Badenoch backs the call to ban transgenders from single-sex areas

Kemi Bdenoch supports a group nurses who are trying to stop transgender employees from using women’s restrooms and changing areas.

The Conservative Party leader has backed the eight female employees at Darlington Memorial Hospital, County Durham, in their call for new NHS guidelines. They were forced to make a change in front of an ally who was transgender.

Claire Coutinho, the shadow minister for equalities, assured two of the women that she supported their cause, and that policies on equality and diversity needed to be revised and revisited across the NHS, and in the workplaces generally.

Bethany Hutchison is a Darlington nurse who also serves as the president of the Darlington Nursing Union. Her comments were “very encouraging” to the group.

She said: It was refreshing to have support and backing rather than to be told by our trust that we needed to “broaden our mind” be “more inclusive” and to ‘compromise”.

Hutchison is of the opinion that the guidance reveals how the trust’s policies on these matters are illegal. She continued: “Gender is not a protected trait and we shouldn’t be forced to undress in front of men. We are still shocked at the way our rights in this matter continue to get violated.

We hope that what we are pushing will provide a lawful and common sense way to protect women in the NHS. It should be a model for all UK public services and workplaces.

Five nurses attended a meeting with Wes Streeting , the health secretary, last month. They had brought a petition to 10 Downing Street signed by 48,000. The petition asked the government to take whatever steps were necessary to protect spaces for single-sex people.

The Darlington Nursing Union was formed by the Darlington nurses who were forced to report the sexually-active male who identified as Rose after his “intimidating behavior”.

Since then, they have taken legal action against the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust. They claim that the trust failed to protect them from sexual abuse.

The group claims that their employer’s policy allows any employee to identify themselves as the opposite gender and enter spaces for single-sex people such as showers, changing rooms and toilets.

Andrea Williams, CEO of the Christian Legal Centre which supports the nurses, said that the meeting was “highly constructive” and there were clear views expressed about the need to rethink equality and diversity policies in the NHS as well as in workplaces throughout the country.

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