Without forgetting her nursing training

A crucial point in this piece on Amy Hamm:

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warned that “professional misconduct must not be permitted to be redefined to include speaking unpopular truths” — in this case, unpopular truths that bear directly on Hamm’s medical training and responsibilities as a nurse and nurse educator. Hamm knows that sex is observed, not “assigned”, at birth. Her case highlights the contradictory expectations professionals in her position face: to pretend to go along with a strange new set of beliefs about sex and gender without forgetting her nursing training, in which sex is not a postmodern riddle but rather a constantly relevant factor in medical evaluation and treatment. 

It’s all very well* for people who aren’t medical professionals to echo the stupid mantras but people who are medical professionals had god damn well better not lose track of which people are which sex, and everyone knows it, and even the zealots don’t actually want their nurses and doctors pretending they’re the other sex when it makes any kind of medical difference which sex they are. Do men who claim to be women want to see a gynecologist? Do they want their gynecologist to ram a speculum into their genitals? Do they want to be checked for breast cancer but not for testicular cancer?

When philosopher Kathleen Stock and athletic coach Linda Blade testified as expert witnesses on Hamm’s behalf, opposing counsel declined to ask either woman a single question, perhaps fearing any elaboration on the common-sense views they share with Hamm. “We’ve had language for boys and girls, men and women, since the beginning of time,” Stock testified on Tuesday. “Biology hasn’t gone away” — something a nurse should know better than anyone — “but all of us have lost the ability to freely refer to facts about ourselves, important facts, for instance that we are a sexually dimorphic species.”

We used to be a sexually dimorphic species. Now that kind of thing is old hat, so we’re creative and poeticalish instead.

*it’s not all very well at all of course

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