NHS teaches doctors how to help transgender patients 'change' their registered sex

Dr James Barrett, the lead doctor at the Tavistock's gender clinic, taught family doctors how to change patients' "sex markers" on official documents including passports and bank accounts.

"Changing your name is really quite simple and easy, and once you've changed your name, you can re-register yourself in your new name and with a new sex marker in very many of the places where we’re all registered: at the bank, at the Gilbert and Sullivan Appreciation Society, and the tax and benefits agency, and down the dentist and on your driving licence," he said.

"To change the sex marker on your passport, the patient will need a letter. The letter can come from a primary care practitioner [a GP] or can come from the clinic.

"All that letter says is that this person is now living as a woman or is now living as a man, so far as I know, and seems to be doing so all of the time.

"Because it's a statement about how the person looks, if they look like they are living as a woman, that's what needs to be on their passport. The patient can change their own driving licence. They don't need your assistance with that," GPs were told.

Elsewhere in the session, Dr Barrett likened the idea of segregating people by sex in hospital wards to segregating people based on race.

He added that if a woman calls the police because a transgender person is present in the toilet, "it is exactly the same as if you were to call the police and complain that there is a black person at the toilet and they've got to come and do something about it".

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The advice comes in the face of a recent landmark review by University College London's Professor Alice Sullivan - which warned of the risks of mixing up biological sex and gender when it comes to clinical care, sex-specific cancer screenings and safeguarding in hospitals.

Prof Sullivan's review said "a confusion between sex and transgender and gender-diverse identities" had emerged in the last few years, and warned of attempts to "merge these two things into one variable".

So far, the Department of Health has said the findings would be considered with "the gravity they deserve" in a push to "reform gender identity services across the board" - though it has not yet brought forward any legislation to enshrine the review in law.

But Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at human rights charity Sex Matters, has poured scorn on Dr Barrett's session.

His "ill-founded advice to his peers is particularly tone-deaf given that the ink on the Sullivan Review is barely dry", she said.

Joyce added: "Prof Sullivan provided ample evidence of the serious harm done by destroying sex-based data, yet here is a senior doctor trivialising changes to official records by overwriting the material reality of biological sex with undefined 'gender identity'. It is trans people who will be most harmed by destroying sex-based data records."

She also described his sex-race comparison as "deeply offensive" and the "sort of superficial comparison you might expect from a teenager who has watched too many TikTok videos, not a doctor in a senior leadership position".

A spokesman for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said: "Staff from our adult gender identity clinic run information sessions for healthcare professionals.

"These involve clinician-to-clinician discussions about a range of issues including prescribing, maintenance hormone therapy, birth gender and its implications for routine cancer screening and cardiovascular outcomes."