Hadley Freeman in The Times:

The process is the punishment. This is the conclusion every woman will draw from the experience of the Darlington Memorial Hospital nurses who were humiliated and degraded by their employer just because they didn’t want a man, known as “Rose” Henderson, to use the women’s changing room, where he could watch them undress.

On Friday an employment tribunal upheld the nurses’ complaints of discrimination and harassment, which is a victory and should be celebrated. But it is obscene this tribunal was necessary, and future generations will look upon cases like this with the same horrified bewilderment with which we look back on witch trials.

Or perhaps not quite the same because even more so because this is now. This is not the fucking 17th century when people believed a lot of wacko things, this is the 21st century when we know how to put an exploratory tool on Mars and how to put people on a space station that orbits the earth, to name just a couple of examples of humans knowing more now than they did 5 centuries ago. To put it another way: how dare they? How dare they not only pretend to believe that a man who says he’s a woman is therefore a woman, but also punish real women for saying a man is not a woman? How dare they stick this ludicrous reality-denying ideology in the middle of a human world that knows better?

Mind you, the US is just as bad, to judge from a senate committee hearing about abortion medication last week, in which an obstetrician-gynaecologist, Dr Nisha Verma, was asked if men could get pregnant and refused to answer what she described as a “polarising” question. It would be very interesting to learn how and why this anti-science lunacy took such hold in the UK and US medical establishment, and whether biology is even taught in medical schools any more, or if it is deemed just too polarising these days.

What exactly, one wonders, did Dr Nisha Verma learn in the process of becoming an obstetrician-gynaecologist? I mean, were there classes on how to make a man look pregnant? Were their classes on how to deliver a baby born to a man? What??? What can the content have been?

When another nurse, Bethany Hutchison, was interviewed on Woman’s Hour in 2024, she was scolded by the presenter for referring to Rose as a man: “You use the word ‘male’ but what you mean is a trans woman colleague.”

The presenter of Woman’s Hour. That presenter rebuked a woman for referring to a man as a man. Women must bend the knee one way or another. If feminism gets in the way it must be turned inside out so that it becomes all about men.

The Darlington nurses won their tribunal, but it took a 16-day hearing, almost 4,500 pages of evidence and years of being bullied. How many other women will take the risk to stand up for themselves, especially when the outcome is still far from guaranteed? The NHS nurse — yes, another nurse — Jennifer Melle is still waiting to hear if she can work again after she was suspended from St Helier Hospital in Surrey because she refused to refer to, and I swear I’m not making this up, a convicted male paedophile as “she”. The convicted paedophile attacked her and racially abused her, and somehow Melle was seen as the one in the wrong.

A witchfinder-general would be an improvement at this point.