Daily Mail
3/8/2021
'BARONESS NICHOLSON: Why I fear the sanctity of single sex wards is under threat from trans rights'
(extract)
"A hospital should be a refuge — somewhere that ill and vulnerable people can stay in absolute safety, their only concern being to focus on getting better.
But, sadly, I have come to learn these institutions can at times stray far from this ideal.
For well over a year now, people working across the NHS have been writing to me to tell of their deep concerns about a tragic and, I believe, dangerous shift that has taken place inside our hospitals.
The consequences of this change were foreseeable — but are no less horrifying.
In my capacity as Chair of the parliamentary campaign group Children and Women First, I have been reading of the most appalling sexual behaviour alleged by whistleblowers to have taken place on hospital premises, including at least one case of rape. (continues)
Many biologically female patients have understandably been left distraught, forced to share some of their most intimate and vulnerable moments alongside a member of the opposite sex.
Others, like those in the ward disturbed by their presence, have been left uncomfortable to a degree.
Still others, as my correspondents from across the NHS have said, are alleged to have seen or experienced far worse.
Yet, often, they object at their peril. Many of those who have expressed discomfort at this turn of events — be they patients or nursing staff — have been accused of transphobia and hate crime. Some nurses have lost their jobs." (continues)
Hospitals are exempt from the Equalities Act of 2010, which outlawed discrimination or unfair treatment on the basis of certain personal characteristics, among them age, religion or sexual orientation.
It means they were one of the few places where you can — or could — insist on the privacy of a single-sex space.
Moreover, that right had been hard-won in only recent history. While single-sex wards were standard practice for decades, in the late-1970s and early-1980s the NHS started to move towards mixed-sex wards to cut nursing costs and make the best use of diminishing numbers of staff.
It led to widespread complaints, particularly from female patients worried about being in beds alongside male patients, and sharing washing facilities with them.
It took years of lobbying from health professionals and organisations — among them the Mail — for the law to change.
That happened in 2011, when a redrafted version of the Patient's Charter announced mixed-sex hospital wards were to be phased out, with patients given the right to request a bed on a single-sex ward.
Separate lavatories also had to be provided on existing mixed-sex wards. Since April that year, Trusts have been fined £250 when a patient is placed on a mixed-sex ward." (continues)
And it is women who are paying the price. As a woman who has spent a great deal of her adult career campaigning for the rights of women and children, I approached colleagues to form an all-party campaign group to collect evidence from patients and medics on the impact of the deviation from single-sex spaces.
The examples we have received are legion.
In hundreds of emails and hours of personal testimony, we have heard cases ranging from dementia patients distressed at waking up next to someone who, in their mind, looks like a man, to reports of a rape on a psychiatric unit undertaken by a biological male who identified as a woman." (continues)
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9857821/BARONESS-NICHOLSON-fear-sanctity-single-sex-wards-threat-trans-rights.html
Children and Women First
MY VISION
"It is imperative to restore the rights of women & children. I foresee a single issue, cluster approach; we make a new Women’s Rights movement solely to rescue womanhood from its destruction through today’s legal and social denial of our existence" - Emma, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
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and gratitude Emma Nicholson
childrenandwomenfirst.org/