Times article: Hospital managers ‘ignore Supreme Court trans ruling’

[RoyalCorgi]

NHS managers think they're above the law, apparently:

https://www.thetimes.com/article/18be21b2-89c9-4ce3-9710-41a818169159?shareToken=09d843ffb1bca59651ef8d92180a4cc0

And, in a nice touch, this is the same hospital where Nurse Jennifer Melle was disciplined because she referred to a convicted paedophile as "he".

I can guarantee they're breaking the law. All NHS trusts are. The standard annual EDI training for the NHS for the past few years has included incorrect information that specifically told them to break the law. Annex B to the single-sex wards policy mandates breaking the law.

They don't have to send out comms 'pledging commitment' to the SC ruling. They have to send out comms to tell everyone to follow it because they know they aren't.

And they don't need to wait for guidance. Guidance is guidance, the law is the law. If they contradict each other then you have to follow the law. There is already interim.guidance that they could use if confused. The final guidance.won't say anything different about what the law is.

So waiting is also breaking the law.

Does anybody know if the nurse actually misgendered him?

He was admitted to hospital as a male and she was talking about his treatment on the phone.

He overheard and went crazy, accusing her of misgendering him...

But at that point had she even been told he had female pronoun preferences? He was listed as a male patient so it was perfectly reasonable to use male pronouns.

Then she told him that she would use his name but not pronouns.

Again, that isn't actually misgendering - it's refusal to use a word.

I think it does trigger a need for coms as they had not been following the equality act to that point. So needed to let staff know what, if anything, was going to be the response.

If you were an employer that had maintained single sex provisions or only had unisex provisions then no change / no coms necessary surely.

I work for a big company, and the MD released the obligatory statement about the ruling; saying we support our trans colleagues, blah blah blah.
But ultimately said they’d follow the ruling. I think, secretly, she was quite glad.

Yesterday, when i was noodling about our intranet, and looked at our EDI group; which seems to only be about trans shite - no other protected characteristic gets a look in!

The post said that the ruling should be ignored and that ‘we’ should campaign to be able to use the opposite gender (their words) facilities.
TRAs really don’t like being told ‘no’, do they??

I work in the public and third sector and some trusts and charities put out comms whenever events affect people in ‘their communities’. The majority of the time, these are earthquakes, war etc. My friends and I compare messages - the key vocabulary never fails to appear.

Most of my friends received an ‘all staff’ message of solidarity relating to the SC ruling. All included comments about waiting for further guidance, so carry on as you are.

Sorry to continue the diversion but I’d not spotted “people officers” in the wild. Can we just not go back to “Personnel” which was the term before HR? I’ve always found HR to be a dehumanising term anyways, ironically enough. I’m a person, not a resource.

Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been working and that I’m now the old biddy on the corner desk wanging on about what life was like when I started work. (No email, one computer for the whole office, secretaries did the typing up of your hand written reports and got very stroppy when WordPerfect appeared and we started doing it ourselves, brown internal mail envelopes with the string closure, Friday lunchtimes in the pub and not much work done after…).

Our chief people officer wrote a kind message to concerned staff to say we remain committed to treating everyone with dignity, respect and compassion. It is wrong to suggest we are instead committed to ignoring the ruling and any guidance. We are not.”

We are not, eh? Then why the essay bragging that you are ignoring the SC ruling? The two claims are complete incompatible.

The last paragraph in the article says

With regard to the Supreme Court ruling, a spokeswoman for Epsom and St Helier hospitals said: “Our chief people officer wrote a kind message to concerned staff to say we remain committed to treating everyone with dignity, respect and compassion. It is wrong to suggest we are instead committed to ignoring the ruling and any guidance. We are not.”

But I completely agree with previous posters that all the respect, kindness, accommodation, and let's face it fear, is reserved for people identifying as trans.

Women are fucking nowhere.

And yes, some CEOs might secretly be pleased. But bloody hell it just goes to show that even when the Supreme Court says they're wrong, even when the Supreme Court says women deserve rights, privacy, dignity and safety, they still can't stand up for them.

So even when everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief, and everything settles down, and women once more have their own spaces, and men realise the jig is up and stop clamouring for them 24 fucking 7, they still won't acknowledge that women have rights too.

It will just be the old shoulder shrug, and our hands are tied, but anyway, what's next on the agenda

They are not breaking the law if they are as of now if they are only admitting people of the designated sex to single sex wards, and only allowing people of the designated sex to use single sex toilets and other facilities.

So they could have issued a statement reassuring their staff and the wider public that they are now fully compliant with the SC ruling, that they are operating correctly on the basis of biological sex being the determinant for access to single sex areas, that they will continue to treat 'everyone with dignity, respect and compassion', rather than singling out some people as being apparently more deserving of dignity, respect and compassion than others.

They could have put out a professional, factual, straightforward statement that they were as of now compliant with the SC ruling, and the EHRC guidance, and therefore the law. The statement they chose to put out is not like that in tone or content, and that is what raises doubts, and hackles.

But bloody hell it just goes to show that even when the Supreme Court says they're wrong, even when the Supreme Court says women deserve rights, privacy, dignity and safety, they still can't stand up for them.

Although it seems like I’m defending them, I’m only arguing that the article doesn’t show any evidence that they’re breaking the law. I’m in complete agreement that it’s a shitshow that the focus of their message is on transfolk and not woman. As I said previously, they didn’t actually have to say anything, my Trust haven’t, so I wonder if they have a particularly significant (in number or volume) in trans identifying staff. But hey, we don’t know, the full email could have been 95% about women and the Times have run with the 5% that wasn’t.

They are not breaking the law if they are as of now if they are only admitting people of the designated sex to single sex wards

The message came from the Chief People Officer so the focus of the message would have been staff facilities, not their arrangement for patients. But the click bait headline doesn’t allow for that nuance.

the full email could have been 95% about women and the Times have run with the 5% that wasn’t.

You're absolutely right, it could have been. Are you a betting woman, NewForestMum123?

Haha if I was, I wouldn’t be taking that bet! I think my comments here are rooted in my anger at MSM.

Doesn't matter if there are no trans-identifying staff at all. If any policy or training says that staff should use facilities that align with their gender rather than their sex, it is not compliant with the law. Even if it currently applies only to theoretical staff.

So comms are needed to ensure all policiea/training/signs/posters etc are checked - and changed if necessary.