Weston Park Cancer Centre is a well-respected hospital in Sheffield, providing excellent cancer care and research to more than two million patients every year. The hospital is never mentioned in less than reverential terms, because almost every family in the city knows someone who has received treatment there. It is hard to think of anything tarnishing the reputation of a facility which saves lives and keeps people out of pain, but also helps them, and their families, cope when they are dying. 

Yet a nurse, who works at the hospital, recently found a leaflet in the waiting room, which turned her blood cold. Of course there are cancer patients who are lesbian, gay and bisexual. They should receive relevant advice like anyone else. There are also patients who may identify as something they aren’t, be it men, women or the confused. Those patients are either male or female and in a health care setting their identity is largely irrelevant to the treatment they need.

The leaflet, titled “LGBTQ+ people and cancer”, is produced by Macmillan Cancer Support in partnership with a group called “Outpatients”. It is quite possibly one of the most offensive pieces of healthcare literature, amended to include people who “identify as” the opposite sex, that I have seen thus far. 

There are many phrases in the patient booklet which are infuriating, including those advising patients that they are able to choose which single-sex ward they would prefer to be accommodated on. The booklet says,

Your team will talk to you about where you will stay. Hospital wards may be single sex or mixed. Where you stay should give you privacy and keep you safe. If the hospital has single-sex wards you will usually be able to stay in a ward which matches the gender you identify with.

This confirms that some female people, identifying as trans, who have surgery for, amongst other things, breast, cervical and ovarian cancer, will be placed on wards with male people, who will certainly not be recovering from surgery for those cancers. If we remember that many patients are given morphine-based pain relief which is self-administered in the aftermath of such surgery, this is certainly anything but “safe”. Those women, even if they choose to identify as men, are incredibly vulnerable. Likewise, if a man is identifying as a woman, and has had surgery for a cancer which is not female-specific, but is placed amongst those women, how safe are the women? This shows a horrendous disregard for female safety.

A 2023 report found 6500 cases of sexual assault occurred in under 4 years in a hospital setting. A healthcare provider should not be pretending it is safer to collude with the lies a patient tells about themselves, than it is to accommodate women separately to men when they are at their most vulnerable. 

Some of the language is nonsensical and Macmillan should be ashamed of using it. In one passage it claims there are potential difficulties because:

Some health conditions are still often treated in clinics that are gendered. For example, if you have a problem affecting the vagina or nearby pelvic areas, you may have an appointment at a women’s health clinic. A problem affecting the prostate, you may be given an appointment at a clinic for men. These clinics can be difficult to cope with if your gender identity does not reflect the sex you were assigned at birth.

Cancer is difficult. Treatment for cancer is difficult. Being in the correct, sex-specific place, to get treatment which might save your life is not “difficult”, it is essential.  If ever there is a time to know the reality about your own body and prioritise staying alive rather than which words are being used about you, facing cancer is it. 

It is unfathomable that hospital advisory leaflets are colluding with the ludicrous notion that people are “assigned” a sex at birth. Sex, which is observed at birth, is not a random decision, open to interpretation, it is — in the overwhelming majority of cases — a biological one. This inaccurate language pervades the leaflet. 

In some places the leaflet even reads like parody telling male patients:

If you were assigned male at birth and have had genital reconstructive surgery. If you have had surgery to make a vagina, the risks of cancer in this area are thought to be low. You do not have a cervix and do not need to go for cervical screening (a smear test).

Whilst it is essential that everyone obtains accurate health care information, surely there is not a man alive, even one who has had his penis inverted, who thinks that somehow the complex reproductive system of a female person was popped in at the top end of that without them being told? It would be laughable if it wasn’t a perfect indication of how far this ludicrous ideology has driven otherwise sane organisations and individuals.

Yet the leaflet was particularly inflammatory when it came to surgery used to treat the cancer of people who “identify” as the opposite sex. At this point the wheels came completely off the logic cart and in the section “Cancer surgery and gender-affirming surgery”,  trans-identifying patients are told:

Sometimes surgery to treat cancer is also gender-affirming. Surgery to remove the cancer may remove a body part that you prefer not to have anyway.

As a cancer patient who had extensive life-saving surgery, which removed several abdominal parts, including my womb, I can say with absolute certainty that the surgery did not change my sex. I am still a woman. Nothing about being full of tumours is fun, and nothing about removing the body parts targeted by them could ever be compensated for.  This is the vilest suggestion in the booklet, that there could be a welcome result of undergoing major surgery. 

The nurse who discovered the booklet told me:

That was the very worst sentence for me, one that floored me and my colleagues. It sounded like a cancer diagnosis was sometimes something to be celebrated when we all know very well the devastating impact of a cancer diagnosis. There is the underlying suggestion throughout that the trans patient opts for “gender affirming” life care over life-saving treatments like radiotherapy. This seems irresponsible to me.

She continued:

The whole thing seems regressive, unscientific and generally very poor advice which is more likely to cause harm to these patients.

The other thing highlighted by the booklet is that this insidious ideology, and the demand for solutions it creates, is causing people to hate their own bodies so much, that when they are told, cruelly and insensitively, that there is a positive to their body being attacked by disease, they can be convinced that it is a win. It is an unhinged way to treat the seriously ill. 

I find it unutterably sad that such a brilliant charity as Macmillan has co-produced this booklet and that a well-respected hospital has launched it at vulnerable patients, suffering the worst of times.

 The only positive thing to cut out is the lie that people can change sex.