Hospital refuses to operate after woman requests all-female care

[Imnobody4]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11316141/Hospital-bans-sex-assault-victim-op-female-care-request.html

I feel quite sick at this.

She was stunned then to receive an email from the hospital's chief executive Maxine Estop Green telling her the operation was off.

She told her the hospital 'did not share her beliefs' and she should make alternative arrangements for her surgery.

The message added the hospital was committed to protecting staff from what it described as 'unacceptable distress'.

Emma urged them to reconsider, adding in a further message she thought they had misunderstood her requests, which she said were entirely within the law.

The hospital said it would offer a private room but would NOT facilitate her requests for single-sex care after her operation.

It also mentioned her comment about pronouns and said it had a responsibility to protect staff from 'discrimination and harassment'.

You are inventing arguments that I haven’t made.

You are accusing me of opinions that I do not hold.

So I invite you to read what I actually wrote. Not what you are imagining that I wrote.

How bizarre.

Are we now in the habit of telling women their religious choices are not to be respected, even if the government of the country we live in has made provision for just these religious beliefs to be accommodated?

So, you are all for telling a woman who chooses to strictly adhere to her religious beliefs where she should not be touched or alone in a space with a male in situations where her religion details specifically that she should not be, that her decision is to be ignored?

As you quite like to say: 'good luck with that'.

That seems like an intolerance issue that you have.

You are running away from the logical consequences of your attempts to play the ReLiGiOn iS bIgOtRy card. It doesn't work so well on an old-style talk board, does it.

So, should ill women in hospital have the right to request that only female nurses wash their vulvas? Or not?

It's not a hard question. You can answer it within even a twitter character limit. It's a yes or a no. Pick one.

Accommodation of religious belief does not exempt or prohibit those religious beliefs from being criticised. Especially when those beliefs are used to restrict the freedom and autonomy of women.

It truly amazes me that people are arguing against this on a feminist discussion board.

But here we are.

Oh, I see.

It is the polarised argument being used here.

landOFconfusion might come back and tell us whether in the UK, women who actively choose, for whatever reason, to follow their religion are worth of respect or not.

I suspect that extreme examples that are abusive and should NOT be respected will be used.

However, I have not also seen an acknowledgement to nils great questions:

So what is your solution to help these women?

That they abandon their religion. Today.

That in fact they switch to your religion which is better. (Gosh anyone reminded of colonalism yet, the kids kidnapped from indigenous people so they could be taught civilised ways)

Where would you like these women to live tomorrow when - if they can - they perform this on the spot abandonment of lifetime values? Because they'll have to leave their homes, families, friends. In some of those faiths and cultures they won't be allowed to take their children. Some will be beaten up or worse for mooting that they wish this.

Who is going to be there for them when they make themselves more palatable to your oh so superior tastes?

I myself have asked similar questions at times, and never once has it been acknowledged that expecting a woman to simply abandon her religion, her community and her family is not the answer even if she was being coerced into remaining and retaining those beliefs.

But maybe landofconfusion will come and discuss it rather than declaring that an overly simplistic 'fact' has been left and that somehow that is some kind of 'gotcha'.

Yeah I know that argument.

This religion restricts the autonomy and freedom of women.

Yes.

So they should be forced to let males wash their vulvas cos the males want to.

........... you what?

Feel free to criticise it all you like.

That is not actually what you seem to be wanting to do though.

You have plopped down a 'fact'. One that neglects to include women who choose to follow these religious restrictions in a hospital situation. It is a protected belief in the UK, despite you bizarrely trying to make out that it is not, and despite you bizarrely trying to make out that a woman choosing to not allow a male she has not given permission to, either to touch her or to be alone with her.

You have sought to make this restriction out to be extreme and to be harmful to the women involved when the UK government has accommodations for provisions to be made.

It truly amazes me that people are arguing against this on a feminist discussion board.

And you are a feminist? Did I miss something? Are you a feminist discussing feminist issues here on this board?

Strangely enough, we are fully aware there are those women out there who are heavily invested in lowering women's boundaries despite it restricting the freedom and autonomy of women. And yes, we know about them. They are plenty active on this board who seek to shame those who hold a different view.

Just like you are doing.

But here we are.

Indeed.

And when you see it, you cannot unsee it.

That is the line taken for so many issues. Basically, landofconfusion has declared some religions are not worthy of respect in their eyes.

The intolerance is very easy to see.

Actually, now I finally grasp her reasoning!

It's as you said, "some religions are not worthy of respect in their eyes", and then I think Land's next step is to think that women following or born into that religion are not worthy of respect and then it is as we have seen. Women of these faiths must apparently be punished for being of these faiths.

The women must be punished for their own good, while Land and their ilk piously gloat. Dickens would recognise this phenomenon, I think.

Actually if you want to compare the two views:

• women should be respected and treated with equality regardless of colour, faith, belief, culture, sexuality or gender transition, and under the law should have accessible provisions available to them

• women should be forced to allow males to treat them as they wish, or punished by exclusion from health care

Which one has the most in common with a patriarchal religion? Which one seeks to control women and their bodies and compel them to do things that distress them and conflict with their beliefs? Which one has no care for the woman's feelings, inner life, needs, and right to follow whatever faith she wishes in a free country without someone superior turning up to try to control her and make her behave in a better way?

That seems like an intolerance issue that you have.

Yep.

IMO almost all mainstream religions are a type of patriarchy, and feminism has long recognised that carving out rights for women within a patriarchy is a necessary step to eventually defeating/dissolving/neutralising that patriarchy (eg in the UK women getting the right to vote led to girls getting the right to an education and women having access to the professions that were once almost entirely male).

So stating that women who are currently part of a religious patriarchal system with strict rules regarding social, professional and physical interactions with non-related males just can’t access medical care (due to what? Their patriarchy’s rules being incompatible with the PoMoPatricia-archy rules?) is an astonishing admittance that women can be denied life saving health care on the basis that their ruling groups of PenisPeople disagree with each other!

Fuck off with THAT fuckery.

Thankfully UK Equalities Law does not take this position and instead seeks to protect sex based rights (with the definition of ‘woman’ written into the law as ‘a female of any age’) AND the right to not be discriminated against due to beliefs (religious or otherwise) AND the right to not be discriminated against due to gender reassignment (which is a completely different category to sex. A male nurse and a male nurse with the additional protected category of gender reassignment are both male nurses under EQ2010).

I do wish our non- UK visitors would familiarise themselves with the law in the jurisdiction of the event before making comments (I often hsve to check re: when laws are UK wide and when they divide into E&W, Scotland and NI, so it’s not as if the same standards aren’t required of UK resident posters too).

Maybe her name is Serena Joy. 😆

Go outside and touch some grass.

Yeah... not patronising at all.

I cannot seriously believe we live in a time when some people are trying to simultaneously argue that everyone should bend their pronouns in all directions, abandon sex based provisions and meet everyone as special individuals with unique lived experience and the right to define themselves and their inner self and be nurtured in this....

while at the same time arguing that females should be made to leave faiths that some random superior person decrees wrong in their eyes.

The two things don't add up.

It makes no sense. And so you begin to realise that the first paragraph doesn't refer to 'people' but only to a very special group, and those privileges aren't meant for humans outside of that group - so that high moral sounding stuff was actually not quite as pure and lovely as it seemed. And then you're forced to notice that the second paragraph is about the need of the male people in paragraph one to strip away female rights and protections because it prevents access to and control of females.

And then it starts to make sense.

Although it makes it no less repulsive that some would actually use their religious and racial intolerance as leverage to further male rights and destroy women's equality.

If you can accomodate a male person wishing particular language and care on grounds of his gender and respecting his feelings and needs, you can bloody well accommodate a female person wishing particular care on grounds of her faith and respecting her feelings and needs.

The only problem is that respecting this in the female presents unwanted boundaries to the male.

There are regular examples on here demonstrating how racism runs through this ideology like a stick of rock - yet I'm still surprised to see such colonialist views openly posted - that women of certain faiths are not WORIAD.

The intolerance is beacon bright when you consider the posting history of that poster.

This is someone who declared that Fred Sargeant was to assume blame because he, a founder of the Pride movement, should have never been peacefully protesting at a Pride event.

So, it is pretty easy to assume that they will then blame a woman whose religious belief means she must have female only carers where possible for having that care cancelled.

It’s so funny when they try to use this one against Mumsnetters.

The majority of us have grown other humans inside of us.
Or we’ve spent all of our lives actively deciding not to grow other humans inside of us and being judged on that basis.
Or we’ve spend great amounts of time and energy (and money) attempting to grow other humans inside of us.
And some of us have dedicated huge amounts of time and energy raising humans that, tragically, had been separated from the women who grew them inside of her, and thus dealing with all the difficulties of that sad and life-altering situation.

We really aren’t the ones who need to ‘touch grass’ to understand that material reality is found in the biological environment.

The example that I had in my mind was scientology.

A religion which is - in your words - I truly believe is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.

But go on. Please explain to my little ladybrain why my fierce opposition to scientology is “racist” and “colonialist”.

I do not think that this poster understands just how racist their posts are.

Not because they criticise a religion, but that those religions have quite a few variations and they are associating all those variations as being 'harmful' and not worthy of respect. And that even if those variations had practices that were legal but were seen to be harmful, that while they are legal and clearly legal, the government has legislation to protect those legal practices and woman have the right to choose to follow those religions if they choose freely to do so.

Criticise, yes. Fill your boots and expect any one who disagrees to debate the point.

Punish women for following a legal religious practice, no.

It is really quite astonishing to see it.

You're taking disingenuousness to a whole new level and I'm not sure who you think you're fooling, but yes, you would be decreeing from your point of view as a superior kind of person that you have the entitlement to inform a group of females that you do not respect their beliefs or rights to hold whatever beliefs they choose, and should not be accommodated.

But specifically you don't want their beliefs to be respect when (content of whole thread) respecting those beliefs would limit the freedoms of males to do whatever they want in handling non consenting females.

So by easy extension you can then remove the grounds for religious respect to all other religions that you personally don't happen to approve of and feel superior and entitled enough to judge and prescribe on to make the heathens/ sinners more like you and more acceptable in your eyes. Colonialism.

Important to remember however that I doubt you would have the faintest interest in those particular women or any religion or faith, (or that you would have cared about reading or posting on this thread) unless those faiths were cock blocking males. That's the goal. To remove protections from females in salami slice tactics to achieve the freedoms males seek: that females either get their clothes off and submit, or lose healthcare.

Scientology? Wow - frantic flailing and derailing I see.

Scientologist women need female only carers?

(as this is the topic of the thread?)

Ok. So what? Still worthy of respect that they need female only care team.

Yes. Scientology - a religion which has been sued on multiple occasions for making its female members undergo forced abortions.

I sincerely hope that nobody will attempt to explain why opposing scientology is “colonialist” and why they consider scientology to be worthy of respect in a democratic society.

You're not even reading this thread are you, you're so utterly convinced of your own superiority?