UK: National Health Service to Deny Treatment for ‘Racist or Sexist Language, Gestures, Behaviour’
How low the bar for deeming behaviour discriminatory and sufficiently “offensive” to withdraw treatment is not spelled out in explicit terms.
For example, in late 2017 an NHS patient who requested a female nurse to carry out a cervical smear complained when the hospital sent a person with “an obviously male appearance… close-cropped hair, a male facial appearance and voice, large number of tattoos and facial stubble” who insisted “My gender is not male. I’m a transsexual”.
It is not clear whether the patient could have fallen foul of the Bristol policy had it been in place and the nurse had chosen to take offence — and nor is it clear how far the trust’s assurances that it will only withdraw treatment once clinically safe extend, and if patients could, for example, be denied diagnostic procedures or so-called routine operations such as hip replacements, for which many patients have to wait eight months or more.
British state authorities have previously proved somewhat overzealous in their enforcement of political correctness, with foster parents caring for three “not indigenous White British” children having them taken away by Labour-run Rotherham Borough Council in 2012 because they were members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), then led by Nigel Farage.
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