I'm a woman doctor and we have to stop trans activists and their supporters in the NHS imposing their fantasy on everyone else's reality

When I pick up a male patient's notes for the first time, there are some conditions I tend to rule out. Ovarian cancer is one of them.

So imagine this scenario. It's a hypothetical case — but one that is all too plausible. A new patient books a GP appointment at my surgery, complaining of back pain, bloating and loss of appetite. Let's call him 'Mac'.

My initial concern might be that he has irritable bowel syndrome. The first assessment is done over the phone. Mac wants an instant cure, a prescription to fix the problem. That sense of urgency makes me cautious, and I ask him to come in for a consultation. There may be nothing in the medical notes, nothing at all, to indicate that Mac is a trans patient — a biological woman, presenting as a man.

But one simple question — 'Were you born female?' — could prove a lifesaver, though in the current climate I might hesitate to ask directly. If Mac does indeed have early-stage ovarian cancer, that's something that I could never have surmised from the notes.

The NHS's obsession with 'trans rights' is deeply dangerous in many ways, not least to the trans men and trans women whose medical records do not reflect that they identify as the opposite sex. They might even have obtained a new NHS number to eradicate their history.

Health Secretary Victoria Atkins' announcement this week that it is essential 'biological sex is respected' cannot undo all the damage wreaked in the past decade by trans dogma.

But it is a crucial step in the right direction. It means that the NHS must start using clear, unambiguous language, sweeping away the woke waffle that labels mothers-to-be as 'pregnant people' and 'breast-feeding' as 'chest-feeding'.

And it heralds a shift away from the misuse of single-sex wards, where biological males identifying as 'trans women' can share facilities with women. It also raises a renewed hope that women undergoing intimate examinations will be able to request that the doctor carrying out the examination is a biological woman, without trans women present.

But I have serious misgivings about the news. It comes far too late: I'm one of many women doctors who have been warning about these problems for years, and our voices have been comprehensively ignored until now. The Secretary of State's pledges do not go nearly far enough — and already we are seeing resistance from outraged trans activists within the health service, who will fight to prevent any changes to the NHS constitution.

Yesterday Dr Emma Runswick, the deputy chair of the British Medical Association council, lashed out at the proposals. These will be subject to an eight-week consultation period during which they are at risk of being completely reversed or once again watered down until they are meaningless.

The proposals have, said Dr Runswick, 'the potential to incite further discrimination, harassment and ostracisation of an already marginalised group. Transgender and non-binary patients will potentially find their access to vital NHS services limited'. She makes no comment about women who are excluded as a result of current trends.

Trans activists and extremists within the NHS cannot be allowed to keep imposing their fantasy on everyone else's reality. The vast majority of British people, in my long experience as a doctor, have no truck with the notion that gender is a personal choice, a matter of 'emotional instinct' rather than basic biology.

At a time when public trust in the health service is already eroded, peddling the trans ideology actively discourages people from seeking medical help. One of my patients, a man well past pension age, became visibly frustrated and distressed last week when he was asked to fill in a form asking questions that were, to him, deeply nonsensical.

He hated being asked whether he 'identified as the sex to which he was assigned at birth', and he was genuinely insulted by a question about his sexuality. In the end, I took the form and put a red line through the offending sections — then wrote across the top in red Biro, 'This patient is 79 and male,' with details of his symptoms. That's all any doctor needs to know.

I have to assume that when pages of data like this are being collected from every patient, there will be armies of analysts collating it and compiling it into reports — at untold cost to the NHS. That money could go into the reduction of waiting lists.

In the same way, inordinate amounts of time and money are being spent on the leaflets, the posters, the Pride flags, the slogans, the diversity officers and all the rewriting that goes with 'trans inclusivity'.

It's a colossal waste of resources, probably running into hundreds of millions of pounds. If that energy and funding wasn't being diverted into pointless wokery, it could be helping to solve the NHS crisis that leaves patients dying in emergency waiting rooms before they can be seen by A&E doctors.

By concentrating on 'trans-friendly' language, the NHS is dehumanising everyone else. I hate being called a 'person who menstruates', 'a cervix-haver' or a 'patient with ovaries'. That reduces me to the status of a chattel defined by body parts.

It's also dangerous. I know exactly what an ovary and a cervix is, but many women sadly don't. It's abominable to discriminate against women who don't happen to have all the medical terminology memorised. After all, data shows 44 per cent of women don't know what a cervix is, so it's only right that cancer-screening clinics should invite 'women' to attend, not 'people with cervixes'. Every woman knows she's female, whether or not she can explain where her cervix is.

If medical data does not accurately record whether patients are biologically male or female, the results will be skewed. This has long-term implications: how can clinicians improve early diagnosis rates if they don't have the full facts? How can public health plan for future needs and spend money effectively?

Men and women don't only have different diseases, they have different risks of developing diseases shared in common. For example, either sex can suffer breast cancer, but it's much more prevalent in women.

The most urgent problem of all is the presence of trans women in all-female hospital wards, a bizarre change introduced in 2021. For three years, NHS guidance has been that trans patients can be placed in single-sex wards, based on the gender they 'identify' with. The Health Secretary's proposals will belatedly reverse this. The new guidance will state: 'We are defining sex as biological sex.'

This cannot come a day too soon. Women in hospital wards are especially vulnerable to assault. Between 2017 and 2021, according to data in the British Medical Journal, 35,000 female patients suffered rapes, sexual assaults and sexual harassment in hospital. That is a disgrace, something the NHS should be doing everything to prevent. One obvious way is to put an end to the madness of placing trans women on female wards.

Nobody wants to deprive trans people of any medical care. That should go without saying. But the crisis in the health service affects everyone. We cannot continue to allow the NHS to be held to ransom by a tiny minority of activists who continue to trumpet the increasingly discredited slogan that 'trans women are women'.

• Dr Renee Hoenderkamp is a practising GP.