Why gender ideology could have ‘fatal consequences’ for trans people

The broadcaster’s change of attitude came mid-week on the publication of the Sullivan Review – a report commissioned by the previous UK Government – into how public bodies record data on sex and gender.

Professor Alice Sullivan, from University College London, and her team, which included Edinburgh-based policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, found that “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”. The review team uncovered that the term “gender” had started to replace “sex” in data collection in the 1990s, and that over the past decade ­“robust and accurate data on biological sex” had been lost.

Beginning of the end for self-ID?

Hidden halfway down the BBC’s online news report was the sentence: “While people can legally change gender, they can’t change biological sex.” Women’s rights campaigners the length and breadth of the United Kingdom dropped their morning coffee in shock.

This is exactly what they have argued for the best part of a decade, yet were treated as pariahs for stating the obvious. Women found their careers crashing, friendships broken, reputations trashed, all because they said what BBC editors now feel able to assert without fear of retribution – that human beings can’t change their biological sex.

Professor Sullivan’s review may just be the beginning of the end of self-ID, the public policy that allows people to change their biological sex on demand, and which resulted in such horrifying spectacles as a double rapist being initially housed in a female prison.

Even now, Sandie Peggie, a nurse with 30 years’ experience, is having to endure a harrowing employment tribunal because she was forced to share a changing room with a male-born doctor who now self-identifies as a woman.

Veiled threat to Edinburgh Women’s Aid

And only a day after the Sullivan Review was published, a row broke out in Edinburgh City Council after a Scottish Green councillor, Alex Staniforth – who incidentally identifies as non-binary – tabled a motion that called for a review of Edinburgh Women’s Aid’s (EWA) funding because they do not allow men who identify as women to use their shared refuges or group counselling sessions.

In an impassioned plea to councillors, Linda Rogers, chief executive of EWA, said that Councillor Staniforth’s motion was a veiled threat to the charity’s funding and an explicit threat to their ability to deliver the “best, most trauma-informed, and safest services to women and children affected by domestic abuse in Edinburgh”.

Staniforth’s motion was later replaced by an amendment from the SNP and Liberal Democrats which acknowledged the “vital work” of EWA but instructed the council leader, Scottish Labour councillor Jane Meagher, to write to the charity setting out “the importance of providing services to trans women and to ask how the organisation can provide this”.

Councillor Meagher may have to dictate that letter through gritted teeth. Just before the council meeting started, she joined a women’s rights protest outside where she told them that in 1977 she had stood in almost the same spot campaigning for a “battered women’s refuge”. “I am so proud of what we have achieved over many years, so let’s keep going with women-only spaces,” she said to loud cheers.

Streeting stops NHS changing under-18s’ sex data

Meanwhile at Westminster, another Labour politician acted with similar clarity and conviction. Within hours of the Sullivan Review becoming public, Health Secretary Wes Streeting implemented some of its key recommendations.

He announced a ban on the health service changing the sex data of under-18s. “I’ve made it clear this must not happen. We must deliver safe and ­holistic care for adults and children when it comes to gender, and that also means accurately recording biological sex,” he said.

So far, the Scottish Government’s response has been cursory: “We note the Sullivan Review and its recommendations, which will now be considered.” Health secretary Neil Gray has said nothing in response to the revelation that Scotland’s NHS allows patients to change their records at will, as NHS National Services Scotland confirmed: “No evidence is required; the patient simply needs to advise either their GP practice or practitioner services that they wish to change their gender.”

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Setting aside the folly of allowing people to change their health records without question, the failure to record biological sex on patients’ records can be dangerous. As Professor Sullivan points out, this can lead to patients not being called in for screening for conditions – prostate cancer, for example – which may affect them due to their sex. “This has potentially fatal consequences for trans people,” she says.

Scots Tories showing most common sense

Justice Secretary Angela Constance remains silent too, even though the report confirms that Police Scotland requires “no evidence or certification as proof of biological sex or gender identity” when recording the gender identity of a victim, witness or perpetrator.

Its official guidance says that if a man who identifies as a woman was to attempt or enact rape, he would be “recorded as a female on relevant police systems” – which is why the double rapist Adam Graham was prosecuted as Isla Bryson, a blonde woman.

As in many other key moments during this heated debate, it is the Scottish Conservatives who have shown the most common sense. In an effort to elicit a proper response from ministers, the party’s deputy leader, Rachael Hamilton MSP, has tabled several questions asking the Scottish Government if it will implement the recommendations outlined in Professor Sullivan’s report, in particular whether it will now clarify its 2021 guidance for public bodies on the data collection of sex and gender identity.

The answers will reveal whether the Scottish Government has re-discovered material reality, or whether it is still wedded to the dangerous mythology that human beings can change their biological sex.