British Hospital Allegedly Denied Rape Claim Because Perpetrator Was Transgender
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In a speech to the House of Lords on Thursday, a British politician alleged that a hospital denied a female patient’s claim that she had been raped because the alleged attacker was transgender.
Emma Nicholson, the Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, did not name the hospital where the alleged incident took place, or give the identity of the victim. No further information on the alleged incident has been publicly reported.
The woman who said she was raped “naturally reported it to police,” Nicholson told fellow members of the House of Lords. “The police spoke to the hospital, and the hospital informed police that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened.”
Nicholson told parliament’s upper chamber that “it has taken nearly a year for the hospital to agree that actually there was a male on the ward and yes this rape happened,” and this only because of evidence captured on CCTV footage.
Nicholson claimed that the alleged incident was the direct result of a National Health Service policy known as Annex B, which orders hospitals to place patients in single-sex wards according to their preferred gender identity.
“The result of Annex B is that hospital trusts inform ward sisters and nurses that if there is a male as a trans person in a female ward, and a female patient or anyone complains, they must be told that it is not true, there is no male there,” Nicholson said.
She added that the policy “gives priority to trans people over women” and, as a result, erodes the “dignity, privacy and safety” of women and girls.
Nicholson, who started her political career in the Conservative Party before switching to the Liberal Democrats in 1995 and returning to the Conservatives in 2016, has previously alleged that some medical professionals in Britain feel “inhibited” from speaking freely on issues of gender identity.
