R U sexoffenderphobic?
Male-born sex offenders who self-identify as women can be placed on female-only NHS wards, hospital trusts have said in guidance.
Devon, Oxford and Nottinghamshire hospitals all tell staff that a criminal history should be part of a risk assessment when placing male-born people on female-only wards, but do not say it is a bar to admission.
There’s a funny thing going on here…Men can be placed on women-only wards, but women can’t. Men can request women-only but women have to put up with women and men who claim to be trans.
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.
It comes as The Telegraph has found that NHS Trusts across the country have issued guidance that says patients should be admitted based on the gender they identify with and therefore can choose which ward, lavatory and shower facilities they use.
Which means that women can’t choose. “Women-only please.” “We don’t cater to TERFs here, bitch.”
Some trusts have labelled those patients who express discomfort as transphobic, compared them to racists in official guidelines and ordered staff to report them to police for hate crimes.
But all they’re doing is choosing women-only wards, which you just said…
Until 2019, one hospital group instructed medics to withdraw treatment if a female patient refused to accept a physically intact male on women-only wards.
They what???????????
Dr Jane Hamlin, president of the Beaumont Society, a trans support group, said: “If anyone starts off with an assumption that a trans person is a sex offender – or even a potential sex offender – that is discrimination and transphobia.”
The hell it is. Trans women are men, and men are potential sex offenders when it comes to protecting vulnerable women. That’s the whole point. It’s not that all men are, it’s that men are the ones who potentially are. There’s a reason parents tell their daughters not to get into a car if a man they don’t know invites them to.
Devon Partnership NHS Trust says that patients “will be admitted based on the gender which they identify as at the point of admission” and it will not be based on physical characteristics or the person proving they have legally changed their gender or name, as they claim this is illegal.
It states that risk assessments must be carried out but indicate that this does not prevent male-born sex offenders being placed on a female-only ward.
“Where a transgender woman is admitted and has a history of sex offending, decisions regarding risk should include consideration of whether they are being prescribed anti-libidinal medication that would be expected to reduce sexual risk,” the document states.
Oh would it, well that’s fine then. It would be expected to but hey it might not but that’s fine, because it’s the feelings of the sex offending man who says he is a woman that count. Nothing else matters, especially not the safety and peace of mind of a bunch of stupid women.
Oxford states that “if the service user has a sex-offending history, risk should be managed in the same way as it would be with any other client, irrespective of gender”.
Right, because sex-offending is notoriously gender-neutral. No difference in the stats at all. In fact women probably do it more, because they’re such good liars.
When hospitals were ordered to eliminate mixed-sex wards more than a decade ago, patients were hopeful it would mean that they would have privacy and dignity during a difficult time.
But hahaha no it was all a trick.
But since then female patients have been accused of hate crimes, placed in seclusion and even threatened with their treatment being withdrawn for questioning why men who self-identify as women are placed in single-sex accommodation.
TERFs should just die.
Dr Lucy Griffin, a frontline clinician, has warned MPs and peers that doctors “are really worried about the toolkits that have gone out within individual organisations largely about things like single-sex wards”.
“Some of them are so punitive,” she said. “One organisation is suggesting that any woman who objects to a male on a single-sex ward is put in seclusion, as in a psychiatric setting.”Other policies state that trans people have “equal access” to single-sex facilities, which includes “male or female-only support groups”…
And the extra problem with that is, a man who goes along with that policy is a shitty human being, and who the fuck wants to be in a bed next to or a support group with a fake woman who is a shitty human being? It takes a real sadist and egomaniac to force himself on women in a hospital in that way, so how can it possibly be fair to force such men on women who are ill?
[D]espite acknowledgement of the risks, the documents suggest that any patients who question the decision will be treated as “bigots”, a practising nurse who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals has said.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust states that “concerns alone are insufficient” to justify moving wards, adding: “Just as the Trust will not adapt practice in light of Racist concerns expressed as discomfort, so the Trust will not adapt practice in light of Transphobic concerns expressed as discomfort.”
It’s not the same thing.
“Concerns expressed as discomfort,” eh? Obviously, whenever someone voices discomfort about the presence of a category of people, that is prima facie bigotry.
Uncomfortable that there’s a black person here? Racist.
Uncomfortable that there’s a gay man here? Homophobe.
Uncomfortable that there’s a transwoman here? Transphobe.
Uncomfortable that there’s a convicted murderer here? A thief? A con artist? A serial rapist? A pink-haired male in fatigues and fuck-me pumps brandishing a nail-spiked bat labeled “TERF slayer”?
Not all arguments that look the same are the same. Sometimes they only look the same because some premises are suppressed; i.e., implicit. Sometimes premises in one argument are sound, while the apparently analogous premises in the other are unsound. I’d complain about people’s logical ineptitude, but I’d be at that until the heat death of the universe.
Women who express discomfort due to the presence of transwomen in women-only spaces aren’t like white women expressing discomfort due to the presence of black women in white-only spaces. That analogy doesn’t fit. Fortunately, after wracking my brain, I’ve come up with what I think is a better one.
Women who express discomfort due to the presence of transwomen in women-only spaces are just like women expressing discomfort due to the presence of MEN in women-only spaces. That’s it! And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, or make them bad, or anything.
It’s therefore up to the transwomen to be sensitive, accommodating, and nice about it, and bow out.
Sastra, didn’t anyone ever tell you men aren’t supposed to have to accommodate women? It is women who are supposed to accommodate, always and forever. Because reasons.
‘“Where a transgender woman is admitted and has a history of sex offending, decisions regarding risk should include consideration of whether they are being prescribed anti-libidinal medication that would be expected to reduce sexual risk,” the document states.’
I think we’re all aware that it’s a misconception that men commit sexual crimes against women because of their ‘libido’ or because they’re somehow ‘oversexed’. Men commit these crimes against women to express anger, domination and control, not because they have some physical compulsion to have sex. Risk assessments that aren’t based on this understanding would be useless.
I’m not a medical professional, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been told that hospital staff do their best to accommodate patients who express racist attitudes or ‘discomfort’. Staff may identify these patients as racists, but it’s their job to help these people, not to judge them. It’s routinely acknowledged that patients often prefer to be treated by people who are like them, with respect to race, ethnicity, language, culture, and age, as well as sex.
Of course, they could always reopen Devil’s Island to the men who wish to be women. Problem solved. I cannot for the life of me understand why that thought has not made its way into somebody’s head.
Omar, you took that right out of my head. Yes, it worked its way to my head, but I have no large platform (and saying that would get me deplatformed if I did).
iknklast: How big a platform do you need? (I happen to be in the platform business. ;-)
Risk Assessment
This is a dangerous phrase. Look out for it, you’ll see it everywhere. It’s being used to handwave away any solution as safe or fair or workable regardless of whether:
a) it is, or
b) another, perfectly adequate solution already exists.
For example.
Problem: the presence of dangerous male sex offenders in female wards.
Solution 1: Sex-segregated wards. Simple, cheap, very effective
Solution 2: Risk assessment of male patients. Difficult (read: ‘impossible’, see below), expensive, unproven, requires additional structures, processes, staff, enforcement, punishment spaces, the consequences of error are very grave…
The real problem, of course, is that we live in a world in which people’s values have been so skewed by gender identity extremist ideology and institutional grooming that many people feel that solution 1 seems the better idea.
Re risk: I’ve said here many times that humans are awful at assessing risk. Much substance of my various careers has been based on that fact. Our intuitions about risk are (presumably) tuned by evolution and tend to relate to the immediate and the strongly causally correlated, such as the possibility of a rustle in the bushes being a tiger. Risks relating to events separated by distance and time or where motive is obscure are very difficult for us to assess. For example, you’re unlikely to connect the identity fraud which led to your bank account being emptied to the burglary of your house four years ago. The mechanisms by which these might be connected are clear only with hindsight and expertise.
This failure in intuition is central to the abuser’s ability to abuse. People always underestimate the lengths and depths a predator will go to in order to achieve even tiny gains. The motives at play and the expected results are not ones our intuitions are prepared for. As Ceri Black of LGBA Ireland put it in a recent brilliant Twitter thread: a child groomer is not always expecting to gain access to that particular child. Often, he is content with getting that child ready for the next guy. Or, by extension, with minutely changing the environment so that targeting, abuse or even grooming itself is slightly easier overall. Predators will spend decades doing this. They’ll spend their lives doing it. They will marry women, move countries, buy a house with her and settle down… just to get access to her kids. They’ll go into politics. They’ll join or even start political movements. Not for some big sweeping gain, but for incremental but sinister ones nobody will notice and the ‘benefits’ of which they might not even see themselves.
We don’t expect that. You might already be thinking that it all sounds a bit unrealistic. Part of you might be thinking that even as you are nodding your head in agreement. That is your brain on risk. You are terrible at assessing risk, I promise you, especially if you think you are not.
Not only do we not expect the extremely skewed relationship between the motives and behaviour of predators, it’s also very difficult to correct for the fact that we don’t expect it. It’s a lesson that has to be constantly re-learned. A lot of the training I do involves re-tuning people’s intuitions about risk. Even when that’s been done, the lessons require regular re-enforcement. I hardly need tease out the obvious irony: that organisations always decide, after a while, that the re-enforcement training is no longer needed because nothing bad has happened…
So with all this in mind, don’t you dare tell me that hospitals, prisons, schools, gyms, public fucking toilet attendants… are capable of making such risk assessments, even if they were properly funded trained and the mechanisms in place to make them work.
And even if all of this were actually possible – which it manifestly is not – then please let us not lose sight of the fact that none of it would be necessary at all if we just stuck to single-sex spaces.
Call it ‘gaslighting’ if you like, but I think we should call it what it is: grooming. And “risk assessment” is the groomingest phrase of all. Keep your eyes on it.
latsot #8
Very interesting and disturbing, thank you.
(I assume you mean “…many people feel that solution 2 seems the better idea”)
Yes latsot @#8: I concur entirely with your excellent post.
As the old (militarist?) slogan has it: ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’ To which I might add, from the personal right up to the national level and beyond.
Bjarte:
Yes!
Trust me to get the most fundamental part of the post 100% wrong ;)
latsot at #8:
I encounter that attitude in regard to safety measures. “Why do we have to do [safety measure/procedure]? Nothing ever happens.” “My reactions never blow up.”
“Why can’t you test the fire alarm when I’m not here? It’s so loud and annoying.”
Karen:
‘There is no such thing as the Precautionary Principle in science.’ I have that on the authority of Professor Ian Plimer, mining geologist and anthropogenic global warming denier. It was in a book, so it must be right. The book was written by him; and entitled ‘Heaven + Earth’. He also ends on a very positive note, and urges us not to worry, as God will protect us.
So chemists don’t need fume cupboards, goggles and such; for the same reason.