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
I’ve been trying to sort out my views on when someone’s statements or behavior outside of their work capacity should justify disciplinary action. (I mean morally justify, not what the legal lines are.)
It’s hard to come up with a formulation that doesn’t involve a lot of case-by-case judgment. The extreme bright-line rules don’t seem workable to me. It just can’t be the case that an employer should shrug and ignore a manager who is posting statements about how members of group X are intellectualy inferior, etc. — that obviously raises concerns that such a person can’t fairly make hiring/firing/employee evaluation decisions. Ditto for someone who is the “face of the company” but has made themselves toxic to the general public and/or your customer base, etc. Conversely, I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that people can’t have separate existences from their job, and that every employee’s every utterance is fodder for HR.
There’s obviously a lot of factors to consider (is it a public-facing job, how far beyond the pale are the statements, etc.), but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?
When you have to make arguments like “Employee X made statement Y. Statement Y is contrary to the position of advocacy groups for minority such-and-such. Therefore Y constitutes ‘violence’ against that group, and members of that group would be justifiably ‘afraid’ to be treated by X even if X would never utter Y on the job, therefore X can’t do the job and must be fired or disciplined,” I think something has gone wrong.
Story of my life, basically, and I’m sure that of a lot of people.
Yes, men who claim to be women do want to see a gynaecologist https://reduxx.info/french-lgbti-organization-calls-for-gynecologist-to-be-condemned-after-he-stated-he-only-serves-real-women/
True, but I doubt he’d like the speculum jammed up his urethra…
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I think a substantial number of the creep-and-weirdo fringe really do.
I vaguely recall some issue about how gynecologists should handle demands from TiMs for pap smears. The suggested response was actually imitating the procedure, rather than telling them their demands were nonsense.