Trans women barred from female hospital wards under new NHS guidance

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

Updated NHS England guidance has confirmed that transgender patients are to be placed on hospital wards matching their birth sex rather than their gender identity.

The move allows hospitals to lawfully ban trans women from female wards and exclude trans men from male wards, and has been criticised by trans rights groups who say it will “push trans people away from accessing care”.

Prior to the update, healthcare guidelines permitted transgender patients to be accommodated on single-sex wards in accordance with the gender identity with which they identified.

Published on Thursday, the new instructions arrive just over two months after broader guidance on single-sex spaces from Britain's rights watchdog formally took effect, and 18 months after a Supreme Court judgment on biological sex that dealt a huge blow to trans rights.

At the time of the judgment, trans rights groups warned that it will “exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society”.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) code had previously confirmed that to qualify as a single-sex provision under the Equality Act, a service must be offered on the basis of biological sex.

It said: “In separate or single-sex services, a trans man will be excluded from the men-only service because his sex is female, and a trans woman will be excluded from the women-only service because her sex is male.”

It covered a range of scenarios including single-sex hospital wards, which it said can lawfully exclude trans patients.

The new NHS England document, which says all patients “should be treated with respect, dignity, compassion and care”, adds that “trans people and others with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment should be accommodated in line with their biological sex”.

It says that hospitals “should identify alternative arrangements” for trans patients in cases “where it would not be clinically appropriate” to care for them on a ward of their biological sex.

It adds that “where clinical needs and same-sex accommodation requirements cannot both be met, clinical needs are the priority”.

Such occurrences, where a trans patient was placed on a ward of their gender identity, are described in the guidance as likely to be “rare” and reasons should be “clearly recorded and reported nationally as breaches of this guidance”.

The new guidance applies to acute, mental health and community NHS trusts as well as NHS-funded patients in private settings but not A&E departments, urgent treatment centres or paediatrics.