To think most women would prefer to be on a single-sex ward as hospital in patients?

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

This was debated in the House of Lords in the early hours today.

I'm not up to speed on this so I don't know how many single-sex wards there are in the NHS. I know it's been promised again and again but for various reasons, mostly I expect to do with money, it doesn't always happen. Now there's the additional headache of trans-identifying patients to factor in, many of whom won't have made many (or any) changes to their bodies.

My hunch is that most of us (male and female), given the choice, would prefer to be in a single-sex ward when stuck in bed with a flimsy gown on and all sorts of undignified and painful things going on with our bodies.

Am I right?

YABU - who cares, mixed sex is fine
YANBU - yes, I would prefer hospital wards to be single-sex

Why are you asking her this? It feels like you are trying to catch her out.

What if she can manage a controlled, 15 minute appointment with a (presumably trained) male HCP with good patient-facing skills? What does that have to do with whether she can manage an extended stay as an inpatient in a ward with male-bodied people? Where the male people are present for more than 15 minutes?

Lots of us have phobias. It's one thing dealing with a fear-object under controlled, time-limited conditions. Doesn't mean the fear is gone entirely!

It's like thinking someone can swim the Channel because they managed 10 swimming pool lengths once.

@Mum2jenny

If a person needs medical/ surgical treatment they will be put on a ward that meets their needs.

That is irrespective of sex or gender. Just get over it!!

We're not talking about those situations where there are literally no other beds left. We're talking about a situation where a male merely has to ask to be moved to a female bay.

Do you always tell sexual abuse survivors to "get over it"? Perhaps you also tell them to "reframe their trauma".

does that mean you are unable to be treated by male healthcare officials / require a companion when being treated by male healthcare professionals

I let a male doctor deliver my eldest child. Having read my notes, he offered to wake the female on call consultant. I refused because I didn't want to make a fuss and I thought I'd manage. I ended up with postpartum psychosis having first had flashbacks to being raped before passing out on the operating table. It nearly cost me my life and my marriage. It did cost me my career because by the time I should have been returning to work, I still wasn't functioning fully. It also impacted on my relationship with my son, not least because I came to associate him with trauma. Given all that, I now have no qualms about advocating for myself.

With my second child, my notes clearly said female hcps only and that's what I got. The difference it made was immense.

Gp/psychiatrists have been male. Most were understanding of me needing physical distance, being closer to the door etc. Would prefer female though. My last (male) psychiatrist kept telling me I was beautiful. In the circumstances it didn't exactly help and was a definite factor in my self discharge.

Where the male people are present for more than 15 minutes?

It's the sleep that would bother me or rather lack of. When I'm struggling with my symptoms I can't share a room with dh...because he's male. I know he adores me, that he'd watch the world burn if it would take away my pain and that he'd never hurt me. Yet even so and especially when I'm struggling and tired, he becomes a potential threat and I can't relax to sleep. Frustratingly a lack of sleep, makes my mental health so much worse.

Even before I was raped, I hated sharing sleeping spaces with men though. We used to camp out in horse boxes at events and more than once I woke up with a strange hand in my pants. Add the two things together and ...

Most men would want to be on a single sex ward. Most women would want to be on a single sex ward.

I don’t understand the issue with most men or most women wanting that to be the case.

I want single sex wards. Years ago I was very ill in hospital on a single sex ward. I felt perfectly safe. The day after I was admitted, I was taken downstairs to have a scan. I was on morphine and pretty spaced out. I remember being left in my bed at the side of a corridor waiting to be scanned. I couldn’t walk (lots of pain and very wobbly because of the amount of meds). There were people coming and going of both sexes and I vividly remember being quite frightened that I couldn’t defend myself and that I was lying there in just a thin hospital gown, no bra on, it was horrible. 15 years later, I can’t remember anything about the scan, just that overriding feeling of not being safe. Once I was back on the ward, I felt fine again. So NO I would not want to be on a mixed sex ward.

The transgender issue has muddied the waters of this thread but is a thorny issue. I would not want a transwoman who has transitioned to feel frightened and vulnerable on a male ward. Should a person with a penis be on a woman’s ward - no. Does a transwoman have the right to feel safe, yes. Does the trans woman’s right to feel safe trump women’s right to feel safe - NO (but nowadays the answer is yes).

The question is how many transwomen are a threat to women and the answer is who the fuck knows! Or is that the question, should the question be, how many female patients feel less able to relax and feel safe with a transwoman on the ward?

I wonder is sexual preference relevant, would women feel safer if they knew the transwoman was into men? My bisexual teen dd (at Uni) says gay clubs are great fun but there are annoying amount of gay men who thinks it’s fine to harass/grope women (because they’re gay and therefore no ‘real’ threat so women aren’t allowed to feel harassed). She’s a huge advocate of trans rights and LGBTQ rights but doesn’t seem to see the relevance of what she’s told me in the general trans debate.

So maybe it is really simple - person with penis on one ward, person with vagina on another?

Either way what drives me crazy is, in a scenario of 1000 patients in a hospital, 500 are women, 499 are men and 1 is a man with a penis who mentally feels he is a woman. Guess which group’s feelings dictates whether (470 ie 94% of the women) get to feel safe in hospital? .

It shows the shocking falling apart of safeguarding in recent years that any of this is even a question. The saturation of society with free online porn via smartphones makes today’s men feel even more sexually entitled to women than they did in previous generations. Women are constantly, even more, sexually objectified by men. Women and girls in any vulnerable situation of any kind, hospital or anywhere else, need to be able to remain safely out of male reach. Doesn’t matter if you think ‘not all men are like that’. Just takes one. Doesn’t matter if you personally have never had a problem with this. Millions of women the world over, have had devastating problems with it. Access to healthcare is a basic human right and not feeling safe deters women from getting healthcare.

This is why we all need to demand safeguarding which is universally applied. This isn’t about trans or not trans people. Who cares what people consider themselves to be in this discussion- when you’re ill and vulnerable there’s only males and females. It’s about male sexual entitlement and male violence (for which there is no female equivalent) and the frightening consequences of that for women and girls.

An increasingly misogynistic society like this one, dismantled safeguarding, as it’s doing- because it’s inconvenient to men, hurts some men’s feelings, costs more money and time than letting men do what they want, and raises difficult questions about men and women that a lot of people would rather not think about.

Are we just going to let them get away with that? Please email your MP if you care about this, because only MPs have the power to legislate that women must have single-sex hospital accommodation.

Very well said, @Slothtoes.

Would you have to share the toilets with men too?

So maybe it is really simple - person with penis on one ward, person with vagina on another?
*

Who would check this? Would you expect the poorly patient to sign some type of declaration form as proof?

NHS records should say what sex someone is. Regrettably, there is now some confusion over this as I believe in some cases birth sex has been replaced by gender identity. This is a bad idea when it comes to health care as women and men may not show the same symptoms, and of course some health issues are sex-specific.

However, even without an accurate sex marker on the NHS record, almost all humans can tell males from females, just like all the other mammals.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g you have defeated the object of why people are in hospitals many times on this thread. Hospital records are a good point but again when being allocated a bed this is not what nurses check in reality or the doctors.

You can tell a trans of course. However you wouldn't know if they still had a penis or vagina was my point

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g quite right! A doctor friend of mine cited a case in which a transgender woman died because she had a condition (something like testicular torsion but don't quote me on that) which was not diagnosed in time due to her records stating she was female.

I feel like it's all gone so crazy that this needs explaining like a bedtime story for children:

If a fox could talk and said to the farmer 'I'm a chicken and I really believe that', sticks a few feathers on his head and trots into the hen house, it would have been, in previous years, that the chickens would go crazy in fear and the farmer would chase him out. In our society the farmer would tell the chickens to shut up because the poor fox really believes it and give the leader of chickens, who is clucking the loudest, a good kick as he leaves .
The End.

When a man says he is a woman we say 'absolutely and here, let's ignore women's cries about safety, privacy, modesty (eg in the case of needing a female only space to adjust a hijab) and you must be allowed to go everywhere you want to and do everything you want to and any women who speak up about it will be vilified and threatened (eg JKR).

The gender bollocks is muddying this discussion which is very simple for women.

Women are legally entitled to single sex spaces such as hospital wards. If any man objects to that as he feels like a woman and doesn't want to be on the mens ward, let him lobby for a third space.

If anyone thinks that should be up for debate there are two questions -

1. Why would a man not feel safe in a mens' ward?

1. If he doesn't feel safe around men, why does he feel entitled to override women who feel exactly the same way? Especially given he is a fucking man?

1. And the heart of the matter - what does feeling (or living) like a woman actually entail? If anyone can answer that without using offensive stereotyping, I'd love to hear it.

I really feel like a child, I identify as a child and I'd like to be on a paediatric ward.

We recognise that won't happen because safeguarding - well why the fuck aren't women being safeguarded?

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

NHS records should say what sex someone is. Regrettably, there is now some confusion over this as I believe in some cases birth sex has been replaced by gender identity. This is a bad idea when it comes to health care as women and men may not show the same symptoms, and of course some health issues are sex-specific.

However, even without an accurate sex marker on the NHS record, almost all humans can tell males from females, just like all the other mammals.

They should also keep a record of the biological sex of their staff - so they can properly allocate staff when same sex care is required. I believe they erase the biological sex from staff records if the staff member transitions.

Definitely. I hated that there were even male "visitors" (husbands/partners) when I was in having my DC. It was so embarrassing and undignified labouring with random men in the room gawping on occasion. I was also in hospital when my appendix burst in my twenties. They left me in a random room all night, with a drunken/drugged up weirdo shouting and aggressive in the next bed. I often think how vulnerable I was that night. I don't think he knew I was there luckily but I didn't sleep a wink in fear.

@WeBuiltCisCityOnSexistRoles

I really feel like a child, I identify as a child and I'd like to be on a paediatric ward.

We recognise that won't happen because safeguarding - well why the fuck aren't women being safeguarded?

Give it a few years. A 26 year old male is presently in a juvenile penitentiary for girls, after "sexually assaulting" a ten year old girl in a restaurant toilet. (He was identified using DNA evidence, so draw your own conclusions there.)

And by "draw your own conclusions", I mean that "sexual assault" allows people to let their minds skate over the reality of what this male has done.

I wonder if Furries go to hospital or the vets?

This is from Today's Times
That poor woman

I have an experience here that shows, at least, the attitude of NHS staff. I'm 40 but due to being really short am sometimes mistaken for younger (more on that later).

I was admitted to a respiratory ward this year with some breathing issues due to a bout of pneumonia. I'd never been admitted to hospital before so wasn't sure if I'd be on a single sex or mixed ward.

I got my own room it turns out. It was opposite a men-only ward with maybe 6 men in it. My room had a big window and also a window on the door and so did the men's ward so i could see into their ward and vice versa. There was a nurse's station almost inbetween right next to both.

So long story short, on my first day, a man (maybe 50s) sat up in his bed and looked into my room like he was watching a tv programme. I don't know how long he would have done it if I hadn't got my mum to close the blinds in response. But i risked opening them again a couple of times during my week long stay and he looked in again.

My family said "would you not be less bored if you opened the blinds and saw the goings on of the corridor etc" I said "probably but remember there's a weird guy in the ward opposite who just stares" My mum said "oh he is probably just surprised to see a young woman here" (as if it makes any difference what age i look!?)

I hadn't packed a bag for the hospital because i hadn't known i was going to he admitted so was wearing a fairly skimpy satin type nightgown (lol) under a massive wooly cardigan so when the nursed came to take my blood pressure and i took off my cardigan, i do admit it was probably more interesting to look at me than at a wall or other men. But even so, i didn't know the guy and could only presume he would never come into my room at night (that couldn't lock for obvious reasons)

The nursing staff would enquire gently about my always shut blinds as if it was strange to want privacy (i found that an odd thing to be confused about) but i declined to tell them it was because of the starer because i felt too unwell to make a fuss.

Surely when you're lying sick in a bed on a bit of oxygen you shouldn't need to explain that you don't want to be stared at by a man, or men, on a ward opposite and whoever may be passing in the corridor.

I'm very keen on privacy and maybe other people are more relaxed about being viewed but I was surprised when questioned about the blinds.

Just some thoughts.

I have been on a mixed ward for admission and heart scan. There were 5 men and 3 women. I am quite old and was tucked into a corner but the young women had to sit through obscene sexual comments and male attitude.
I was not supposed to leave the bed after the scan but nurses allowed me to go to the female toilets. They had made me drink a lot to rid my system of something injected.
We were unable to sleep because of the shouting and attention seeking. In the end the nurses moved all the men into another ward and we 3 sleot in peace and quiet.
Horrible experience and totally inconsiderate men UGH.