It seems that NHS Scotland still hasn’t learned the lessons from the Sandie Peggie furore. Now it turns out that a ‘cultural humility’ training module for healthcare workers produced in December 2023 told them to call bearded trans staff ‘women’ – and even suggested gender-neutral toilets should be introduced in care homes. With over 700,000 patients stuck on Scottish waiting lists, it’s not like hard-pressed NHS staff don’t have more pressing issues to contend with…
The Scottish NHS Cultural Humility training module puts forward one situation in which ‘Lucy’ is a male-to-female trans nurse who has not formally changed their name from Lee. The healthcare worker is described as ‘still producing facial hair which is exposed’ and adds that other staff feel uncomfortable correcting patients when they use male pronouns to reference the nurse. The solution? Staff are told that ‘they have a duty (under equality law) to use the correct name and pronouns for Lucy’.
Another scenario involves the introduction of gender-neutral bathrooms to care homes, which prompted a backlash from workers. The module suggests the manager should tell unhappy staff to ‘reflect’ on whether their objections are ‘informed’. And swallow a healthy dose of humility down too, presumably.
The rather baffling training programme – which is still being circulated – has already provoked a backlash from legal experts. Law lecturer Dr Michael Foran has pointed out that there is not, in fact, a specific legal obligation to use preferred pronouns and added that the training ‘isn’t precise enough to accurately reflect the full legal position’. Not the NHS falling short on quality, surely!
Tellingly, when approached by the Times, NHS Education for Scotland deleted the gender-neutral lavatory case and scrapped the claim that staff had a legal duty to use ‘the correct pronouns for Lucy’, while a spokesperson for the organisation insisted that the scenarios ‘are intended to prompt reflection and discussion’. So much for that, eh?
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