh, and the people who are supposed to protect us? The Casey Review determined that the Met Police are “failing women and children” – as well as being “unable to police itself” and fostering an environment of“institutional racism, sexism and homophobia”.
(Incidentally, in her speech at the Conservative Party conference, Braverman bragged about putting more police officers on the streets – as well as giving them a pay rise.)
Our privacy is seriously under threat, too. The rise of deepfake technology and intimate-image-based abuse leaves women vulnerable to appearing in non-consensual pornography. And last week, the UK Information Commissioner called on organisations to improve their data handling to avoid putting victims of domestic abuse in danger, after reprimanding seven organisations for data breaches affecting victims of domestic abuse.
But what’s the Conservative party focusing on? Rewriting the NHS website to exclude transgender patients. In his speech at the Conservative Conference, Health secretary Steve Barclay announced that sex-specific language will be restored to online NHS advice pages. “I ordered a reversal of unacceptable changes to the NHS website that erased references to women for conditions such as cervical cancer,” he said, adding that he also, “stopped the NHS ordering staff to declare pronouns to each new patient.”
The threats to women’s safety and privacy largely come from men – usually cisgender men (although most research simply states “men and boys”). And yet, if you believe what the Home Secretary and Health Secretary say, you might be forgiven for thinking that transgender people, specifically transgender women (whom Braverman stigmatises as “biological men”), are the biggest threat to cisgender women’s lives. This is patently untrue.
Less than a month ago, an analysis by the University of Exeter, the University of Surrey and the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery found evidence of female surgeons being sexually assaulted at work. Maternal mortality for Black women is currently almost four times higher than for White women. NHS doctors and radiographers are striking over unsustainable working conditions, leading to concerns of “causing significant risk to patients” (via Sky News).
There is no evidence of cisgender women complaining about transgender people in hospitals. An investigation by TransLucent – which submitted freedom of information requests to 102 NHS Foundation Trusts – found that no cisgender women had complained about sharing a ward with a transgender person.