AAAAAAAAARRGH

I wear my green and purple one. Let them try…

I'm currently reading their complaints procedure policy (I know have to have fun) and they have failed on just about every point to carry out a proper investigation! TWICE!

(And the SAR info they've sent me actually drops them right in the shit!)

But it's alright cos the staff are wearing rainbow lanyards!

Such fun!

How about lanyards supporting biological reality?

Pronoun badges in mostly non-surgical and across a range of settings (primary to tertiary) and specialities (A&E, gerontology, inclusion medicine, psychiatry and more). They can be standalone on a rainbow backing but a number of Trusts are adding them to the, "hello, my name is…" badges.

I meet a number on panels, committees, and working groups. And, to be fair, I wonder how many have their pronouns etc. inserted by their institution's IT systems.

Crikey @Boiledbeetle that's terrible

We keep going on about how the NHS is ‘captured’, but who is it that keeps making these decisions? There must be someone somewhere who is responsible for all this crap.

does anybody have a name?

I needed an intimate examination recently and the appointment letter warned informed me that there could be a TW in the examination room as either doctor/chaperone/both *. If I wasn't happy with this I could contact them. I did. They said no problem, they would ensure at least one (biological) woman in the room.

I received a phone call a short time later letting me know that both the attending consultant and the chaperone were female. And they were. The caller was very reassuring and told me to ring again if I had any worries at all.

Perhaps I am just lucky with this particular hospital trust.

*paraphrasing - it was couched in a bit of "woo"

Out of interest, what specialism? And are these surgical?

As I said we have dealt with lots of doctors and they are all realists - in fact brutally realist - last week to the woman in the general ward next to us ‘Hello Anne, I am your doctor today. You are going to die if you carry on drinking, you know this already but I have looked at your records and can confirm so you have 2 options…’ I can’t imagine anyone like him wearing a pronoun badge.

Knowing some (paediatric) brain surgeons now, I tentatively asked one they could really tell the difference between a male and female brain. These are people that study scans for hours to work out which parts of childrens’ brains to take out. A very definite NO was the answer. Also can’t imagine them wearing pronoun badges and would be horrified if they believed in all this nonsense.

An acquaintance observed a NICE public meeting about fibroids. She made a note of how many times the words women or woman were used on the slides or when people were presenting or discussing. It was < 20. There were > 100 uses of persons or people (she couldn't catch them all).

It was full of HCPs and clinicians plus academics and NICE staff. Apparently, they're not willing to assert that uterine fibroids affect women. There was, however, an overview of equalities issues and that slide carefully listed transmen, transgender people etc.

I appreciate this is more anecdotal stuff but I'm genuinely interested because this has been the opposite of my experience - are your pronoun doctors in general practice / non-surgical practice?

Scary

How the hell does the NHS have the money to pay Stonewall? Maybe something for Victoria Atkinson to get her teeth into. We’d all be very happy if she could free up some of that cash for things which actually make things better eg investment in equipment, building maintenance and patient care.

I’m going to see what I can find out about my local hospital’s finances and maybe ask the trustees some pointy questions

Me too @RethinkingLife I hope that the pronoun in signature ones have just not given it any thought at all but I know one or two clinicians who are real cheerleaders

I have not come across any doctors who have got pronoun badges

I have. Many, many and on a regular basis. And who put it in the chyrons for MS Teams/Zoom etc. And put it in their email sig files. And ask patients for their pronouns.

I've no idea how this would be audited rather than shared anecdotes.

My job takes me into three different hospitals regularly and I know a number of doctors professionally and personally. None of them have any time for the 'biological sex is an illusion' nonsense. They're not stupid. (Well, of course they're not stupid: they're doctors.)

Adrian Harrop is the risible outlier that proves the rule and he barely counts as he's practically spent more time suspended than he has in practice.

Having spent a lot of time in hospitals over the last few years, I have not come across any doctors who have got pronoun badges. This is in critical for children where it matters very much that you know reality - and doctors deal with stark reality all day. The only person was an older man who was a children’s support worker. Very much a balding male who was lovely but obvious had a very different role in trying to cheer children up.

Look, OP. When will this all end, you said? It will end when people truly feel it's time for a change and they really want it. The "rules" have changed, women are more "empowered", certain things you cannot say aloud. It doesn't mean people (men) changed in their mindsets, that worked comfortably for centuries. The changes are forced, not natural, I'm afraid. Most (men's) minds are firmly rooted in the past. They might mask it, but it's as it is. 😞

It seems incredible on the face of it how Stonewall have got themselves into a position of such power; it's like they run half the bloody country! NHS, armed forces, police, criminal justice system, schools; who doesn't kow-tow to them?

Well, women, obviously! 😃 But people have sat back and let this happen, or actively encouraged it.

of all organizations, you'd think the NHS would be the most likely to know the difference between male and female bodies and how important it is to differentiate by SEX, not gender.

Oh, they know the difference, don't worry.

Imagine that you are a doctor or nurse in A&E. There's been a car crash and a patient, who is not breathing, is rushed in. You need to know if they're a man or a woman so you know how much oxygen to inflate into their lungs. You need to know this because your medical training, and your professional experience, have taught you that men and women have very different lung capacities.

A life hangs in the balance and every second counts. You will not waste time clutching your precious rainbow lanyard and remembering that gender is an inner identity and nothing to do with biology. You KNOW that there is a difference between the sexes. You KNOW that there is a marked sex-based difference in lung capacity. So you ascertain the sex, and then you proceed to give the correct life-saving treatment.

Medical staff know the truth. They base treatments on the truth multiple times per day. The rest is just window dressing and idiotic posturing by non-clinical managerial staff.

The real issue is that the UK already has one of the highest tax spends per capita on the health service in the world and in return we get a shoddy service with poor outcomes. So why is money being spent on lanyards and training in a metaphysical belief that is not based in reality?

I work somewhere that had some ‘training’ from lobby groups (yes ones that pop up on here with dodgy ideology) and inevitably pronouns in emails, rainbow lanyards and pronoun badges were introduced.

Sadly those pushing it are older gay men and straight middle aged women (married to men with kids). And no one wears a badge that isn’t stating the bleeding obvious.

I refuse to play. Not looking forward to pride season…

'I’m very wary of anyone wearing anything rainbow in a professional setting. I automatically think they’re not very bright and just want to seem “with it'

Same here, ditto people with pronouns in their email signature 🙄 I work for the NHS and I refuse to wear any rainbow shit. I think we should be committed to providing the best care we can to everyone and anyone, not privileging any one group over others

These 'ally' groups make me cringe. I'm a radical feminist. If I saw men at work wearing a 'feminist ally' badge, I would think they were doing it for their own ego and for virtue signalling, rather than any actual interest in women and making our lives better

NHS hospitals have been proudly rainbow flag wearing for a while now.

The problem is how can they fly that flag and wear those pins and say to trans people that sex comes first in health care?

It's no wonder we are getting assaults in women's wards.

I work with the NHS a lot and always cheer inwardly when I get an email from someone sans pronouns. Means they’ve made an active decision to stand up to what I know is huge pressure to beeeee kiiiiind

as I always say ‘don’t be a jerk and treat everyone the same’. How much can I charge to go onto companies and ‘train’ them?

A progress rainbow flag is a political statement that has no place in any workplace. I find the idea that certain 'special' people are singled out as identifying as not homophobic or any other kind of phobic especially offensive - what is that implying about other staff?