Put off

Hide all the women.

The word “woman” could be erased from specialist NHS clinics dealing with female health issues under proposed new transgender inclusivity rules.

Weird how “transgender inclusivity” always means erasing women. Never men.

A report proposing new NHS treatment guidelines in Scotland suggests “a general move away from gendered healthcare” and warns that trans people are put off attending services if they are targeted at a certain sex.

If that’s true then trans people need to grow the fuck up.

It also calls for laboratories to “decouple” reference ranges in test results from “gender markers”. Men and women have different healthy ranges on a series of criteria, for example in blood tests.

The report claims ranges should instead be “relevant to the individual.” The suggestion was branded a denial of reality by doctors.

Denial of medical reality is not a very brilliant idea.

“It seems that the Scottish NHS is in the grip of a science-denying cult,” Susan Smith, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said.

“Gender, including non binary identities, are an irrelevance in medicine, but sex matters. This move will, almost inevitably, rebound on women.

“Progress to improve standards in women’s healthcare has been hard won – this will set the clock back on those gains by decades.”

But it’s only women, so it doesn’t matter.

Louise Irvine, a retired GP who is co-chairman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, raised concerns at repeated references to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in the report.

She said the association’s guidelines were “very poor” and potentially harmful for patients and questioned why the advice of respected Scottish experts had not been preferred.

“Proposals to change whole systems of IT, language and clinics is timorous, unhelpful and potentially dangerous,” Dr Irvine said.

Also insulting to women.

“You can’t move entirely away from sexed healthcare, because everyone has a biological sex, even if they take additional hormones to affirm or appear differently.

“To interpret test results safely you need to know a person’s sex, as well as their age, conditions and drugs. To suggest otherwise simply denies reality.”

Denying reality seems to be the whole point.

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