A racist paedophile vs a gender-critical nurse? Guess whose side the NHS is on

Nurses are as close as we get to a universally beloved profession. We trust them with our newborns, our dying parents, and quite a lot of the bits in between. So when nurse Jennifer Melle was verbally abused at work by a racist paedophile, you might imagine everyone from her managers to her union would be proud to stand with her. Not so. Instead, it was Melle who found herself punished, disciplined by her employer and nursing’s professional body, and finally hung out to dry by her union.

A committed Christian, Melle believes what most people, of all faiths and none, quietly understand: people cannot change sex. So when a male, trans-identified, convicted child abuser was brought onto her ward for treatment, she referred to him as ‘Mr’. According to Melle, the patient overheard this and erupted, screaming, ‘Do not call me Mr! I am a woman!’

Melle replied calmly: ‘I am sorry, I cannot refer to you as her or she, as it is against my faith and Christian values, but I can call you by your name’. The response from the patient was a tirade of racist abuse as he lunged towards her.

Unbelievably, as a result of this incident, the Nursing and Midwifery Council labelled Melle a ‘potential risk’. When Melle spoke publicly about being disciplined for calling a male paedophile ‘Mr’, her employer, Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals, suspended her for what it termed a ‘data breach’.

Rather than standing with one of their own, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has retreated into bureaucratic cowardice. As the Telegraph revealed this week, the RCN has issued a statement saying it cannot act until the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) produces its long delayed code of practice setting out how to implement the UK Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling, which reaffirmed the legal reality of biological sex. Meanwhile, the EHRC has told service providers to get on with providing services according to sex, not self-identified gender.

According to Melle’s account, the man who racially abused her was more than six feet tall, ‘clearly masculine in appearance’, and arrived shackled to two security guards after being transferred from a secure unit. ‘We were briefed he was a sex offender’, she recalls. ‘He was brought onto a male ward, his records said he was male, but the name written above his bed was a very feminine name.’

For Melle, refusing to indulge the fiction was not only a matter of common sense but of conscience. ‘He has committed horrific crimes against children’, she wrote in Premiere Christianity magazine. ‘To call him “she” not only felt wrong, it felt like a betrayal. Not just of reality, but of the victims who suffered at his hands.’

Melle is not the only woman who has been let down by the RCN. Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie, who objected to the (as it transpired, unlawful) presence of a man in a women’s changing room, is now suing the union for failing to support her. The Darlington Eight, a group of nurses ordered to ‘reeducate’ themselves after they also complained about a male colleague changing alongside them, were similarly abandoned. They subsequently left and formed their own union. When nurses are resorting to DIY unionisation, something has gone very wrong.

Melle did, eventually, secure a meeting with the RCN’s leadership, attended by its general secretary, Professor Nicola Ranger. According to Christian Concern, the advocacy group supporting Melle’s case, Ranger excused herself midway through the discussion to take a phone call and simply never returned. Shamefully, the head of a union representing over half a million members had vanished like a teenager sneaking away from the dinner table. Afterwards, the RCN sent Melle a thin, consolatory letter acknowledging the ‘impact’ the incident must have had on her, but confirming that it would be taking absolutely no action. Melle was, however, welcome to access ‘other member-support services’. Perhaps a mindfulness app…

Under Ranger, the RCN has instead devoted much of its energy to fetishising LGBTQ+ inclusion, rolling out hate-crime training, allyship campaigns and Pride celebrations. Ranger herself calls equity and inclusion a ‘moral imperative’. It seems odd that a fixation with gender ideology has entirely eclipsed the union’s actual moral imperative: defending and advocating for its members.

Outside of union AGMs and diversity webinars, racists and child abusers are people civilised societies recoil from. Yet here we are: a senior nurse racially abused at work, disciplined for refusing to pretend a male child abuser is a woman, and still the RCN cannot muster even a sternly worded email in her defence. It is clear the union has put the feelings of a racist paedophile above the rights of the woman caring for him.

If even nurses with perfectly ordinary Christian beliefs are now too politically radioactive for the RCN to defend, then what exactly is the point of the organisation? A union that bows to the feelings of dangerous convicted criminals while abandoning its own member has not merely lost its way; it has handed its spine, its mission and its conscience to trans-ideological lunacy.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.