Wes Streeting today banned the NHS from changing children’s gender on their medical records amid fears it could leave them at risk of harm.
It comes after a review into the ‘corruption’ of official statistics by extreme gender ideology found there is currently no minimum age at which the record of a child’s sex can be changed.
The Health Secretary said this was ‘completely wrong’ and that ‘children’s safety must come first’ after the government-commissioned review highlighted ‘serious safeguarding concerns’.
The Sullivan Review found that in one case a mother had requested a change of sex for their baby who was just a few weeks old ‘and the GP had complied’, granting the child a new NHS number.
The Health Secretary announced today that the NHS will immediately suspend all in-process or new applications for gender changes and new NHS numbers for under 18s.
The move has been welcomed by the review’s author, Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, who said she hopes that other ministers ‘will follow suit in due course’.
The review by Professor Alice Sullivan (pictured), from University College London, found that from 2015, public bodies began collecting information on gender identity rather than biological sex, meaning ‘robust and accurate data’ was lost
Cancer screenings are being missed and crimes misrecorded because official statistics are ‘corrupted’ by extreme gender ideology, the review warned (stock image)
Mr Streeting said: ‘Children’s safety must come first. It’s completely wrong that children’s NHS numbers can be changed if they change gender. And I’ve made it clear this must not happen.
‘We must deliver safe and holistic care for both adults and children when it comes to gender, and that also means accurately recording biological sex – not just for research and insight, but also for patient safety.
‘I have always made it clear that doing so does not stop us from recording, recognising and respecting people’s gender identity where these differ.
‘As we reform gender identity services across the board, we’ll take forward the serious research this review highlights.’
It comes after the Sullivan Review found that from about 2015 public bodies began collecting information on gender identity rather than biological sex.
This undermines medical research and has meant that people have not been called up for sex-specific checks such as cervical cancers screenings or prostate exams, potentially with ‘fatal consequences’, it found.
The review called for data on sex to be collected by default by all public bodies and said that the most urgent matter was to cease issuing new NHS numbers and changed ‘gender markers’ to children on request.
The Health Secretary (pictured) said it was ‘completely wrong’ that there is currently no minimum age at which the record of a child’s sex can be changed and that ‘children’s safety must come first’
Maya Forstater, chief executive of Sex Matters, said of the Sullivan Review: ‘The problems are everywhere, from NHS records that do not record biological sex to police forces that record male sex offenders as women’
Prof Sullivan, head of research at the UCL Social Research Institute, today welcomed the Health Secretary’s move to address what she described as the ‘most serious’ issue raised by her review.
She told the Mail: ‘I am delighted that the Health Secretary is taking decisive action to implement the recommendations of the review, and I hope other ministers will follow suit in due course.’
Prof Sullivan added: ‘The fact that there was no lower age limit on when the NHS gender marker can be changed, which was information provided by a whistleblower, was the one thing that really knocked me for six.
‘I was absolutely shocked by that and it was the one thing that was marked in the report as urgent because it’s clearly a very urgent safeguarding issue.’
She added that the whistleblower who had highlighted the case of the mother who changed their baby’s gender had raised it as a safeguarding issue but ‘was not able to get action taken’ by children’s services.
‘This is what happens with issues around gender identity, people become so frightened that they forget all of their basic principles that they would act on with any other issue, and that’s very dangerous,’ Prof Sullivan said.
The review also urged the Home Secretary to make it mandatory for all police forces to record data on the sex of offenders and victims in police systems rather than gender.
The recommendation came based on a note in the Police National Computer which showed that it is ‘quite possible’ that somebody could be released from custody if their offending history wasn’t known because they had changed gender.
Defence minister Luke Pollard said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is looking into the recommendation ‘to make sure that we’re keeping the public safe’.
He told LBC: ‘What is important is that we recognise that the accurate collection of data is vital, not just for the public health component… but across government.’
