Pilloried as a transphobe
A woman who asked for her NHS breast-screening to be carried out by a female-born clinician was pilloried as a transphobe by a hospital trust.
Clare Dimyon, 54, who was raped as a teenager and is a lesbian, wrote formal letters asking to be seen by a “natal female” when she went for a mammogram on Christmas Eve last year.
She made clear that after being violated by a man when she was “little more than a child” she did not consent to intimate procedures being carried out by people born as boys.
Hey you know what, we shouldn’t have to cite traumatic experiences to want a woman doing that job. I’ll tell you why: it hurts, and you want a person who knows how much it hurts doing it to you. Of course it should be women doing mammograms! Literal women, people-with-breasts.
The mammographer signed one letter confirming she was female and another letter was placed in Dimyon’s medical records. But two weeks ago she saw her letters highlighted by the trust as examples of “unacceptable” and “highly discriminatory” communications in guidelines to support trans patients and staff.
Her requests had been anonymised, but were not given any context. The trust failed to say that they were written before a mammogram, an intimate procedure.
An intimate procedure that involves handling and arranging the breasts on a plastic plate. No thanks, don’t want a man doing that. Have every right not to want a man doing that.
This weekend the trust defended its stance.
“It is not possible to guarantee to any patient that they will only be treated by a clinician assigned to a specific gender at birth and, as an organisation that prides itself on our commitment to diversity and inclusion, nor would we wish to do so,” it said.
Their commitment to diversity and inclusion which excludes women who don’t want men squishing their breasts between two plates. Their commitment to diversity and inclusion which is all about trans inclusion and not at all about women inclusion.
In a statement, the trust stressed the importance of patients seeing the clinician with the most relevant skills, adding:
“We have a duty to apply the same principles here as we would if a patient requested clinicians from particular backgrounds/ethnicities or any of the nine characteristics protected by law.”
In effect, the trust was arguing that for a woman to ask for an intimate examination by another biological woman was as offensive as to request a medic of a particular religion or skin colour.
Which sort of frames all women as the equivalent of racist, because we keep having this evil instinct to try to preserve some privacy around men.
Dimyon, who was made an MBE for her LGBT work, said she was shocked because it was “long-standing practice to ask for a lady doctor or lady nurse”.
She said:
“We have an examination which involves clinicians handling your breasts and placing them on a mammography table in order for those pictures to be taken. Even on the door they say ‘gentlemen stay outside’, meaning husbands and partners, I suppose, because they recognise this is an intimate examination.”
And by “placing them on a mammography table” she means doing a good deal of lifting and pushing and prodding to get them in exactly the right position. It’s very “intimate.”
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust said that it had now removed the letters from its equality and diversity guidance and was “very sorry for any offence or upset caused”.
Sigh. Don’t do that. Don’t say the generic “any offence.” We know what the offence is, they know what the offence is, so just apologize for that without any blame-shifting “any” added. Just apologize for shaming a woman for a perfectly reasonable, ordinary, commonplace request.
They’ve all lost their damn minds, I swear.
Except of course, no one ever said anything about anyone’s “gender.” The patient requested someone born of the female sex. Trans activists have conditioned woke little administrators to conflate one’s gender presentation with literal biological sex, and I can’t believe everyone’s falling for it.
For that matter, what difference does the patient’s sexuality make? If she was straight, would it somehow be less imaginable that she feels she has the right to decide which men have the right to have access to her body? So much noise gets stirred up in these discussions with irrelevant details that it forces reasonable people to have to fight just to focus on the key elements.
Interesting that there is all this hue and cry about the patient being selective with respect to the transness of the screener, but none at all for the fact that she was equally “phobic” with respect to the sex of the screener. To me, this selectiveness in anger gives the game away. The patient ruled out literally 50% of the population! But no, the issue is that in amongst that 50%, some 0.3% of all males call themselves women, and they were ruled out too.
TRAs are vociferous in defending trans/”cis” as a category, implying that they believe this should be a protected category. They are silent in defence of sex as a category, implying that this is not a category that should be protected.
We knew this already, but there it is. Gender-identity, trans as a protected category comes at the expense of sex as a category.
Holms, I suspect that is part of the TWAW dogma. It’s okay to reject men for your screening, but hey, we’re not men, so it’s not okay to reject us. When you do, you are rejecting our womanhood, and therefore denying our right to exist. If they pointed out that she had also rejected the idea of males entirely, the game would be over, because it would draw the connection between them and men.
Besides, it’s part of their whole strategy that they seem to accept that women do have a right to be protected from men. But they are women, so why would a woman need to be protected from them? By pretending that they care about the rights of women, they only want to make sure that ALL women are included (their words, not mine), they can continue to amass the sympathy of people who don’t think very hard about things. They can continue to analogize it to the black woman, the Indian woman, the Thai woman, whatever other woman might be out there. They are just another one of the women, and it is wrong to discriminate.