It has been claimed in the House of Lords that staff at a British hospital told police a woman who alleged she had been raped whilst a patient in the hospital could not have been raped as there were no men on the ward at the time. Baroness Nicholson told the House that the woman in question says that she was raped by a transgender woman, a man who has been legally recognised as a woman. Nicholson shared the details of the case with the House of Lords during a recent debate on single-sex wards in hospitals.
Nicholson claimed that the NHS has adopted a policy that complaints from patients that someone they perceive to be a man is being housed on a female hospital ward are to be rejected and that NHS staff are to inform those who complain that everyone on the ward is female.
The NHS policy Nicholson referenced, Annex B, states that transgender patients should be “accommodated according to their presentation: the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use…it does not depend on their having a gender recognition certificate (GRC)…different genital or breast sex appearance is not a bar to this.”
British law defines rape as the non-consensual, intentional, penile penetration of a vagina, anus, or mouth of another. As such a transgender woman, if they still possessed a penis, is capable of committing rape under British law.
Nicholson says that it had taken “nearly a year for the hospital to agree that there was a male on the ward and, yes, this rape happened. It is on the record – I know where the case happened, who the police are and where the hospital is.” Those details have not yet been made public.
The woman who claims to have raped had, Nicholson said, suffered immensely over the year it took the hospital to accept a rape had occoured, and that “she has almost come to the edge of a nervous breakdown, because being disbelieved about being raped in hospital has been such an appalling shock.”
According to Nicholson the police are now investigating the situation.