BMA beclowning themselves over the SC judgement

There really needs to be a widespread pushback on this crap from the scientific and medical community.

The regular people I still see supporting this stuff really believe it is medically justified. And statements like this, or policies that support the idea of medically necessary "affirmation care," or magazines like Scientific American publishing this stuff, mean they really do not think these are not scientific positions.

It's interesting in the reddit thread posted above how many people said they'd left the BMA because of idiocy. The general public does not understand that.

I do understand the mentalist union bit. My own union is only interested in Gaza and has completely given up any pretence of organising to improve working conditions in my industry. I should not be a member, really, I just...it's an emotional attachment to trades unionism from my family I guess. I should give it up. Instead I just vote for literally any candidate who has ever had their hands on a cable in their working life. You can still usually find one and I live in hope.

I think, even though I am bewildered by them generally, I would STILL be surprised if the CWU made a public announcement saying that electricity was incomprehensible and there's no such thing as binary information theory.

I do love the fact they now identify as ‘residents’ as opposed to junior doctors, presumably for more gravitas.

I’m sure at some point during the, ahem, transition, members queried whether the general public would know that ‘residents’ meant junior doctors.

Junior doctors: Hold my beer…

Just tell them that BMA membership is complex and multifaceted, so there’s really no way for them to confirm that you definitely aren’t a member.

Perhaps we should all do this…

Yes, it’s a problem. And the BMA are very vociferous in their statements. Like so many other institutions there has been ideological capture that those of us on the frontline can only look at in astonishment. I’m pleased to say that I haven’t been a BMA member for about 20years so I haven’t funded any of this current nonsense. A lot of doctors feel completely betrayed by their trade union making such statements.

Agree also with @merrymouse that it’s ridiculous these things can’t be spoken of openly, but we’ve all seen the impact of standing up on people such as Kathleen Stock and Sandie Peggie. The scenes at the CAN-SG conference last year were astonishing and very frightening considering it was a medical meeting talking about evidence and best practice - even organising it was unbelievably difficult. It’s very workplace-dependent how easy it is to object to EDI policies etc, but doctors are organising and are speaking out.

I completely agree that these ridiculous statements are doing harm to the profession and to our patients’ trust in us. Without trust we cannot do our jobs and our patients suffer - no one wins.

I used to work on a project with some senior consultants and they had zero truck with it, they took the piss the few times the subject came up (as public facing comms) in meetings.

It's not reassuring that doctors don't feel able to discuss issues that relate only to medical practice and standards.

Leaving aside the political issues, taken at face value, their announcement suggests that everyone should be concerned about prostate cancer, not just men, because who knows what sex you might be?

The only thing that suggests this conclusion to be wrong is 'common sense'. But sometimes you have to trust doctors when they say something that isn't obviously common sense - so who do you trust?

I’ve not RTFT so this may have been pointed out, but the BMA isn’t the doctors’ ‘professional body’ (that’s the GMC who have made a short neutral statement at this point). The BMA is the doctors’ trade union. So…. They can probably see various of their members in all sorts of shit for their illegal and dangerous work re ‘gender’, which they’ve been complicit in. I’m not at all surprised they’re doubling down - no idea whether unions can be held to account for providing appalling advice to its members and probably discriminating against some.

It remains a mystery to me why so many unions are so vociferously anti-women’s rights. But that’s a matter for a whole other thread.

A doctor I know eye rolls and is pleased he no longer has to ask elderly men if they might be pregnant 🙄

I'm glad to hear some doctors are not insane, but I do still think the BMA is generally understood to be "in the name" of doctors. The BMA and GMC are the name of doctors, to the public. The tagline if you google BMA is literally "the voice of doctors".

GMC have only said this https://www.gmc-uk.org/news/news-archive/gmc-statement-following-supreme-court-judgment-on-definition-of-a-woman

Just to reassure those of you querying the medical profession as a whole, there are plenty of us as doctors working to say this is ‘not in our name’ - such as those quoted by the Times today and many others in organisations such as SEENHealth. Unfortunately with this area a lot of it has to be done with caution but we are here and we are standing up for medical science and for our patients.

I'm sure they know exactly how babies are made. This is a political stance.

Of course, it makes them look utterly stupid, and the headlines write themselves, but I don't think they truly believe any of it.

They're junior doctors. Educated in queer theory and fondly imagining they're being progressive.

I suspect when the rest of the BMA gets to vote, it will be completely different

Totally Handmaid's Tale!

Oh this is frightening. Do doctors not think biology matters any more? They don't know that sex exists? How are babies made? What are they working by instead? How can I trust them to care for my female body? I find this honestly frightening.

I know doctors have often been in the middle of scandals but to formally publicly announce as a professional body that they don't know how babies are made. Literally how is babby formed.

I'm really disturbed by this. How can you trust people with your life when they are saying things like this.

I'm drafting a complaint to the BMA. They might only accept complaints from members, it's not clear, but I'll send it anyway. The motion isn't currently official policy but will be voted on by the wider membership, interesting to see what will happen there and if there will be a rift between RDC and the wider BMA. Their email is [email protected] if anyone else wants it

New article in the Times:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/a7ee2155-36f2-4f84-8390-c7f3f584be04?shareToken=d7cffa7aca03d25ca5e515b7bd02747d

I do sometimes wonder how much they actually believe and how much is a deliberate strategy to steal feminists’ attention away from the bigger issues (currently things like holding politicians and organisations to account on the SC ruling (and archiving the receipts), keeping an eye on all the legal challenges, etc).

Thanks! It’s been getting progressively more unhinged and absurd. I fear there will need to be some sort of national de radicalisation programme for people.

I mean I posted a news report of a “woman” who put a cat in a blender and murdered someone, their response was essentially why are you being mean to these marginalised women 🙄

There really is no limit to the excuses these women will make in order to advance political transvestism.

Sorry, that was to
Prestissimo · Yesterday 18:23

I would never go to him as a doctor if it came to it and I had this information. His stupidity on this would mean his mind was too closed to see any organism holistically enough to understand an illness.

The BMA should stick to what they're supposed to do, which is campaigning about pay and conditions for doctors. The RDC seems to have been completely taken over. The wording of that motion was absolutely unbelievable.

From Helen Joyce quoted in the article:

“These junior doctors wildly misunderstand the role of the Supreme Court, which interprets the law rather than creating it or reflecting public opinion. They also seem to have missed the fact that no trans rights group such as Stonewall applied to intervene.”

They just sound so dim not having realised how the law works nor what a legal definition in a specific statute does and doesn’t mean.

If even one of these jokers had read the SC judgment themselves, they would have realised that the SC made it incredibly clear that their interpretation only applied to the terms in the EA 2010, so the fact they thought the SC was trying to come up with a new medical definition is laughable.

It makes them look like little children on work experience who haven’t yet learned how the world works. In a year or two, they will look back and cringe as to how naive and misguided they were in condemning the Supreme Court for performing its very-specific-and-in-no-way-medical function.

TheOtherRaven · Today 18:42

Bring on the court case proving that sex is real and binary, it's going to have to happen.

I think that you're right there; unfortunately, I suspect that there will be a series of similar cases in tandem, as we saw after the Forstater ruling. Various organisations carried on with their reprehensible behaviour, apparently under the illusion that their policies trumped National Legislation.

@Merrymouse I think you’re right and he just doesn’t think about it much. Honestly in other aspects he has excellent critical thinking skills and is a great doctor. But in this area we generally stay out of each other’s way. He told me once that he didn’t care about trans politics (maybe that was just a way of closing a discussion), and I regularly hope that his young daughters don’t have to come to some kind of harm before he realises that this affects all of us - hopefully they are now better protected due to the SC ruling that he agrees is scientifically illiterate

I was genuinely surprised that he thought this move by the BMA was a good one though.

Yes - it's the second.