Dear Sir,
Dr David Mackereth has been discriminated against and denied a job with the Department of Work and Pensions because of his Christian belief that God made mankind male and female. Dr Mackereth believed he should not be compelled to use a preferred specific pronoun to address a transgender patient. I fully agree. Religious belief is also a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, but evidently some protected characteristics are more protected than others.
I met my first transgender patient, male-to-female, in the USA in the 1980s. ‘She’ was called Robin, which in the USA is both a girl’s and a boy’s name, so no problem there. However, I could not in conscience refer to this patient as ‘she’. I decided that no-one, not even Robin, could object to my using ‘her’ first, i.e. Christian, name rather than a pronoun. So I always used ‘her’ name, which led to some rather stilted conversations but provoked no comment, even from Robin. Such choice of address is accurate and insults no one; it may be idiosyncratic, but it is not hate speech. So in disputable matters about gender identity let’s use proper names. We should not be compelled to explain ourselves for our vocabulary, whether our reason is that we believe in a Creator or whether we are sticklers for truth like psychologist Jordan Peterson.
