"Darlington Nurses" vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust Tribunal Thread 7

[ThreeWordHarpy]

Thread 1, 7-Oct to 23-Oct; pre-hearing discussion, KD (day 1 of evidence) and BH (day 2).
Thread 2, 23-Oct to 28-Oct; BH (day 2), CH, JP, MG (day 3&4), TH, SS, ST, LL (day 4), JS, AT (day 5)
Thread 3, 28-Oct to 29-Oct; AT (day 5&6), TA (day 6&7)
Thread 4, 29-Oct to 31-Oct; TA, AM (day 7) JB (day 8)
Thread 5, 31-Oct to 04-Nov; JB (day 8), SW, CG, JR (day 9)
Thread 6, 04-Nov to 05-Nov; RH (day 10), SW (day 11)

Five nurses working at Darlington Memorial Hospital have filed a legal case suing their employer, an NHS trust, for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. The nurses object to sharing the women’s changing facilities with a male colleague, Rose, who identifies as female. The hearing started on October 20th, with evidence starting on October 22nd and is scheduled to last 3 weeks. To view the hearing online requests for access had to be made by October 17th. The hearing is being live tweeted by Tribunal Tweets who have background to this case on their substack. An alternative to X is to use Nitter: nitter.net/tribunaltweets or nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets

The Judge made clear at the start of the public hearing on Day 1 that only TT or press have permission to tweet. If online observers see/hear something in the court that isn’t reported by TT, we don’t mention it until the next time there’s a break. This is a very cautious approach to avoid any accusations of “live reporting” on MN. Commentary on the content of TT tweets is fine as soon as they’re posted on X.

Key people:
C/Ns - Claimants, the Darlington nurses
R/T/Trust - Respondent, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust
J/EJ – Judge/Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney
NF - Niazi Fetto KC, barrister for claimants
SC - Simon Cheetham, KC, barrister for respondents
RH - Rose Henderson, trans identifying nurse
CG – Clare Gregory, NHS ward manager
SW - Sue Williams, NHS Trust HR
KD – Karen Danson, first claimant to give evidence.
BH – Bethany Hutchison, claimant
AH – Alistair Hutchison, husband of Bethany
CH – Carly Hoy, claimant
JP – Jane Peveller, claimant
MG – Mary Anne (aka Annice) Grundy, claimant
TH – Tracy Hooper, claimant
SS – Siobhan Sinclair, witness for the claimants, retired from Trust
ST – Sharron Trevarrow, witness for the claimants, retired from Trust, former housekeeper and wellbeing officer
LL – Lisa Lockey, claimant
JP – Professor Jo Phoenix, expert witness
JS – Jane Shields, witness for the claimants
AT - Andrew Thacker, NHS trust Head of HR
TA – Tracy Atkinson, NHS trust HR.
AM – Andrew Moore, NHS Head of Workforce Experience
JB – Jillian Bailey, NHS Workforce Experience Manager
AT – Anna Telfer, NHS Deputy Director of Nursing
SW – Sandra Watson, Matron for General and Elective Surgery
JR – Jodie Robinson, manager of Rose

Are you under the mistaken impression that your supportive posts about the Darlington Nurses while you are pottering about on Mumsnet have made a ha'pporth of difference in the real world of employment litigation? Is that why you are not prepared to put your money where your mouth is?

Are you so detached from reality that this is just some idle amusement for you?

When they win, as they surely will, I imagine you will be joining in the celebrations by posting further anonymous messages to an online forum . . . perhaps something along the lines of . . .

"Hurray for the brave Darlington Nurses! They went through so much! At work they were victimised and abused. In court they were humiliated by having to recount childhood sexual abuse and they were called liars. They received death threats and had to hire a security guard just to give evidence in court.

- Me? Oh, I posted on Mumsnet supporting them! Solidarity with the Darlington Nurses ✊

It is truly marvellous! Their win will benefit all women who have been forced to share changing rooms with men, or who would otherwise have been forced to share changing rooms with men. Not just at work but anywhere.

- What did I do to actually help them?

I am proud to say that I refused to give a penny to help them win their case. Even more, I went out of my way to try to persuade others not to fund them!

- What do you mean, I don't understand how Crowd Justice funding works?

That's not the point. The point is that I don't approve of the organisation that enabled and supported them to take their case to court. The evil bastards even paid lawyers to represent them and commissioned an Expert Witness! AND they might get all that money back if the Nurses win. How revolting is that?

Some might call me a narcissistic, virtue-signalling hypocrite but they would be wrong. Of course I am pleased that they won. It's just that when push comes to shove, I would rather they had lost for lack of funds than abandon my principles.

- Cognitive Dissonance? Never heard of it. New Celebrity Panel Game?"

That's you, that is.

Thank you from me too.

Agree with this. I think that using 'sex' to mean 'intercourse' is much older than 30 or so years. I'm in my sixties and it has been in general use for all of the parts of my life when I was old enough to notice.

Of course we did also have other terms, like 'making love'. The term 'having sex' might have seemed a bit bald in some contexts. But it was absolutely mainstream. I'm guessing it emerged early-to-mid tweniteth century. Likely originating as an abbreviation of 'sexual intercourse'

Re funding the nurses. I have happily donated to their fund despite my significant reservations about CC.

It is a more palatable contribution, than my monthly direct debit to the Royal College of Nursing, who have let nurses and women down on this issue. Unfortunately, Unison is no better (if anything, worse) and I need the insurance.

I'm guessing it emerged early-to-mid tweniteth century. Likely originating as an abbreviation of 'sexual intercourse'

Which famously began in 1963:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

I had sex education lessons at primary school in the 80’s.

I was always confused about that. Pretty sure I was taught at school that baiser meant to kiss, but later got the idea that it was slang for fuck, and better to use embrasser for kiss. Nowadays, I'd have no use for either in conversation! 😀

In that particular case it would be "c'est un c*nnard de trouduc" (Trouduc being short for trou du cul, ie arsehole). But a range of possibilities are available !

Un baiser is a kiss (noun)
Baiser (verb) means to fuck
Embrasser means to kiss

And I agree it makes little sense!

2nd agree. I'm in my sixties and sex (short for sexual intercourse) has been used for as long as I can remember.

I don't know if this helps to clarify or the opposite but I remember sometime around 1963-65 (dating this from the school I was attending at the time) that I read in a Newspaper that, "Sex should not be just a dirty word in the playground". (something like that).

I had no idea what the word meant and had never heard the word before, so when I was at school I listened out for anyone saying it. I never did hear anyone saying it.

One of the things that puzzled me at that time was, "Where did swear words come from?"

I don't know if that thought was triggered by the "sex word" or if it was already something that I wondered about. What I was aware of was a general consensus amongst my peers that Swear Words did not have any meaning, they were just Bad Words that you were not supposed to say.

When a new word materialised in the mouths of school friends and they were asked what it meant, they never knew. There seemed to be one or two new Bad Words every year that came out of nowhere and that only grown ups were allowed to say.

My hypothesis about the origin of Swear Words at that age, after empirical observation and much thought on the matter, was as follows:

Observations:

• A small number of New Swear Words appear every year
• New Swear Words are uttered first by parents and overheard by their children, who are then told off by their parents when they repeat them
• If parents are asked what the words mean they just say that they were Bad Words that adults might say when they were angry but children should not say them.

Questions:

• Where do the words come from?
• When do parents have an opportunity to learn what the new Swear Words are without their children being aware of this knowledge being imparted to them?

Conclusion:
Once a year children are sent out of the room while parents listen to an important message from the Queen - this is where Swear Words came from!! The Queen's Christmas Speech!

The Queen must say something like,

"Now all children are out of the room, I do declare that these are the new Swear Words for 1963 . . . arse . . . fanny . . . sex. These are NOT words for the playground!"

Obvious when you think about it 🤷‍♀️

As for the "slept with" vs "had sex" question, this Ngram might help or it might be misleading, depending on what those phrases meant at any one time:

https://ngrams.org/ngram-viewer.html

But you didn’t “have sex”, did you? Of course the word sex was in use. But for most people, if they wanted to talk about having sexual intercourse or sexual relations (Bill Clinton’s phrase, famously) they would euphemistically refer to it as “sleeping with” or “making love”, not as “having sex”. At least this is my recollection from the sixties, seventies and early eighties. Or, if less refined, “fucking” or “screwing” (screwing seems to have fallen out of fashion, though fucking is perennially popular).
In fact the word sex was used more or less correctly most of the time to refer to the biological class that an individual belonged to. Gender was something only encountered in grammar for most people who were acquainted with the word, (though I can think of one instance at least where Dickens uses it humorously instead of sex).

I remember genders when I was young. All the words had them in French and German, and I never did work out how they assigned them.

Sex education was definitely a thing in the 1970's and early 1980's, and all those diagrams really put me off. Not quite as bad as dissecting frogs but close! One girl brought in a copy of playgirl and we were unanimous that men looked so much better with clothes on.

Edited to add - we looked closely at the statues in the National Gallery and stately homes when we were on school trips, and then decided that they'd been designed so as not to embarras whoever had paid for them. It was a girls grammar school, dedicated to turning out young ladies. Ah well, no one succeeds all the time.

As were we in the 70's.

When I first talked about sex, in the 1970s, we often called it 'bonking' but that may be a Midlands thing.

As popularised by The Sun!

And the late lamented Jilly Cooper, bless her.

Anyone remember the Horlicks ad? "In India, Horlicks is an energy drink, so what do they think of us drinking it at bedtime? They think we're bonkers."

Would you have used it in conversation to help de-code the different slang phrases. I remember mid-80s having to be clear about the difference, in different friendship groups, between 'getting off with' (snogging, kissing with open mouths/tongues), ' 'having it off with' (having [penetrative] sex), "going with' (grey area, could mean being steady gf/bf, or having sex depending who you talk to!)

IIRC 'having sex' was the only phrase common to everyone, but maybe used among peers rather than in polite company.

An AI hypothesis can suggest what it likes, but we definitely talked about who was having sex at my very ordinary state comprehensive in the 1980s. We used lots of other words for sex too. Funnily enough, the word we didn’t use outside language lessons was gender. That only became common parlance once I started working in the NHS.

Well no I didn’t have sex as I was at primary school. 😂 I never knew it as anything other than sex, doing it, bonking or popping one’s cherry until I was older. We all called it that. Plus there was always pictures of that joy of sex book in magazines that we used to laugh at. It’s possible that there were regional variations. That’s my experience of a northern, working class, council estate school. I really can’t imagine anyone calling it ‘making love’ in the pubs where I live even now unless they were taking the piss.

I only knew gender from learning Spanish and French.

I really can’t imagine anyone calling it ‘making love’

Same here. No idea why but I've always found the term awkward and don't think I've ever used it.

Oh god, I remember that now! That must have been where we got it from, though I've never read The Sun.

I remember dh’s aunty years ago (she’s only 4/5 years older than us) saying to us that she’d said to her husband that she really wanted to make love to him and we both cracked out laughing. It’s a really cringey term. I remember my dad once forwarding an episode of Inspector Morse because there was a woman singing about making whoopee because it was making him feel sick!

"gender" only came into general usage
(pushed VERY hard by lobbyists)
in the last ten years or so

Even the 2004 Gener Recognition Act was assumed to be about 'transexuals'