How dare she speak to him that way
Dr Upton, for those who have not been following the case, was born male and is at least 6ft tall. Make-up and discreet silver jewellery cannot mask the good doctor’s male physiology. As Sandie Peggie told the tribunal, she was not discomfited by Dr Upton being transgender, but by having to share female changing facilities with a male-bodied person, as indeed most women would be, especially when bleeding heavily.
She made her feelings clear, much to Upton’s distaste. As the solidly middle class doctor, still in his 20s, told the tribunal, “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life.”
Oh really? That explains a lot.
The employment tribunal, which will continue into the summer because of NHS Fife’s inability to produce essential documents in time, has not only exposed the nebulous nature of gender identity theory – that a human being can change their sex through sheer will – but the ingrained class divide at the heart of the NHS that also characterises the debate around gender.
Gender identity theory is largely a middle-class pursuit, a fake radicalism which doesn’t bother its pretty little head with tackling the material causes of poverty and inequality. Instead, as feminist writer Sheila Jeffries argued in 2014, it is a social construct designed to maintain male dominance. And since its inception, the National Health Service has put the demands of the doctor class first before the needs of the largely working-class nursing and support staff.
Maybe if we all started pointing out how posh and twee and snobbish the whole thing is it would get through. It turns out men don’t mind being told how sexist their hot new opinion is, so maybe we should ding them in their street cred.
Former Labour MSP Jenny Marra, who attended the tribunal over several days, said the evidence reeked of class and entitlement. She observed: “Middle-class arrogant male doctor breaches nurse’s boundaries is not a new story. But this time the doctor is facing down the nurse with the backing of politicians and illegal guidelines drawn up by public sector officials who have been hoodwinked into betraying reality and the many working-class women at the frontline of our public services.”
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In an ironic twist of fate, the UK’s largest union Unison held its national women’s conference in Edinburgh this week, and the first motion to be debated called for the Labour government to introduce self-ID, the process where someone can change their legal sex by filling in a form. “Trans women are women,” read the motion which also criticised women who campaign for female-only spaces as “reactionary”.
Unison’s robustly male president Steve North (pronouns he/him) crowed on social media that not one delegate had spoken against the motion but, as is often the case with carefully stage-managed political conferences, the reality was rather different to that described by President North. Women who were prepared to debate the issue were so intimidated by the hostile atmosphere that they left the meeting, unable to face being called bigots by the very noisy supporters of the motion.
Yeeeah, pesky women. Don’t they know that the working class is male? That workers are male? That women who work don’t count as workers? That women are reactionary by nature and have to be told what to say by the enlightened men?
It is not surprising that middle-class professionals, whether doctors, HR managers or even politicians, have found comfort in the simplistic politics of identity. How much easier it is to pin a trans ally badge on a set of scrubs or business suit than begin to tackle the centuries’ old structural issues that trap millions of women in low-paid jobs, poor housing and ill-health, often at risk of sexual violence and abuse.
There is much about the gender debate that has left women aghast in recent years, from placing male rapists in female prisons to the scandal of the NHS mutilating young women’s bodies in the name of progress.
But surely one of the greatest betrayals is a trade union whose membership is three-quarters female, ignoring the material reality of women’s lives in favour of a fanciful theory that sex can be cast off as easily as last season’s fashions.
Yes but it’s so much easier than going on strike.
In today’s England the judgement “you have not forgotten where you came from” is the highest compliment you can pay a man of working class origin, and the most stinging insult you can offer a woman of lower middle class origin.
Gotta keep the help in their place.
My mother was a nurse in an hospital, and while she was middle class (in the US), she had a low opinion of most doctors.
These things are something I never would have believed. If you take away the trans, having a male doctor make demands of a female nurse would be considered sexist and also a power imbalance. Add in he is trans and suddenly everything is reversed.
@ Mike #3
That’s what’s so astonishing. It’s happening right in front of everyone’s faces, and yet so many are determined not to see.
Belief is key. Having gone all in with DARVO, trans “allies” can’t afford to turn back, so even UNISON will adopt Stalinist tactics before it will admit it’s made a mistake. Pointing out that they’re wrong doesn’t elicit a grateful course correction, but an angry defensiveness that precludes any walking away from their sunk costs.
Yet those who are pointing this out are the baddies who are beyond the pale. It’s all the more infuriating that what we are pointing out is not the nakedness of an Emperor, but the real harms against women. We are not protesting foolishness and vanity, but the cheating, bullying, intimidation, injury, sexual assault, and erasure of women. A naked Emperor? If only. The Emperor is advocating for the silencing and subjection of half the human race. Men’s feelings and desires are promoted and prioritized over the health, safety, and dignity of women. It’s just another version of “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Yet the men who claim to be women also claim a victimhood and powerlessness belied by the power of the captured institutions whose fealty they command. So in this sense trans ideology is indeed Imperial, given the breadth and strength of their influence and power. And that power is “naked” in that it has been taken (or given) and used without debate and discussion. If “NO DEBATE” fails, they try to pass this off with the “argument” that “trans rights are human rights” , and that the fundamental, axiomatic nature of what they’re demanding is so basic and unquestionable, that anyone so questioning this is either mentally deficient or unspeakably evil. they want it to be the case that what they want “goes without saying” because they know that it would not survive public scrutiny. They know, deep down, that what they demand are not “rights” at all, but privilegesand special treatment. In an open, honest debate, they lose. That they try to shame and shout down any criticism, complant, or protest shows how desperate they are to avoid the normal channels of democratic politics that they happened to evade in their initial seizure of the power they’ve acquired. They now do so with the unlikely bedfellows and dupes they’ve made of organizations that one would normally expect to be against the blatant, sexist power imbalance that this hearing is highlighting. Liberal news media? Labour unions? Trans ideology has successfully managed to get these organizations, and many others, to willingly and eagerly betray and subvert the very institutional values upon which they were supposedly founded. More than a whiff of Empire or Stalinism here. And they will not thank you for pointing it out to them.
That trans interests align perfectly with the age old values of sexist patriarchy means that “It’s only women” who lose out, as ever. Trans “rights” liberate nobody. They challenge nothing but women’s boundaries. They are invasive, colonial, and regressive. Nothing new to see here. That nominally “progressive” movements and organizations have so quickly incorporated trans “rights” into their missions makes you wonder just how committed any of them were to women in the first place. That women’s organizations allowed themselves to be taken in by this misogynist poison is astounding. I wouldn’t have imagined that this kind of self-abnegation and self-immolation was still possible. Who would have guessed that they would allow the bullies to join, and then join in the bullying themselves?
This whole travesty shows that we as a society are not so far removed from the values of the Taliban as we would like to imagine. We vary only in degree, not in kind. We are not as free of the darkness and ignorance that we see so clearly in them as we like to pretend. The underlying woman-hatred is still there, barely concealed beneath the surface. Scratch it and it’s visble. The belittling and marginalization of, and injury to women is universal.