Quote:When a doctor announces to colleagues that he wishes henceforth to be known as the opposite sex, it seems he is offered a new GMC number to go with the new name and pronouns, wiping out his past. Wes Streeting has raised concerns that this could be hiding the adverse findings of any previous disciplinaries from the public, supposed to be traceable via the same number.

The health secretary’s point about safeguarding is so blindingly obvious you’d think it might have been raised when number switching was first mooted among GMC bigwigs — except, of course, that we are talking about an ineffable but highly potent substance, gender identity, known to paralyse even high-functioning minds upon first contact. The same magical stuff led managers at NHS Fife to accede to the requests of a male doctor to use the women’s staff changing room, thereby exposing themselves to a highly embarrassing tribunal from a nurse, Sandie Peggie, that went part-heard last week. And it has also led NHS England managers to embrace the genius idea of issuing a new NHS number to anyone who “changes gender”, meaning any man who phones up his GP and says he is now a woman, and vice versa. The need to transfer old information into a new record creates, at best, a lot of pointless hassle for a cash-strapped service, and, at worst, disastrous errors, as crucial medical information pertinent to biological sex fails to be switched over.