The underwear question.

A ruling that an NHS manager discriminated against a transgender employee by asking if they took off their underwear in a women’s changing room has “deeply worrying” implications, an MP has said.

The worker, who was born a man, successfully sued Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for gender reassignment discrimination in July. Employment judges heard that a manager had questioned the employee after concerns were raised that they had been naked from the waist down in the women’s changing room.

HE! That HE had been naked from the waist down. Don’t pander to this shit in the very act of reporting on it.

Sarah-Jane Davies, the tribunal judge, said in the ruling: “This was a communal changing room with a shower cubicle. [It did not seem] likely that there would have been a concern about a cisgender woman in a state of undress while changing in such a changing room.” The ruling means the trans woman will be entitled to damages, which will be allocated later.

God almighty are people simply melting their brains down with blowtorches? Of course women have “a concern” about men getting naked in such a changing room while not having the same concern about women doing so.

Miriam Cates, the Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, wrote to Kirsten Major, the chief executive of the hospitals trust, pointing out that she had a “narrow window” of time to appeal against the ruling. The trust chose not to appeal, however, and Cates told The Times that “the implications of this judgment, and the failure to challenge it, are deeply worrying”.

In her letter to hospital bosses, Cates said it had emerged during the hearing that the trust had “instructed” biological women employees that they had “to deny reality in order to be inclusive and keep their jobs”. She asked: “Why are women being re-educated to suppress their natural and understandable discomfort about being forced to share intimate facilities with a man?”

Because trans ideology.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission said it was aware of concern about the tribunal judgment. “We are interested in clarifying the law where rights between different protected characteristics overlap,” the commission said.

“Trans” shouldn’t be a protected characteristic. It just shouldn’t. If it is, it obliterates women’s rights, and that’s not a good outcome. When trans rights=men get to be in women’s spaces and get naked whether the women like it or not, that’s not a good outcome.