How the NHS’s gender lunacy led to a horrific sex attack

Within an hour of being transferred to Lambeth Hospital’s all-male psychiatric ward on 12 April 2022, an unnamed transgender man (ie, a biological female) was pushed into a cupboard and raped.

‘No Adam’s apple’, the patients chanted when the woman arrived. As she went into a side room to avoid other patients asking, ‘Are you a girl?’, she was followed by 27-year-old Davointe Thomas. He proceeded to subject her to a sex attack. Last month, a London Crown Court convicted Thomas of rape and handed him an indefinite hospital order.

How could this have happened? How could a vulnerable woman have been placed in a secure psychiatric ward brimming with troubled, unstable men? The answer, of course, lies in the NHS’s embrace of trans ideology – an ideology in which a person’s gender identity is said to trump biological reality, safety be damned.

Indeed, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has confirmed as much. It insisted its decision to transfer the female patient to a male psych ward was in line with NHS England’s policy on gender at the time.

This was an incomprehensibly terrible decision. Perhaps even more unfathomable is the alleged behaviour of the NHS trust during the subsequent investigation. A source told The Times that, following the rape, the trust went ‘into self-preservation mode’ and sought to obstruct the police investigation ‘from the outset’.

Reportedly, the trust ignored several information requests from detectives and even shared around an internal note reading ‘don’t give them any more’. It took a judge’s summons for internal reports (which had previously been redacted) to be shared with investigators in full.

In the meantime, Luther Badejo, a mentally ill patient, had wrongly stood trial for the assault. Only when complete records were finally handed over was Badejo finally cleared. ‘This has been hanging over me for three years’, he said. ‘It’s been killing me and my family. It should never have got this far. I just don’t understand why it did.’

The victim struggled to deliver her impact statement. ‘He’s ruined my life and taken away who I was’, she said of her assailant. ‘Before this I was never afraid… I can’t continue with the statement, there are too many tears.’

If the horror of this case is not a wake-up call for those who have lobbied to normalise gender self-ID within the NHS, I’m not sure what is.

There has, rightfully, been much pushback against biological men entering women’s spaces – particularly in hospitals, homeless shelters and women’s refuges, where residents are already at risk of abuse. But the rape at Lambeth Hospital draws attention to another stark reality of collapsing male and female spaces.

Here was a patient who was struggling enough with her mental health to be referred to a psychiatric ward. She was clearly vulnerable. She may believe herself to be a man, but that should never have been a reason to transfer her to a ward with actual men, let alone one populated by men struggling with severe mental-health conditions themselves.

This is a catastrophic safeguarding failure on the part of the NHS. Ridding our health service of the delusions of gender identity has never been more urgent.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.