Why is the NHS peddling trans nonsense to kids?

April’s Supreme Court ruling that ‘woman’ refers to biological sex, not gender identity, might have dealt a severe blow to transgender activists, but their destructive influence is far from over. Last week, it emerged that NHS staff working in nurseries at hospitals in Brighton and Haywards Heath have been given ‘gender guidance’ and are instructed to be aware that some children’s feelings do ‘not match their bodies’.

The equality and diversity policy of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust informs nursery nurses that ‘for the majority of children the gender in which they are born fits them’, before going on to warn that there are some young children whose feelings do not ‘match their bodies in terms of expected dress and behaviour’. This, the guidance helpfully points out, ‘is sometimes known as gender variance or gender non-conformity’.

This means that, when it comes to looking after the young children in their care, staff are expected to avoid saying ‘boys and girls’ or dividing children according to sex. The guidance, seen by The Times, warns that ‘all areas of the curriculum and resources will be closely monitored to ensure that they do not rely on gender stereotypes or contain transphobic material’. This is a momentous task indeed, when even biological facts about the existence of two sexes can be considered transphobic.

The document goes on to note that staff or children who are transgender ‘will be provided with a supportive environment’. In other words, they will presumably be ‘supported’ to use toilets and changing rooms meant for the opposite sex, and allowed to insist others refer to them by new names and pronouns. Yet this fundamentally contradicts recommendations from the review of children and young people’s ‘gender services’, commissioned in 2020 by NHS England and conducted by Dr Hilary Cass.

The Cass Review, published in April last year, urges caution when it comes to ‘social transition’, warning that the adoption of new names and pronouns is an ‘active intervention’ that may make children more likely to proceed to medical transition. Cass specifically says that educators should not proactively initiate a child’s social transition, and that medical staff should help families recognise normal developmental variation rather than rushing to affirm a child’s transgender identity. This is repeated in the government’s newly released statutory guidance to schools, ‘Keeping children safe in education’, which states that ‘schools should take a cautious approach’ with ‘children questioning their gender’. This is sensible advice. But, shockingly, it has been ignored by Sussex NHS Foundation Trust.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, the NHS competes with the police for the prize of Britain’s wokest institution. Anyone who has had the misfortune of visiting a hospital will be familiar with crumbling buildings bedecked in rainbow-hued posters preaching the importance of inclusion. Staff, when they can be found, sport rainbow lanyards while leaflets refer to pregnant people, offer ‘chestfeeding’ advice to new parents and advertise smear tests to ‘people with a cervix’. Patients, it seems, are not to be treated, but hectored. Then there’s the £40million the NHS is estimated to spend each year on staff whose sole purpose is to promote equity, diversity and inclusion. The more useless it is at actually treating the sick, the more the NHS seems determined to indulge in displays of woke virtue.

In nursery schools, staff deal with a different captive audience – not sick adults, but very young children. Providing a ‘supportive atmosphere’ for children who claim to be transgender raises many problems. For a start, no toddler independently concludes that he or she is transgender. Tiny tots who declare they have been born in the wrong body are simply parroting the views of their parents or other adults. The onus should be on health or education professionals to maintain a healthy scepticism about such claims and avoid further entrenching this adult-imposed delusion.

There are other consequences, too. Affirming even one child or adult as transgender means lying to all the other children in a school or nursery. It means telling them to distrust their own eyes and accept that some children they know to be boys might actually be girls on the inside. Worse, it asks children to collude in a lie by reinforcing a transgender person’s sense of themselves as belonging to the opposite sex. In the process, every child is left confused about their own body and identity, their place in the world, and even the correct vocabulary to use when referring to males and females. Learning to recognise that boys will grow up to become men, and girls will grow up to become women, is an important part of a child’s development. It is central to what it means to be human and a member of society.

Pretending that people are neither male nor female is fundamentally dishonest. Doing this in a nursery risks sending more youngsters down the trans path by encouraging them to question facts about their identity that should simply be taken for granted. This is a terrible thing for anyone, let alone educators working in a health setting, to do to a child.

Nursery staff have no right to mess with children’s heads in this way. Gender-neutral nurseries are a shameful attempt to manipulate toddlers for the benefit of a woke ideology.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/