MARIA Miller, the Conservative MP who chairs the House of Commons women and equalities select committee, claims that the NHS has a discriminatory approach to transgender people, and criticises ‘serious deficiencies’ in the quality and capacity of NHS Gender Identity Services.
In an interview with the Press Association, she said that waiting times for surgery were ‘completely unacceptable’ and that many trans people ‘simply don’t have access to the basic healthcare that the rest of us take for granted’.
However, she was referring not to life-saving operations but sex-change surgery, and the ‘basic healthcare’ she mentioned included cervical smear tests which, she claimed, trans men are often not able to access. A translation from the PC suggests that women who think they are men are not ‘accessing’ smear tests because the NHS does not address its patient information to ‘people with cervixes’; instead – like most sensible people – they assume that only women have a cervix and address their health information accordingly.
Regarding the Government’s moves to allow individuals to self-identify as a member of the opposite sex without medical involvement, Mrs Miller said that focusing on legislation alone was ‘wrong-headed’, and argued instead ‘for a greater focus on the provision of services’. In view of public resistance – especially from women – to such legislation as endangering their rights to women-only public facilities, Mrs Miller’s renewed emphasis on tokenism might be understandable, but it will not placate the most zealous ‘trans’ campaigners, for whom nothing less than abject submission is acceptable.
Moreover, by supporting the provision of harmful sex-change operations at taxpayers’ expense she is doing no favours to confused individuals; neither is she helping women with her advice to ministers ‘that they should focus on getting their services right first and foremost, and also be clear that there is no threat to single-sex services – they are clearly protected in law and they need to be clearer on that’.
Mrs Miller used to be the minister for women and equalities, and now she chairs a Commons select committee of the same name. The title suggests a clash of minority rights, and Mrs Miller’s most recent philosophical contortions do nothing to dispel the impression.
