This week on Project Runway god makes it work
A Christian midwife is suing a hospital for making her wear trousers in the operating theatre…She cites a command in the Book of Deuteronomy that people should not wear clothing meant for the other gender.
Yes but even if you think that’s an acceptable reason for someone to refuse to follow a job requirement (and why would you think that?), what makes Hannah Adewole so sure that trousers have always been boy-clothing and skirts have always been girl-clothing? What makes anyone sure what clothing was “meant” for “the other gender”?
Nothing; it’s just that people associate the most prissy option in any particular situation with “what god has always meant” and pitch fits accordingly, by way of letting everyone know how pious they are and getting their names in the papers.
Funny, as I was watching a TV show called The Glee Project, which is a reality show where kids (I think they are about 18-20 years old) are competing for a role in the next season of Glee. Well, one young man, a thin blond boy, has been complaining that his christianity has kept him from kissing girls with whom he is not in a committed relationship. Each week they sing and act various roles before the judges.
SPOILER ALERT: So in the latest episode, he quit the show, and a very good chance at an acting and recording career, because he could not cross the line of his beliefs, even if, as the mentors pointed out, it is only acting. He was the show’s favorite because they wanted to hire a christian character to explore that belief, but he could not even agree to pretend to kiss a fellow competitor.
Until she can find a verse that specifies gender-appropriate clothing, she hasn’t got the beginnings of a case (and maybe not after that, either). I mean, did they even have trousers back in Biblical times?
OTOH: Is there a decent medical justification for requiring pants as opposed to skirts? (I honestly don’t know.) Rules that have no rational basis are stupid and should be changed, whether the source is a holy book or some bureaucrat.
From wikipedia:
Scrubs are the shirts and trousers or gowns worn by nurses (perioperative nurse), surgeons, and other operating room personnel when “scrubbing in” for surgery. In the United Kingdom, they are sometimes known as Theatre Blues. They are designed to be simple with minimal places for dirt to hide, easy to launder, and cheap to replace if damaged or stained irreparably.
So this gentle xtian, meek and mild, is putting her bronze age preferences ahead of the safety of patients in the operating room.
Circa 1920 through 1940, pink was for boys, and blue for girls.
I’m guessing the reason for trousers instead of skirts is because it’s pretty awkward to scrub the legs so it’s better to cover them with sanitized trousers. Arms can easily be scrubbed, legs can’t. Simple.
<i>Is there a decent medical justification for requiring pants as opposed to skirts?</i>It’s much easier to trip or stumble in a floor-length skirt. Sure, the skirt could be shorter, but part of the point of scrubs is to protect you from exposure to patients’ bodily fluids. It just seems like a bad idea all around. She complains because Muslim women are allowed to wear a hijab in the operating theatre, but that seems much less likely to cause you to misstep and injure a patient in the process. Further, while they allow hijab, I doubt they would allow Muslim female surgeons to operate in a burqa.Additionally, skirts tend to, well, skirt the ground. Pants can be tucked into surgical boots so she doesn’t track one patient’s fluids around the hospital unnecessarily. Skirts cannot be tucked in.
A major reason is the greater restriction afforded by trousers to the dispersal of perineal dandruff around the theatre.
#7…perineal dandruff…not that’s an image which will stick with me for a LOOOOOOONG time.
How about we give her pants that have “for women only” printed on them? That would make them no longer men’s clothing, so it should be alright then, right?
She wants it to seem comparable, but it’s not. Although I suspect that the rigidness in this instance might be related to the folks charged with infection control getting tired of being ignored.
Yes, I promptly googled “perineal dandruff” and the only exact match is here. Not another “gnu,” I sincerely hope.
Actually head coverings are pretty practical in surgical theatres, so why not let Ms Crazy Christian wear a veil too – that traditional christian attire.
Umm, apparently “PR” is a real thing, though not referred to quite the way it was above. Yes, I had to find out. I’m “that way.”
That’s “PD.” Oh, nevermind.
For warriors diapers would have been the most comfortable before tools made pants more convenient to make and we observe that in the hunters of many Asian and African tribes. Otherwise, I imagine it would have been skirts all around – we still see that sort of thing in Scotland, a variety of Asian nations, and New Caledonia (Caledonia being the Latin name for Scotland – could the island have been given its name because the natives were observed to wear skirts).
“Diapers” – those are loincloths! Presumably people didn’t shit in them.
Aren’t we anal today.
Is her boss a man? Ultimately, I’ll bet there’s a man in charge of her somewhere, and the Bible tells her to STFU and do what men say. All she needs is a little sexist verbal abuse from a man in authority, and her job will feel just like church and she can get on with things.
OK, you yoyo’s – the human perineum – pubic area, for the anatomically challenged – is a huge source of skin desquamation – DANDRUFF – and has been shown to contaminate OR’s with things like gram-negative organisms and staph epidermidis. So there! Some ORs insist that trouser legs be tucked into socks or boots.
I am starting to get really, really sorry I asked…..
;-)
Point of fact, there is no actual evidence that Muslims would be able to wear hijabs. She claims they “wouldn’t prevent it” but surely if there were a Muslim women flouting the dress code, she would have brought that up, and a hijab would violate the dress code.
Also note that in traditional media style, (People read the title, then the first paragraph, and fewer people read all the way down) the most important sentence is the very last one, that shits all over the “controversy” of the article.
“On Tuesday night the midwife’s claim was rejected by the tribunal. It ruled that the strict uniform policy in force at Queen’s Hospital did not disadvantage Christians and was “legitimate and proportionate for infection control”.”
So there is in fact a valid infection risk being prevented, and it does not in fact disadvantage Christians relative to Muslims. Muslims also can’t wear burkas, and maybe not hijabs if it specifies the type of head covering, as it does for type of scrub (if there is a better head covering, why would they even care?).
@ 18 – well that’s why people wear underpants! And why jockeys (Y fronts) are better than boxers.
Are you sure they do? After all, no true scotsman …
I believe the phrase is perineal fallout. Whether there is any evidence that trousers improve infection control or safety in the OR is another matter.
My girlfriend occasionally dresses as a nurse and she always wears a skirt. Some nights its a french maid. Either way, its rubber gloves.
On clothing and infection control: some NHS Trusts (regional bodies administering the free health care in the UK) prohibit the wearing of neckties because ties have been found to spread infection. (But maybe they do that in the US now, too — been gone so long I wouldn’t know.)
On sex-specific clothing: Others will remember this better, probably, but I believe at the time of the Stonewall uprising there was a law that everyone must wear at least 2 items of gender-appropriate clothing and if you didn’t, you could be arrested. I’m not at all sure that what I’ve got on now would qualify, come to think of it…
On blue vs pink: Marjerie Garber’s “Vested Interests” has quotes from before WWI about pink being “a stronger, more decided color” and so appropriate for boys, while girls should wear blue because they are “delicate” and “dainty”. Her source was a NYTimes article that claimed the currently established pattern of pink for girls and blue for boys wasn’t firmed up until post-WWII.
I would have been quite surprised if there were no such thing as perineal dandruff/fallout. I haven’t heard of it before, but my own perineal skin is decidedly not some sort of selfsterilising plastic or polished metal surface.
Jason. :\ Why doesn’t she punch the patient while she’s at it?
Really??? I never knew that. And I wouldn’t qualify. I never wear “gender-appropriate clothing” apart from underpants (which I never call by their offensive “gender-appropriate” diminutive).
Svlad – well yes I guess so, it’s just that one assumes it’s er contained by the knickers.
“Gender-appropriate clothing” is so culturally and temporally relative. In China and Vietnam, trousers have long been regular female garb for women working in the fields. In medieval Europe, until the 14th century, men and women both wore what we would now call dresses. And of course, there’s Rome and Greece, were men sneered at these barbarian Persians and Gauls with their silly trousers…
Now, on the other hand, do you know that it’s still technically illegal for women to wear trousers within the city of Paris, France, unless they ride a bicycle or a horse? No kidding. It’s a municipal ordinance that has never been repealed.
“Skitters”? What’s wrong with calling then “skitters”?
Irene, I know, hence the quotation marks on “gender appropriate.” I didn’t know about trousers in Paris though! Gee, I’ve done a lot of law-breaking there. Shame on me.
@ Ophelia: Heh. I live there, and I break that ridiculous stuck-in-the-19th-century law all the time. ;-)
Also – if she’s such a devout Christian – WTF does she think she’s doing taking paid employment outside the home in the first place?
#28
Fair point, if they’re good knickers. They still need hospital approval. Shrug.