Learning-disabled girls & women must accept men providing intimate care

[MrsOvertonsWindow]

This dreadful account from Transgender Trend is no doubt replicated all over the country as schools / social care / the NHS remove the rights to sex based care for these vulnerable young women, allowing men to provide intimate / personal care. Prioritising (yet again) the demands of this toxic lobby insisting that the safety, privacy and rights of women and girls no longer matter.

Warning - contains information about rape / HIV

www.transgendertrend.com/severely-learning-disabled-girl-sex-based-rights-under-threat/

It's about treating women as if they are fully human.

Some care homes are great, but I know of some that don't treat any of their residents as fully human.

I think it is right to expect both situations to change.

Also - and I don't think this is what you were actually implying when you mentioned race - TRAs bring up that example all the time. Appropriating racism. Women are fearful of males because they actually do harm /have harmed us. To imply white people fearing people of other ethnicities is somehow equivalent manages to be spectacularly racist.

Appalling lack of care.

I’m sending this article to DDs special school tomorrow asking for clarification of their policies.

Yes, this is an excellent article to give.

I don't need to worry at the moment on my school but I've got it to hand if I do.

God, imagine how much more time, resources, money, energy and most importantly: happiness, mental health, physical health, wellbeing - we'd all have if men didn't rape.
Sorry, pointless post. But it's so upsetting.

Yet again, men are determining the fate of vulnerable women and insisting that their demands matter more. What a society we are becoming when we treat the most vulnerable in society in this way:

If you are reading this blog, you almost certainly have a voice, a social media presence. If you have things to say about sex–based rights, please remember Cassie, please remember our daughter, Helen.
Please advocate for their learning-disabled needs and rights:

Your severely learning-disabled sisters need you

Indeed. If there are no available female carers then, no personal care can be given to women and girls. So no service can be provided. And quite honestly your company should lose its contract for failing to meet the needs of the female service users.

Surely the care home your aunt is in didn't need to have all the female carers on break at the same time, they could have staggered the breaks and mixed the sex of staff on a break more carefully if they had wanted to?

I don’t at all accept that we have a need to accept male carers for women who are vulnerable.:

of course men can make excellent carers. That is not the issue.

it’s low paid work. That’s why it’s hard to recruit or retain staff. It’s bloody hard work.

we don’t value carers enough because we don’t value our people who need care enough, especially if they are female.

it’s grotesque to deny a woman her rights because it makes for an easier shift rota.

I know it happens, but I’m saying it shouldn’t ever happen.

I don't actually think I have the words to describe my emotions after reading the article and then clicking and reading the pdf about the rape case.

I'm not sure if I'm more depressed that these things happen or that I'm not surprised that they happen.

It's just not bloody right.

This shit never end does it?

The point of the article is that these schools are deliberately misinterpreting the law and prioritising the feelings of their gender non conforming staff over the needs of vulnerable children.

There are so many predators in social care. Before we finally said no to all men, we worked out that 25% of the male carers through our door had assaulted someone: me, each other, women carers, and the severely disabled family member I cared for. They broke his bones, they stole things, they felt me up, they menaced us. 75% of the men were fine, lovely people, but approx 1 in 4 was a danger, across multiple agencies and years. We all became so used to it. It's hard to think about now it's over.

We know already that children and adult who have a disability are more likely to be targets for predators and we know that men will go to great lengths to access them. It is appalling that schools particularly are ignoring the knowledge they have. The priority should always be the person needing care and the gender bollocks should be disregarded. Cross gender indeed. Utter utter dangerous bollocks.

This is shocking. Ultimately, nobody should have the right to provide intimate care for anyone else, and I just can't understand how any sensible person- especially people who ought to be more thoroughly versed in safeguarding and ensuring dignity for vulnerable people than the rest of us- could think that the feelings of staff members should matter more than the privacy and safety of people receiving care.

I used to work in a residential setting for disabled adults, and many of the people I cared for could not verbalise a preference/if something had happened and required hoists and other equipment for personal care. No way would our managers have allowed a situation where women were provided intimate care by men, and ensuring adequate staffing numbers to meet personal care needs was always taken account of to plan shifts. The same for working out breaks. On rare occasions when staffing levels meant we needed a man to, for example, help with a hoist, they were always accompanied by a female carer and we ensured the person was clothed. If we couldn't have managed that (due to regular lack of female carers, for example) then we shouldn't have been offering places for women.

Providing dignified, safe personal care is a grave responsibility, not something anyone should be able to claim a right to do.

Wonder what kind of Equality Impact Assessment any of these schools did before changing their policies? Or , as in so many other cases regarding women's safety, was it a case of " nothing to see here and if there is we are not going to look too carefully: ?

It doesn't surprise me. We were put under ceaseless pressure to accept men. I cannot recall an agency that accepted our position. They pushed on this boundary, often weekly. All agencies are obsessed with their rota. The rota is their central concern and people are secondary. They don't mean to be like this. They are all driven a little mad by the staffing problem.

It's hard to explain to people who aren't in that world how completely obsessed agencies are with their rota. To make them hear you is incredibly hard and an endless task. I am a formidable opponent and it exhausted me. There is no way someone with learning disabilities or no advocate could fight it, which is why it's happening here. It is happening to everyone who cannot fight it.

But in these cases it is the schools themselves who are pushing the boundaries. If we can't trust them to put the children's needs ahead of validating their staff's sense of identity, it is a very sick world we live in.

We can't trust them to do it and we never could. These pressures exist throughout care services. It's like a huge body of water pressing and pressing on everything - it will burst through every weak point. Anything that erodes a boundary makes this more likely to happen as the water is always there, pushing.

Agreed maravais. The pressures are immense - which is why it's unforgivable that those working at a commissioning / strategic level with the most vulnerable groups thoughtlessly prioritise the incessant demands of the "gender diverse community" without realising they're enabling predators.

Correction - that should read "predators hiding behind the gender diverse community"

This boundary, in my view, should actually be set further back. The gender aspect is not the real issue, it's just an inevitable tail feather. The real issue is presumed consent to opposite sex care for all those who cannot object, and continue objecting, perhaps daily, for their entire lives. That's where the boundary would lie if people actually cared about stopping rape of paralysed and voiceless women.

All opposite sex care should be opt in, not opt out, by law. Thinking about how to protect profoundly disabled men is also important but perhaps not useful to discuss here.

The worst part about getting free of abusers was the sick knowledge that they would just be dumped on to weaker people on the same books. In fact they would be concentrated on those rotas by the selection pressure of our self-advocacy. Take Julia.

but people need to be aware that personal care is often provided by male carers these days and will be commonplace now due to lack of female
carers, or mainly, due to a rise in need for care staff

Then if/when my time comes to need care or a care home, if this is still an issue i want an all female team or home or I want the right to euthanasia.
Its that stark a choice.

@Terfydactyl yes. And I expect there are many women who are scared of this scenario.

terrifying. Actually terrifying

Me too. I'm totally alone with no family to speak up for me. It's inhuman to treat people male or female like this. Care has to start with the person not the carer, what we have is processing not care.