Bleef
Wes Streeting said “something has gone wrong in our society” as he met NHS nurses fighting to keep biological males out of a women’s changing room in their hospital.
The health secretary confirmed his belief that sex is biological, according to the “Darlington Five” nurses, who handed in a 48,000-name petition at No 10. It called for party leaders to “stand up for women” to ensure they had access to single-sex changing rooms and lavatories.
It’s not a belief. Knowing that men are not women [because their “biological sex” is male] is not a belief. Not knowing that men are not women can be a belief (as opposed to just a mistake and/or lack of knowledge), but knowing that they are is just knowing. We don’t call basic everyday accurate knowledge about the world we live in “belief”; we call it knowledge. We know it’s a mistake to step in front of a car going 60, we know birds are not fish, we know rain is wet (I’ve just been for a walk in some, more of it than I was planning for). We don’t need to put in the hard work of believing any of that, we just know it and move on.
The five nurses have filed a claim against County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust with an employment tribunal. They say their employer has failed to protect staff from sexual harassment. The first pretrial hearing is expected next month.
Rose, who works in the operating department, identifies as female. The nurses claim their colleague does not take female hormones, is sexually active and has said
they were[he was] trying to gettheir[his] girlfriend pregnant.The nurses said the colleague stared at their breasts as they were getting undressed and spent “a long time walking around the female dressing room”, sometimes wearing tight boxers that showed
their[his] genitalia.In other words he’s having a laugh. He’s doing this to harass and humiliate women. He should be fired.
The trust said it is committed to a “safe, secure, and respectful working environment” for all colleagues and had put alternative, private women-only changing facilities in place.
The nurses have argued that the new space opens straight on to a busy corridor and serves only to “further humiliate, degrade and isolate” female staff.
The group has said that 26 nurses wrote to HR and senior management outlining their concerns, but were told via HR that they needed to be “re-educated”, “broaden their mindset” and be more “inclusive”.
Yes, “broaden your mindset” until you believe that snakes are carrots and leeks are goats and trees are bicycles. Broaden your mindset until all words have lost any universal meaning and mean what the individual user decides they mean – just imagine how long conversations take under that system! Broaden your mindset until a man raping a woman is a cookie singing a butterfly.
An important principle of organisational decision-making is that those who make the decision should be those who have to live with the consequences. In this case, that would apparently not include the bureaucrats in charge of the NHS, who are apparently indifferent to the possibility that their decision will have any consequences at all. But it will, if only by lowering staff morale, and those in contact with staff members adversely affected. The only exception would be those male members of staff who fantasise about being women.
The Age of Enlightenment is long gone. Welcome to the Age of Bullshit.
Hey here’s a crazy idea: why not give the purpose-built changing facilities to the larger and pre-existing population of employees claiming to be women, i.e. the actual women, and put the needy pretend woman in the new makeshift room? Slap a ‘women’ sign on each, with instruction such that the pretend woman shall know which is his, and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Sure, the door opens up on a busy corridor still, but if only one – or very few – people are using it, there should be few to no occasions where the door is opened and an occupant is exposed to said corridor.