NHS rainbow badges

[YesIWorkForTheNHS]

As per (shiny new) user name, I work for the NHS. They're bringing in rainbow badges and lanyards at my trust (Google NHS rainbow badges if you want).

Anyone want to help me disentagle / articulate what I think about this?

On the one hand, I want to be inclusive (in the sense that I want everyone to have equal access to healthcare, and remove barriers - real or perceived - to people accessing what we offer). But biological sex matters, particularly in healthcare, and I think we should be held to high standards wrt equality of access for everyone (including women and girls) whether or not we are wearing stripy accessories.

I'm ignoring it for now. But I've had plenty of people tell me how great it is. I have friends at work who know what I believe wrt sex and gender, but I'm not sure I want to have an all-out discussion about my decision not to signal "my tribe" with a badge. The rainbow does not (any longer) represent my beliefs.

LGBTetc has changed. It is no longer the LGB of old. It has been politicised. It no longer is the safe place for lesbians.

Lobby groups with business connections have become powerful, with such lobby groups going into schools (and businesses - for £££) as advisors, spouting the lines that children can be born in the wrong body (which can be ‘fixed’ with medication).

In this day and age we don’t need ‘gay rights’ to be outlined. It’s not 1959. It is not illegal to be gay, you can get married if you are gay, you can join the army if you are gay. You cannot be discriminated against in employment, housing etc if you are gay.

I would query any healthcare provider who deemed it necessary to remind staff to treat all patients with care and respect.

You’ve seen the cases where elders and people with learning difficulties have been abused, beaten, starved, neglected... in private care homes, or by staff provided by local councils? Let’s slap on a pretty ribbon to remind staff to not to beat their patients. No? Because we shouldn’t need to tell people that?

Why are some people more ‘valuable’ than others? We have vulnerable people who need care and to be honest, we need to take a hard look at who is getting it.

Majestic, I've been called a bigot by a colleague for expressing the view that men shouldn't have the right to be accommodated in female wards / units by simply declaring themselves to be female. I would assume you agreed in that assessment of my character.

I bet they didn’t try to explain their position and put forward a well thought-out argument?

I won't wear a lanyard. I would be as open, caring and understanding to a person who falls under the LGBT+ umbrella as I would any person who does not, whether they were obviously LGBT+ or not. No problem for me at all.

However, when you wear a symbolic item, you are not speaking for your own principles, you are embracing the principles of the organisation that the symbol originates from. You are proclaiming their message. I can't, and won't, validate beliefs such as TWAW and I wholeheartedly disagree with a system that fines hospitals for having patients of opposite sexes in the same area on one hand, but then decides that sex and gender are essentially the same, so if a person prefers to be seen as a person of the opposite sex, they can choose which ward they're most comfortable on. So on the one hand, it's considered so important for dignity that patients of opposite sexes do not share ward areas, yet the people of opposite sex are considered so unimportant that they can be made to share with someone of the opposite sex as long as they say they wish to be known as the same sex.

Majestic, thank you for asking. I think the other posters have explained it all very clearly.

As I mentioned upthread, I associate the rainbow and LGBT+, or Q, or whatever, with Stonewall and Pride. I used to be enthusiastically involved in both.

But now both have redefined lesbians by gender instead of sex, so people who identify as women (at least some of the time) & who are attracted to other people who identify as women (at least some of the time).

Which means that men can be lesbians if they identify that way, & those of us who object to the idea that lesbians can have or be attracted to penises are bigots. Very luckily for me I came out a long time ago, but I’ve listened to young lesbians who have been almost in tears over the pressure to accept dick from the very people who ought to be supporting them.

Lesbians who protest at Prides or at Stonewall conferences about that idea (me included) get the police called on them. Women who want intimate care from HCPs of their own sex, or single sex toilets, wards, rape shelters etc, get called transphobes or TERFs.

So there’s that. And there’s also Stonewall’s support for the idea that gender non-conforming children, many of whom would otherwise grow up to be lesbian & gay, should be encouraged to take puberty blockers (eg Lupron) with all their side effects, & then once old enough, have surgery on their prepubertal genitals.

Stonewall justify this with faked statistics from a flawed survey. The kids will sterile, never be able to have a fulfilling sexual relationship & be on drugs for the rest of their life but the rainbow community don’t care about that.

I’m definitely not saying that everyone who wears the rainbow is homophobic and misogynist. Of course not. I’m saying that those are all the associations I have with it. Working in Central London during Pride month was hell.

Pride month? MONTH? Christ it started at the end of June and we’ve only just had the Trans March. It’s like an annual parade and the rainbow is everywhere.

It’s mainly gone from my bit of London now, thank fuck.

Some stores near me still have flags or a series of flags in the colours. I remember (old gunner alert) when you’d only see rainbow flags in certain areas or displayed in windows of homes, that was when it meant something else.

In my view a transsexual person who has been through life changing treatment & surgery to become a woman IS now a woman.

So a pre op transsexual is in the unfortunate position of desperately wanting to be female but still being male... it's difficult for them.

However a person who calls themselves a woman but still has a penis & has no intention of going through surgery shouldnt expect to have access to women's spaces. They are more like a transvestite than a transsexual in my unfashionable view.

BUT there is no need to call someone a THAT as one very young not scared totally normal mentally female patient did to our transsexual volunteer who was kindly doing the teas. (Not allowed to do any patient care as a volunteer).

Afaik the gay & lesbian HCPs still wear the rainbow badge.
I have a couple of lesbian acquaintances but not close enough to ask their opinions on trans people.

The 3 nurses I know who are post op transsexual male to female count as female members of staff in MY view but should a patient refuse to be cared for by them then that is fine. A patient can refuse anyone's care.

There are (at present) so few transsexual people needing hospital care that even if they do pass as female / male they still get siderooms.

I will say though that what does confuse me is transGENDER. Can anyone explain??
I think an actual transsexual is one thing but to self Id as one gender one day & one the next is weird?
Is self id to do with transsexual or to do with transgender?

Like, even my 70 yr old mum gets that some people are transsexual but she doesn't understand the gender stuff nor do I really.

Sorry for the essay just trying to explain my slightly confused thoughts & views.

As regards wards, my husband worked on a forensic psych unit in which a significant amount of patients identified as trans women, all with no treatment at all. They were there for violent crimes against women. Some had been moved to halfway houses then had commited more violence against women and were then brought back to the ward.

Inconvenient truths like these continue to be ignored. For the moment, the unit was able to keep them on the men's ward, but the idea that tgis could be undermined...

In my local hospital a family removed their mother from the ward and discharged her early because she didnt want to be in a bed next to a transwoman who had been admitted. Is that bullying of a transwoman or just an elderly woman needing to feel comfortable on what is called a female ward?

tierra Why does cosmetic surgery, however extreme, mean you change sex? Does a man who loses his penis and testicles in an accident, through cancer, or from a landmine suddenly become a woman? What about a women with BRCA1 who has a mastectomy and total hysterectomy, is she now a man? If not why not?

I will say though that what does confuse me is transGENDER. Can anyone explain??

Yes. The idea being pushed now, and behind self-ID, is that any man who says he’s a woman is one. And a very high proportion retain their penises.

There is at least one ‘nonbinary’ police officer who has two warrant cards, one for each identity, and ‘proud father & husband’ Pips Bunce of Credit Suisse goes into work as either Philip or Pippa depending, and won an award specifically for women.

Gender actually means very little, yet it is being pushed as something Very Important Indeed.

You just can’t change sex - let alone bungee between man and woman on a daily or hourly basis, yet we are being told to swallow this nonsense? And this is what the rainbow has come to signify - ‘I feel like a woman because I like pink and hate football, and like to wear feminine clothes, ergo I am a woman and should therefore be allowed into woman only spaces and woman only shortlists’.

And this is what the rainbow has come to signify - ‘I feel like a woman because I like pink and hate football, and like to wear feminine clothes, ergo I am a woman and should therefore be allowed into woman only spaces and woman only shortlists’.

Exactly. I spent today at a tech conference thoroughly enjoying myself digging into code & whatnot. Tomorrow morning I’m going for a buzz cut. The suggestion that any of that could mean I’m trans / have a male brain is pure old fashioned sexism. But it’s also straight out of Stonewall’s guidelines because it ‘doesn’t match my gender as assigned at birth’.

Slight derail but saw this NHS connected tweet
mobile.twitter.com/TransNHS/status/1174811246522187776

They seem to be up in arms because staff at an NHS trust were asked if they wanted to make their toilets more "trans inclusive" so I'm guessing by that they mean "unisex" and the staff said no.

That doesn't mean trans people couldn't use the toilets of the gender they identify as, just that staff didn't want all unisex.

This of course is literal violence. This hilarious trans man (?) is going to take revenge in poo form. Does your shit change gender when you become a bloke. Suddenly it's a masculine turd. Full of boyness.

Lol. Batshit

Charming.

I hope Majestic and the other NHS staff on the thread have read the posts about why the rainbow is so negative now for a lot of lesbians.

Er, person born female wants to make their presence so unpleasant on other people born female that people born female will submit to accepting people born male in their single sex spaces.

1. Spot the sexism and loathing of women, their feelings and their preferences, and the association of unpleasant behaviour with masculinity, and draw own conclusions.

2. Watch the point whizz miles overhead, that women pooing are really not an issue regardless of how antisocially, it's the XY chromosomes and the penises. And the various issues specific to biological females that mean when a biological male comes into their single sex space to validate personal choice some biological females can no longer use any space at all. And that this is exclusion and oppression of women and really not ok.

You know, it never struck me until now, but never, even when I was in the military, even joking around, have I ever heard a woman talk about leaving a pile of steaming poo. It seems like an exclusively male way to speak. (Of course many men wouldn't, either).

Dear Trans Twitter and NHS trans staff

It is the LAW that workplace toilets must be single-sex or single-occupant. Cubicles with gaps at the top or bottom don't count.

We have a mix of male, female and self-contained unisex loos around the hospital, which I think is fine.

(Do they have to be either single sex or single occupant? My reading of that is that it is sufficient if those facilities are provided alongside e.g. mixed sex not self contained.)

Communal changing (with flimsy shower curtains etc) is probably more of an issue, staff-facilities-wise.

There have to be sufficient of the single-sex or single-occupant type to meet the needs of the workforce. Any mixed multi-occupant loos would be in addition to that, if allowed.

Hmm, I wonder if e.g. places like the Barbican would let a patron use the staff loos if she felt unsafe in the mixed loos?

Someone should tell them that our pets go over the rainbow bridge when they die!

Maybe the NHS doesn't want to be sending out this particular message to patients...

Seeing a rainbow lanyard or a pin would signal to me "we think that men are women if they say so and will not respect your boundaries".

It makes me think I could have men carrying out intimate and essential medical examinations
It makes me think I could have men sharing a ward with me when I am vulnerable and sick
It makes me think they agree that children can be trans and therefore treated with dangerous medicines to make them patients for life.
It makes me think that if I voice any concerns with regards to trans identified males in what should be female single sex conditions, I will be treated as a bigot and denied a decent standard of care, and my boundaries will be ignored.

And if you say any of the above you are a hurtful, hateful, transphobic bigot.

So the feelings of a minority of a minority of a minority (so - some transgenders/sexuals within the trans community, within the 'TWTW brigade) trump most of womankind (and some men too).

How did we get to this state of affairs?