The Darlington nurses have won a victory for Christian truth

The Darlington nurses have won their case against County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, challenging the way they were treated when a biological man, who identifies as a woman, began to use their female-only changing room.

For reasons that will become clear, I will refer to this person as a man and with male pronouns. This is not out of nastiness but because the biological truth matters, particularly when we are dealing with people’s private changing spaces.

Even though I have led the Christian Legal Centre for over 20 years, taking on countless cases in the process, when I first heard about their story, it stood out immediately.

In total, 26 female nurses raised concerns about a male using their changing room, including experiencing inappropriate behaviour from him. Some had traumatic past experiences that made the situation even harder for them. But the trust’s response was simply: “broaden your mindset”.

What a tangled web we weave. The problems we cause for ourselves by constructing a layer of lies and acting as if it is true

But it was the trust’s mindset that needed broadening. It was dogmatic in implementing transgender ideology’s most fundamental, self-contradictory doctrine: “trans women are women”. Its suggestions that the nurses needed re-educating could just as easily have dropped out of 1984.

The trust’s behaviour was outrageous. But unfortunately, quite common. We’ve supported Christian nurses and doctors who were disciplined for praying or respectfully mentioning their faith to patients. Christians like Mary Onuoha have been forced to remove visible crosses, while others have been allowed to wear their own jewellery. Richard Page was pushed out of his senior role because he publicly shared his ordinary Christian beliefs about marriage and family.

Ideology and policy

Despite so many of its staff being Christians, the NHS has long been one of the institutions most captured by policies that undermine the Christian faith of those working within it. The Darlingon nurses weren’t all Christians. But they came to us for help. And now we’ve been able to give them a clear victory at the employment tribunal.

The heart of this case was always about the hospital’s decision to prioritise one male member of staff over the many women whose space he was entering. The tribunal found that the trust’s behaviour in dismissing the nurse’s concerns violated their dignity. Women’s spaces are for women, not for anyone who feels like they are a woman.

The trust could have simply asked the man to use a separate room to change in. But its blinkered pro-transgender policies led them to believe that even raising the issue would be discriminating against him.

So much frustration and pain could have been avoided had the trust simply upheld the truth. Now that sanity has prevailed on the principle point of who can use women-only changing rooms, we ought to see much wider change.

It’s a legal victory that ought to be the last of its kind. For Women Scotland won its Supreme Court case last year on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act. Since then, two cases – the Darlington nurses and Sandie Peggie - have ruled in favour of women seeking to feel safe in their own spaces.

Every NHS trust in the country should by now have implemented policies that acknowledge and uphold biological reality. But despite talking a good talk, the Labour government and its health secretary Wes Streeting MP have failed to push through changes.

Back to reality

The Darlington nurses have won a victory for women’s rights. But it’s also a step towards reality. A man can dress differently, put makeup on, take hormones and undergo surgery, but he will never be a woman. Anyone who claims that he is a woman is denying reality and promoting lies.

Since the Gender Recognition Act, our laws uphold this fiction in several respects. People can receive gender recognition certificates to have their false gender officially recognised in law. They can get their birth certificate falsified to make out that they were born as their chosen gender. But as these recent judgments show, all the transgender-affirming laws and policies are an incoherent veil of falsehood.

The heart of this case was always the hospital’s decision to prioritise one male over the many women whose space he was entering

What a tangled web we weave. The problems we cause for ourselves by constructing a layer of lies and acting as if it is true. It goes for marriage too, when we pretend that male-male or female-female relationships can be marriage, despite no complementarity, no true consummation, no possibility of offspring. It goes for abortion, when we hide the obvious humanity of the unborn child.

But falsehood unravels over time. God made this place. Although we all feel the effects of sin, the universe was made and is being upheld by God. We can’t escape him. When God speaks, so it is. We can say trans women are women until we are blue in the face, but it will never be the case.

And over time, God’s truth will always win. The fake layers of meaning that we drape over ourselves are as insufficient as the fig leaves Adam and Eve made. At the moment, the gender lie is unraveling. One day, the others will too.

For now, we can rejoice in this win not just as one that secures female-only spaces, but also as a move back to reality – and back towards God. Many in our culture are beginning to recognise the truth and wisdom of God’s word. It’s our job to keep speaking truth and see God do great things.