This is a landmark win in the fight against trans ideologues but it didn't need to be fought - Carole Malone

How many more cases are we going to hear about the rights of biological women being ignored in favour of men pretending to be women and demanding to be treated as such?

Just last week, eight Darlington nurses won a landmark tribunal against their bosses who’d forced them to use a changing room with trans nurse Rose Henderson – a fully intact male - whose presence in their changing room in “holey boxer shorts” made them feel uncomfortable.

It took 18 long months and much anguish for these brave nurses to vanquish the NHS trans zealots who put them through hell - but vanquish them they did. But they shouldn’t have had to.

The lives, the careers, the families of those seven nurses were put under the most intolerable strain all because of a national health service that has problems differentiating between a man and a woman, a health service that for too long has has put diversity over competence and fairness and that has dangerously pandered to activist pressure groups – none more sinister than the trans lobby- resulting in the rights of biological women being rode roughshod over.

A health service shouldn’t have to be told that a person with a penis isn’t a woman, no matter how many times he says he is.

And yet, despite the Supreme Court Ruling last year, which made clear that the word sex in the Equality Act means biological sex, our NHS continues to flout the law and punish those refusing to pander to the trans ideology lie.

There was also the case of Scots nurse, Sandie Peggie, who’d also complained about a trans colleague using the female changing room and finally a hearing found she had faced harassment from her NHS trust, but her claims of discrimination were dismissed – a judgment she’s now appealing.

Then this week, nurse Jennifer Melle, who was suspended after calling a trans paedophile “Mr” while she was treating him, is facing a disciplinary hearing.

Jennifer has worked at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton for 12 years, but was escorted from there and suspended after she publicly spoke out about her ordeal (another example of the whistle-blower taking the rap).

Now she may lose her job. And for what – calling a biological man “Mr” and then making public that she had been unfairly disciplined for it?

How much time and money have been spent on all these cases by the hospital trusts for whom they work? It’s entirely wrong that medical professionals are still being expected to pander to the fantasy that men who call themselves women are in fact women when they’re not.

And the Supreme Court has made that crystal clear. But the fact is, since its ruling, the NHS (and other institutions) have simply chosen to ignore it.

We are still seeing nurses and other medical professionals being castigated, disciplined and in some cases sacked for not pandering to the biological lie that men and women can change sex.

The indisputable fact is that trans women aren’t women. Sex is not something you “feel”, it’s a biological truth. And in Jennifer Melle’s case, the fact that she was disciplined for refusing to pander to the delusions of a paedophile trans woman is nothing short of obscene.

What kind of twisted society do we live in when a hard-working female nurse is suspended and disciplined for stating a biological fact and refusing to use the pronoun of a pervert?

The hospital trust also said she’d expressed her beliefs (to a paedophile, don’t forget) in “an inappropriate way.” Which of course she didn’t, she simply called him “Mr”, which is exactly what he is. Before the Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling, the NHS was getting away with nonsense like insisting women be called “chest feeders” so as not to offend trans women. It referred to women on their periods as “people who menstruate” and insisted all NHS staff did too.

It put trans women on women’s wards with all the humiliations and indignities that involve and just told the biological women who objected to deal with it, while inferring they were transphobes.

It also said trans and non-binary people should be able to use whatever toilet they wanted and to Hell with what biological women and men thought - those men and women who account for 99.5 per cent of the population.

And it made clear that at no time was it “appropriate to force staff to use the toilet associated with their assigned sex at birth against their will”.

And while some of those obvious stupidities have changed, many attitudes at the heart of NHS management have not, and there’s still the overriding belief that the rights of trans men and women still supersede biological women’s rights.

And that’s because the NHS has been infiltrated by gender ideologues and has been instrumental in creating a culture where it’s seen as “normal” for men and women who think they’re in the wrong body to subject themselves to lifelong drug regimes and God knows how much plastic surgery to try and get into the one they believe they should be in.

It’s also helped foster the lie that sex is “a feeling” when it’s an indisputable biological truth. And people are still being punished for saying that.

There are so many cases, so much confusion, and so much intransigence (especially in the NHS), which is why it's time Bridget Phillipson, the supposed minister for equalities and women, needs to get her finger out and produce the new guidance she promised right after the Supreme Court ruling.

That was nine months ago, which rather suggests she too is in thrall to the trans lobby. And if she’s not - why isn’t she producing the recommendations to protect biological women and their safe spaces?