A new front in the battle between homosexual rights and religion has been uncovered – in Britain’s hospitals. A new report has found that hundreds of health workers believe that gay people can be cured. However, the NHS employs high numbers of overseas workers, many of whom are more religious than their British counterparts, which may account for the findings.
The figure came to light in a report by the gay rights lobby organisation Stonewall, which interviewed 3,001 health workers across the NHS and private health sector. They found that 10 per cent of those surveyed had heard colleagues say that they believed lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-sexual (LGBT) people could be cured. That figure doubled to 20 per cent in London.
Twenty five percent said that they had heard colleagues use derogatory language to describe LGBT people, such as ‘dyke’ or ‘poof’ in the last five years, and 20 per cent have heard colleagues refer to ‘trannies’ or ‘she-males’,
Just over 25 per cent of lesbian, gay or bisexual staff said that they had personally experienced homophobic bullying in the last five years.
Jane, a psychotherapist from the West Midlands told Stonewall: “A leaflet was put up on a work noticeboard that promoted gay aversion therapy. I brought this to the attention of my manager, who put the leaflet on her desk. It was taken from her desk and re-pinned on the noticeboard.
“I feel that (the two openly gay people in the team) were given responsibility for a response to the issue on behalf of the team and it was kept secret from others.”
Ruth Hunt, chief executive of Stonewall, said: “Health and social care services have a duty to treat people fairly and equally. Yet, as this report shows, there are worrying gaps in knowledge and training relating to LGBT people.
“[Our report] also contains some truly shocking revelations, such as evidence that high numbers of patient-facing staff witness colleagues stating their belief in a gay ‘cure’. This is incredibly harmful and dangerous and should be publicly denounced immediately.”
Stonewall has called on the government to publically condemn ‘gay cure’ therapy and to make sure that such therapies are inaccessible. It also wants education and training to prevent such attitudes from existing in the workplace.
However, such moves may potentially bring the government into conflict with religious and / or foreign people working within the NHS.
Stonewall’s study doesn’t make any comparisons between the attitudes of health workers and that of the population at large, so it is impossible to know whether health workers are representative of the British population in their attitudes to LGBT people.
However, it is known that the NHS relies on doctors and nurses from abroad to fill gaps in employment. Figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that in 2014, nearly a quarter of the NHS’s nurses were foreign. Almost 6,275 Indian nurses and 7,925 Filipino nurses were among those working in the NHS.
In the same year, more than one in five new recruits to the NHS were foreign, the highest single group from (Catholic) Spain, followed by Irish employees, then Indian.
But you don’t have to be religious to believe that transsexual people, in particular, would benefit more from treatment than from so-called corrective surgery. Milo Yiannopoulos, of this parish, has asserted that:
“Transgenderism is a psychiatric disorder, yet we approach it as though it were something to be celebrated and accommodated. It is the only mental illness classified as such by the medical establishment that we indulge with surgery instead of treating with therapy. It’s time to stop performing sex reassignment surgery on sufferers and reconsider the options.”
It is a message that is unpopular with transgender activists, to say the least. Last week Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro was threatened with being sent home in an ambulance during a television debate after he pointed out that a man who dresses as a woman is still biologically a man.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.