Steve Russell, chief executive of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, sat down recently with The Northern Echo and said something that needed saying: "We did not listen closely enough to every perspective or try hard enough to resolve the issues." That is an honest sentence, and in the current climate, honest sentences from NHS chief executives on trans issues are not exactly abundant. So I note it, and I mean that.

But I keep coming back to Rose Henderson.

Rose is the trans nurse at the centre of this case. The employment tribunal that awarded seven of her colleagues £187,000 in damages was also the tribunal that cleared Rose of any personal wrongdoing. The panel was explicit: she was not to blame. She was a nurse doing her job, using a facility her employer's policy permitted her to use, in line with the legal understanding that existed at the time.

So when Mr Russell says the trust became "slightly entrenched" in its views, and that colleagues' concerns "should have been heard more closely", I want to ask: whose concerns? Because Rose had concerns too. Rose had a workplace to feel safe in too. Rose had colleagues, a locker, a changing room, a shift to get through. And what the tribunal described, carefully and without drama, was a situation in which the trust failed to find a workable solution for everyone, and the person who ended up most exposed by that failure was the one who had done the least wrong.

The trust's own legal costs came to around £603,000. Add the £187,000 damages. That is the best part of £800,000 spent on a dispute that, as Mr Russell himself now concedes, could and should have been resolved earlier, at the level of management, with some imagination and some proper facilities. Single lockable rooms exist. They were eventually installed. They could have gone in at the start.

What the trust is doing now

Mr Russell says policies have been updated so that staff use changing facilities "reflecting their biological sex", in line with the Supreme Court judgment and the tribunal finding. He says additional single lockable facilities have been introduced for staff who want them. He acknowledges the existing facilities are not good enough, and commits to improving them.

That is the right direction. Private, dignified facilities for anyone who needs them, available without requiring anyone to justify why, is genuinely the sensible answer. It always was. The tragedy is that it took a tribunal, a Supreme Court ruling, nearly £800,000, and considerable harm to a trans nurse's working life to get there.

What the Royal College of Nursing owes its trans members

This case does not sit in isolation. Read it alongside recent coverage of the Royal College of Nursing's position on trans nurses, and a harder question starts to form. The RCN exists to represent nurses. All nurses. Including Rose Henderson.

When standing with trans members becomes uncomfortable, when the press is running hard on a story and some members are vocal in one direction, professional bodies face a choice. They can hold the line on their obligations to every member, or they can find ways to go quiet, to hedge, to frame their position around the concerns of the louder group and hope the trans members don't notice.

Rose noticed.

The RCN's credibility with trans nurses now depends on whether it is willing to say, clearly and without qualification, that a member cleared of personal wrongdoing by an employment tribunal deserves the same active support it would give any other member facing a hostile working environment. Not a statement about policy. Not a reference to legal complexity. Active, visible support for the nurse who was found, by a tribunal, to have done nothing wrong.

The admission from Mr Russell that the trust did not listen closely enough is worth something. But "we should have done better" is the beginning of an answer, not the end of one. The question it opens is: better for whom? If the answer is better for everyone except Rose, then nothing has actually changed.

Rose was not the defendant in that tribunal. She was never the defendant. She was a trans woman going to work, and the institution around her failed to protect her from a situation that became, through management inaction and a lack of basic facilities, untenable for people on both sides. She was cleared. She deserved better. And if the NHS, the RCN, and the wider debate about trans people in workplaces cannot keep that truth at its centre, then all the policy updates in the world are just paperwork.

I hope Rose is okay. I genuinely do. I hope she is still nursing, still valued, still walking into a building where people are glad she is there. She deserved that from the start.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans equality. She is the founder of GenderGP and writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.