No YOU’RE confusing
Using male pronouns to refer to a transgender doctor who used a hospital’s female changing room is “offensive”, a tribunal heard.
Stupid Telegraph left out the “male” part, thus making its own lede confusing instead of informative. The “transgender doctor” is a male transgender doctor. The Telegraph reports on the brutally enforced taboo on calling males males by refusing to call a male a male. Nice going.
Jane Russell KC, Dr Beth Upton’s lawyer, argued that nurse Sandie Peggie’s legal team were “confusing” those giving evidence in the tribunal by referring to the doctor as “he” and “him”.
Ms Russell claimed the witnesses in the case, which centres on the medic’s use of a women’s hospital changing room, were “not used” to hearing Dr Upton being referred to as male.
Well of course they weren’t, because there’s this viciously enforced taboo! Which even the Telegraph obeys!
But Ms Cunningham continued to refer to Dr Upton as male as she cross-examined a witness who investigated Ms Peggie after the nurse complained about the doctor’s presence in the changing room.
The barrister said Ms Peggie was “guilty of essentially the same heresy that has so exercised Ms Russell in being prepared to say that Dr Upton is a man”.
This prompted Ms Russell to object again, insisting that “Dr Upton is not a man” and she was “very concerned about the latitude being given to Ms Cunningham to be so offensive”.
But this insistence that it’s offensive to call a man a man is how we got in this mess!
Men are men, and women have an extremely basic need to know which are which.
Ms Cunningham accused Ms Russell of having “indulged in repeated futile objections to my use of correct sex pronouns for Dr Upton”. She said Alexander Kemp, the employment tribunal judge, had already ruled on the matter and Ms Russell had not submitted “any grounds” for revisiting that decision.
In January, Mr Kemp rejected an NHS Fife request to impose an order that would have prevented the use of male pronouns or terms to refer to Dr Upton, who was born male but identifies as a transgender woman. The judge said at the time that forcing Ms Peggie and her lawyers to use terms they consider “inaccurate” would be unfair.
Wildly unfair. It would make the whole case all but impossible to win.
He’s a man in reality. He knows he’s a man, because he and his wife are trying for a baby.
And, pertinently:
He’s a man in law, even the stupid law which gives a man a certificate declaring that he’s a woman, on the flimsiest of stupid excuses, because Upton doesn’t even have one.
There are no moral or legal grounds on which his barrister can claim that he is being treated unfairly here, so she’s merely behaving like a member of the Trannish Inquisition hunting heretics.