A British doctor recently lost his job as a disability assessor because he insisted on using clients’ biological sex, not their preferred gender, in his professional capacity.
Dr. David Mackereth, a 55-year-old father of four who worked as a physician in the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) for 26 years, was undergoing training for employment with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in May. According to the Telegraph of London, Mackereth’s “role would have meant interviewing and then writing independent reports about the health of those claiming disability benefits.”
During the course of the training, the instructor stated that assessments had to refer to clients by their preferred gender, at which time the doctors in the room discussed the “fluid” nature of gender, Mackereth told the paper.
“I said that I had a problem with this,” he recounted. “I believe that gender is defined by biology and genetics. And that as a Christian the Bible teaches us that God made humans male or female. I could have kept my mouth shut. But, it was the right time to raise it.”
Mackereth, a Reformed Baptist, told the Telegraph that the instructor “took me aside and said he had passed my comments up the chain to the DWP.” Later, Mackereth received an e-mail from Advanced Personnel Management (APM), the company that employed him and would have hired him out to the DWP, stating that after consulting attorneys, the company believed that refusal to refer to clients by their chosen gender “could be considered to be harassment as defined by the 2010 Equality Act.” That law makes it illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of a “protected characteristic” such as transgenderism, a DPW spokeswoman told the newspaper.
Apparently, however, the act does not ban employment discrimination on the basis of scientific knowledge or Christian beliefs. Mackereth said that upon receipt of the e-mail from APM, he replied that he could not accede to its demands “in good conscience,” so his contract was terminated.
Mackereth recognizes that there is more to his story than simply the firing of one doctor.
“Firstly, we are not allowed to say what we believe,” he said. “Secondly, as my case shows, we are not allowed to think what we believe. Finally, we are not allowed to defend what we believe.”
“By stating what has been believed by mankind for centuries — namely that gender and sex are determined at birth — you can come under ferocious attack,” he added.
In reality, Mackereth would be doing a disservice to his clients, not to mention U.K. taxpayers, by failing to refer to clients by their biological sex. His job, after all, would have been to assess the health of individuals seeking taxpayer-funded disability benefits. As Dr. Michael Brown observed in a Christian Post op-ed, “Males are different than females, which means that in some cases, males must be treated differently than females. To fail to recognize this is to be unscientific, irrational, and liable to medical malpractice.”
To bolster his case, Brown cited a 2017 study by the Weizmann Institute of Science, an Israeli research university, that “identified around 6,500 genes with activity that was biased toward one sex or the other in at least one tissue. For example, [researchers] found genes that were highly expressed in the skin of men relative to that in women’s skin, and they realized that these were related to the growth of body hair. Gene expression for muscle building was higher in men; that for fat storage was higher in women.”
“This alone would tell you that, for medical purposes, it’s important to identify men as men and women as women,” Brown wrote. “Yet when a doctor in England determined to do this very thing, he was sacked. This is beyond illogical. This is criminal.”
And it is only the beginning. As Mackereth himself rightly remarked, “If we are no longer allowed to say that you believe sex and gender are the same and are determined at birth, everyone who holds my views can be sacked on the spot under this Act. I’m not an isolated case.”
