Tucked down a quiet cul-de-sac in the County Durham town of Bishop Auckland is a modest brick house with a neat front garden. Lisa Lockey, whose home it is, welcomes me in on a bright, quiet September Sunday morning with an enormous smile, a handshake that’s more of a hand clasp, and an immediate offer of a cup of tea– as well as an order to the dog to leave me in peace. I am ushered into Lockey’s immaculate, cosy sitting room where three other women are waiting, each with their own cuppa. They are warm and friendly. I could be at a coffee morning.
But we are here for more than just chit chat. These four women– Lisa, her colleagues Bethany Hutchison, Annice Grundy and Tracey Hooper– as well as another, Joanne Bradbury, who is not here today, are taking their employer to court, and in the process, want to change NHS policy for women like them. The charge: sexual harassment and sex discrimination. The accused: County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust.
At the hospital 20 minutes down the road, where these women all work as nurses, there also works an operating theatre nurse named Rose. Like all the other nurses in the hospital, Rose is required to change daily, when she gets to work, into suitable medical attire: in Rose’s case, theatre scrubs. As with all the other nurses who work at the hospital, Rose is given space to do this, in her case, in the women’s changing room.
The only problem is, Rose was born a man and retains male genitalia. And the four women I am meeting today are not happy about Rose’s presence in their changing room. Not only does it make them and other colleagues feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, but they claim it puts them at risk. The trust has said that, because Rose identifies as a woman, Rose is free to use the female changing rooms. The nurses believe they have no choice but to take a stand. “I don’t want it on my head,” says Hutchison. “I don’t want to wake up one day and see that somebody’s accessed the changing room and somebody has been abused, violated, raped, whatever. I don’t want to be that person who goes ‘I could have done something’.”
At 35, Hutchison is the youngest of the four, and one of the most eloquent. She has been the driving force behind the legal action and it has taken its toll: she was “on the sick” for two months with stress, although is back at work now. Blonde, blue-eyed, immaculately made up, slender in an orange shirt and with a notebook full of information on her knee, she is clear about what she wants to achieve from the legal action. This is not, she says, a personal vendetta against Rose, or against transgender people per se. “It’s about a policy change,” she explains. “I want it to focus on men who will use this, and abuse this policy. It’s not about an individual. It’s the policy that’s wrong.”
The four other nurses largely allow Hutchison to take the floor. But all are clearly angry about the way they have been treated by their place of work.
“We were made to feel as if our opinions didn’t matter,” says Grundy, a thoughtful 55-year-old, who came to nursing as a second career after 10 years working as a retail manager for Laura Ashley. Before, she said, “I felt that my life was just work, work, work with no reward. Now my life’s work, work, but I get reward. I enjoy my job.” This issue, though, has taken its toll on her too: Grundy has been off work for the past month with facial neuralgia, an electric shock-like feeling through the jaw. This, she says, was triggered by the stress of what has been happening. The softly spoken Hooper, too, has had “sleepless nights– so many sleepless nights. It has had some negative, negative effects.”
It has, it seems, been a long year for them all. The group first raised their concerns in August 2023, when they reported the issue to their ward manager. She duly raised it in a meeting, and was told that the issue had also been brought up by other departments. But the message back was that the female staff “had to accept the situation due to the inclusiveness of the NHS”.
In April this year, the women wrote a letter to the trust, signed by 26 nurses. The letter explained that female staff felt they were being not only humiliated and degraded by Rose’s presence, but that for many– including nurses who had previously experienced sexual abuse, and those from overseas, where undressing in front of men was not the cultural norm– it also felt discriminatory. One nurse has claimed that she had a panic attack after repeatedly being asked by Rose while alone with her in the changing room, “Are you getting changed yet?” The situation, they wrote, was “intolerable”.
Later that month, the ward manager was summoned to an impromptu meeting, where she was told that the trust “supports Rose 150 per cent” and that the nurses needed to “broaden their mindset”, be “more inclusive”, “be educated”, and be given training. “And they actually said ‘Oh, Rose is very into educating people about this topic’,” claims Hutchison. “I don’t need educating. I’ve got two master’s [degrees] and a degree.”
A further meeting between HR and the nurses criticised the letter as an inappropriate way of raising concerns or complaints. A sign appeared on the changing room door complete with rainbow banding. “Inclusive changing space” it declared. “Do not remove this sign.” It has subsequently been taken down.
Hutchison, Grundy, Hooper, Lockey and Bradbury all received letters from the trust threatening disciplinary action if they talked to the media. The trust has since apologised for any misinterpretation of these letters. In July, they were informed that their ward manager’s office was being cleared out, and would become a temporary locker room for anyone uncomfortable with the situation.
“It’s a tiny cupboard,” snorts Hutchison. “They’ve now also given us a cubicle in the patient discharge room– but that’s where we discharge patients, have huddles with other nurses, meet relatives. “You wouldn’t feel comfortable in there if there was a roomful of people [in the discharge room],” says Grundy. As Lockey, 51, puts it, come the end of shift, it’s “boobs and bums everywhere” in the changing room. “I don’t like my body particularly– I don’t like getting changed even in front of other women let alone a man,” she adds. Was there ever any suggestion that Rose might be asked to use a temporary changing room? “No, never,” they all chorus.
“And what I’m advocating for is a similar change in room for people like Rose,” adds Hutchison. “I don’t want him shoved in– you know, a disabled toilet or a cupboard. It’s not nice for anybody.”
“It needs to be dignified; it needs to be appropriate,” agrees Lockey. “It needs to replicate ours.” “Everyone should be provided for,” says Grundy.
All the nurses, throughout our conversation, refer to Rose as he, or him. I am intrigued by this. To what extent is Rose transitioned, I ask. “There’s no surgical transition, as far as we’re aware, there’s no hormone replacement. There’s nothing,” says Hutchison. “They’ve got to live two years as a woman to get the [gender recognition certificate, that legally recognises a person’s change in gender]– I don’t actually know the exact rules, but that means using women’s facilities,” says Lockey. “But he was very masculine to start with.” Do they have a picture of Rose, I ask? I’m shown one on a phone. Rose looks like a fairly ordinary bloke: middling height, blond hair grown long and tied back in a ponytail, jeans, a band T-shirt, chunky boots. You can see the outline of male genitals through the jeans. “One of the people in theatre had told me that HR had actually approached Rose and told him to wear lipstick and try and look more feminine– and start shaving,” claims Hutchison. “Which is totally stereotyping women,” adds Lockey. In another picture, Rose stands in a doorway with her girlfriend– whom Rose is open about trying to get pregnant.
It’s not hard to see why the women feel let down by their employer. Or why they feel double standards are being applied. Lockey points out that, when it comes to patients, trust policy states that a transgender woman is not allowed to be nursed in a bay with other women; they have to be in a side room– a policy that was brought in earlier this year. “When we had our first meeting with HR, I actually asked the representative about this,” says Lockey. “If the policy is for the patients not to be mixed, why is it OK to do it with staff? And she said that patient law was different to employment law. I asked her if she would be happy to go in a changing room with him. And she said ‘Well yes, it wouldn’t bother me, I’ve been in the Army’.”
“It was very much made clear to us that they were not on our side at all, that they were going to support this individual, and that they weren’t going to take on board our thoughts and feelings,” says Hutchison. “Her reply made me realise that we were not supported by HR,” agrees Grundy. As for support more widely in the hospital, it has been mixed, they all say. “When we talk to people, they are very supportive of us,” says Hutchison. “But there’s also a lot of hostility in [operating] theatres and I think this is because they feel sorry for their friend, and they don’t see the wider impact.” Publicly, the nurses have received an enormous outpouring of support: letters and cards have been arriving daily to the hospital; JK Rowling has tweeted her support, and in June Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, tweeted that he supports the nurses and is “horrified they’ve had to resort to legal action.”
What comes across most strongly is how dignified these women are. They have wrestled with themselves over whether to go public. They believe in their cause, but they want to do the right thing– by themselves, by their colleagues and for Rose, too.
“It is a real complex thing,” says Lockey. “And I know that for a lot of transgender people, being passable is a massive thing for them. I follow a lot of transgender people on TikTok who discuss this sort of thing, and I really sympathise with them. It’s got to be really, really difficult for them.” One of her extended family members lives with several transgender housemates, she says, and another is gay. “He’s not 100 per cent comfortable with [the nurses’ legal action], but he’s still totally supportive, and he does understand,” she says. “Just like he understands that we’re not transphobic. We just want our privacy.” The relative in the houseshare has seen a photo of Rose, she adds; “and he’s like ‘Yeah, he’s taking the p--s.’” Hutchison’s message to Rose is: “Have a bit of empathy. You work in healthcare– have a bit of empathy towards the women that you so desire to join.”
I leave feeling sympathy for all of them: the four nurses I have met today, their unnamed colleagues, and also Rose. All of them went into medicine to help people. None of them, it appears, either wants to be in this situation, or wants to back down. All want to feel supported by their employer.
The nurses are in the process of setting up a union, the Darlington Nurses Union, which will have a particular interest in and focus on safe single-sex spaces, and equality and respect for all workers regardless of their protected characteristics, including both gender reassignment and biological sex. They suspect that many trusts will have policies like this, and that theirs is something of a test case that could open the floodgates for trans-free private spaces in the workplace– something that lawyers at the Christian Legal Centre, which is supporting the action, say is “without doubt” the case.
Until then, they will keep on getting up, going to work and fighting their cause. “This is not just for nurses,” Hutchison declares as I leave. “This is for my sisters, my daughters, my mum– everybody.”