As this thread draws to a close, I have accepted that I will be forever on catch-up. I'm currently on page 9, immersed in the utter madness of NHS Fife "inviting" Sandie to an internal disciplinary hearing this Friday for misgendering and other "crimes" against gender identity belief. I already know this isn't going ahead but I find the comments and different perspectives so valuable that I want to keep reading through them.
This feels like such a key moment in national awakening about the harms related to gender identity belief, centred around the NHS.
@Boiledbeetle your reply to me at the start of this thread suggests you're already on it with Volume 3 😉 Can I put in a request that it's an NHS special? This case has brought so many lurkers and new joiners into the conversation, many of whom work for the NHS or in other health-related roles.
Besides what's coming to the fore in this case about single-sex spaces, I know from my own conversations IRL that there is an increasing number of professionals (in health and education) who are concerned that children and vulnerable young people are being irreversibly harmed by the unquestioning adherence to gender identity belief. Dr Upton has shown us what that looks like, how it risks overshadowing good medical practice when it is centred in patient care, how it puts NHS staff in positions where they are part of that harm and part of enforcing this belief (e.g. part of the systematic failing to safeguard vulnerable people in situations that should/could assume same-sex care by default). Poor Pete the Misgendered Plumber isn't real but there are many, many real people who are at risk of bad medical practice when sex isn't recognised as real and a belief in gendered souls is prioritised instead.
Dr Upton and other believers can carry on believing in gendered souls. But supporting this as if it were real and important in both healthcare and NHS employee welfare? No. This needs to stop.
I will submit my poem about the impact enforced belief in health care in due course. I'm sufficiently angry now to write it. In the meantime, thank you to all of the doctors, nurses and other health professionals who are already on this thread today and to those who stumble upon it over the next few weeks. If you're reading this and are thinking about how you can make a difference, you are already part of effecting change.
As food for thought on gender identity belief, I'm going to leave this video here:
I used to believe I had a gender identity. I no longer do. This video helped me get my head around it all after many months of trying to figure out what it all meant - there are lots of examples of me trying to understand it on MN threads, with an open mind. I still don't challenge the belief directly. People believe all sorts of things that I don't, like the idea that a virgin can give birth to a human child who was conceived without sperm. However, I absolutely challenge with every fibre in my body (driven by a motivation to protect my autistic, adolesent daughter from harm - and others like her) this belief being accommodated in law, education, healthcare and more as if it's fact. This has to end.
Edited for typo