NHS Scotland in the dark about how many patients have changed their recorded sex

NHS Scotland has admitted that it doesn’t know how many thousands of patients may have wiped their biological sex from their medical records.

Patients in Scotland have been able to replace references to their biological sex with their “lived identity” without any medical evidence for a decade, but NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) only started to record these changes last November.

A Freedom of Information request has now revealed that 729 people have changed their records to the opposite sex since November, but NSS did not know how many were amended to correct errors and how many were to reflect gender self-ID.

Self-identification

Writing to NHS Scotland’s Chief Executive, John Connaghan CBE, For Women Scotland highlighted evidence that some gender-confused patients have been pushing others to lie about their biological sex.

The women’s group warned: “Self-identification of sex or gender is not law in Scotland and a person’s sex can only be changed (for some purposes) once a GRC has been obtained. It is necessary for NHS Scotland to update its practices in this regard and close down the mechanism which allows for the sex marker to be changed on request”.

A Scottish Government spokesman agreed that there is “the need, regardless of a person’s self-identified gender”, to ensure patients can access healthcare that “may be appropriate to their biological sex”. But it pledged to explore how records can better reflect “gender identity”.

‘Time bomb’

Earlier this month, MSPs were warned that a lack of clinical guidance for GPs on the use of cross-sex hormones with gender-confused youngsters was a ‘ticking time bomb’.

In a letter to Scotland’s parliamentarians, doctors said they were being asked by clinicians to give hormones to patients discharged into their care without proper guidance or supervision.

A report published in March also highlighted confusion over the clinical governance for under-16s referred by the Sandyford gender clinic for children in Glasgow to hormone specialists in other parts of the country.

Work is currently underway to implement the Chief Medical Officer’s report on the Cass Review’s implications for Scotland, which advised that gender-confused children should not be given puberty blockers without further clinical trials.