If the union won’t stand up for women, women will walk. Janice Turner in The Times:

[Lisa] Lockey, 51, is one of five Darlington nurses in dispute with their NHS trust over its policy of allowing a trans-identified male colleague to use female changing rooms. When the health secretary, Wes Streeting, heard they were suing for sexual harassment and sex discrimination he was “horrified” and offered to meet them. Last week they travelled to London where he heard their concerns, including those of a nurse who has PTSD after being sexually abused as a child.

This meeting incensed North. It was “deeply concerning”, he tweeted, “that Wes Streeting appears to be once again pandering to anti-trans bigotry”. Three quarters of the workers North represents are female, yet here he castigates a Labour minister for listening to women, including some of his own members.

And there it is – the boulder we keep crashing into. Women are required to sit down and shut up and obey, because men who pretend to be women matter more – far far far more – than they do. Than we do. We women are the brutal oppressors, and men who announce that they’re women are our victims. BANG that’s the end of women’s rights. We finally had some, after all these centuries, but now they’re being yanked back again, on behalf of men who think they’re the only women who matter.

None of the Darlington nurses had a view on the “trans debate” until last August: they were too busy caring for patients or their own families. Then a male theatre nurse who calls himself Rose began using the female facilities where they change before and after a shift. Rose has not transitioned. He wears men’s clothes and apart from long hair he presents wholly as male, nor, say his colleagues, does he take hormones because he and his girlfriend are trying to conceive. Parading around in boxer shorts, staring at nurses in their bras and asking one woman repeatedly “are you going to get undressed yet?”, Rose made nurses feel so uncomfortable some started changing in the disabled toilet.

Yeah women always do that – ask other women in the locker room “are you going to take your clothes off yet?” We just can’t stand the waiting.

But when they complained to management they learnt that the policy of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is that trans staff can self-identity into any changing room they choose.

Which means that female staff can’t. If men who claim to be women can self-identity into any changing room they choose, then women can’t choose a changing room with no men in it, because the men will always choose to follow them in. Heads they win tails women lose.

This policy is pure Stonewall playbook, part of the trans “toolkit” of measures it has long insisted every institution or company adopts, especially the rule that it is unhappy women who must be banished from their own facilities rather than — as the nurses have requested — a dignified third space being found for a trans person.

It’s almost as if that’s the whole point, isn’t it. Not really the female soul trapped in a woman’s body, but the male soul rejoicing to have found a way to bully women and watch them take their clothes off.

A vicious, vengeful trans lobby, which dubs opponents bigots, has frightened many into silence. The Darlington nurses were always whispering in hospital kitchens with distressed colleagues too fearful to go public. But they are determined neither to resign from jobs they love, nor to back down. Their tribunal case, which has a preliminary hearing this month, could set a major precedent. They also have a strong ally in Streeting, Labour’s least tribal thinker, who is determined to unravel NHS policy at source. Introduced by stealth it has turned loyal, hard-working nurses into unlikely campaigners.

Solidarity.