13-05-2025
A woman saying no to trans ideology should be enough. In the NHS it isn't
If you want to understand how power works on a day-to-day basis, here is an easy explanation. The less power you have, the more you are required to explain yourself. If you are late for work you need to have a reason why, but if your boss is late he or she does not. The lower you are in terms of status, the more you have to justify your actions.
I notice that when someone bumps into me. I am the one who automatically says 'sorry'. Most women are programmed to apologise for difficult social interactions – it's how we are brought up.
That is what makes it hard for us to say no, to demand respect, to insist that we mean what we say. Experience has taught us that to be taken seriously, we have to prove that we count.
The case of the Darlington nurses, who are locked in a legal battle with their local NHS trust over its transgender policies, includes an example of this in extremis. Why did nurse Karen Danson have to give a detailed account of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her own father for some to understand why she does not want to share a changing room with a biological male called 'Rose'?
The details of what she went through, as described in an interview at the weekend, are just horrible. Nobody should need to go public with their private torments in order to demand something that we once took for granted: single-sex changing rooms. As she and her colleagues fight the NHS over this, the Supreme Court Equality Act decision (which defines sex as 'biological sex', and which various luminaries claim not to understand) has made it clear that they should have single-sex changing rooms.
Danson did not want to get undressed in front of 'Rose', a man who self-identifies as female but whose genitals could be seen through the holes in his boxer shorts. Liberal media compliance with all of this has meant that 'Rose' has to be referred to as a trans woman and the Darlington nurses as vile transphobes.
Let's just end such compliance here.
'Rose' asked Danson why she was not getting changed. I have never heard a woman ask that of another woman in a changing room, have you? Privacy, dignity, safety – these three little words surely do not need vast explanations.
These three words should also be the central tenet throughout hospital wards and care homes, particularly when intimate care is required. This is part of our understanding that we treat each other as fully human, even at our most frail.
Later, when Danson needed an urgent hysterectomy, she was informed that 'Rose' would be present, and she obviously objected. Was this punishment for the legal action she and her colleagues were taking against their employers, the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation? Twenty-six women had complained about the changing room situation and were told they needed 're-education'. As with the case of nurse Sandie Peggie, who also took her NHS employer to court when she was suspended after complaining about sharing a changing room with a transgender colleague, the feelings of female nurses with decades of experience counted for nothing.
What mattered were the delusions of selfish men who cared not about how uncomfortable they made colleagues feel.
So cowed has the NHS been that such men are deemed the victims of outrageous bigotry. They are the ones suffering from outdated prejudice, even though the health system has altered our very language to represent their desires and they have the full backing of their unions.
Most of the unions and some MPs are struggling to comprehend the Supreme Court judgment. This is yet more dishonesty. It is easy to understand. What they are struggling with is the fact that they have got the law wrong. Unions exist to protect all their members yet the intense focus on trans rights at the expense of women's means that they are not much interested in doing so.
The absolute abandonment of any principle of safeguarding by so-called progressives has been astonishing to behold. Safeguarding exists to protect the vulnerable. We need it because we know too much about the abuse of children, women, the elderly and the disabled – nearly always at the hands of biological men. That such reality is deemed offensive does not make it untrue.
There is no need for competitive victimhood here (trans people have a hard time but so do other sections of society) yet here we go again. We have seen it with the treatment of rape victims and the astonishingly low rate of convictions because the victims don't conform to a stereotype of respectable women attacked by strangers. The police described some of the children raped by grooming gangs as 'unrapeable'. Gisele Pelicot was a heroine for going public with the crimes inflicted on her. But who would wish this on anyone?
Women are required to explain themselves over and over in order to be believed and deserving of justice. Why? Why is it not enough for us to say no to men however they identify? Our institutions, including the beloved NHS, have not accepted that women have a right to say No.
But we do and we need to own it. I read once that when Meryl Streep is asked to pose in a certain way or do something she doesn't want she simply says, 'That won't be happening'. She does not need to explain herself. None of us do.
That Danson found her voice is admirable. But no more apologies, no more explanations, no more stories of violation should be necessary now.
We have the right to our own space. We always did.
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