"Darlington Nurses" vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust Tribunal Thread 8

[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)
Thread 7, 05-Nov to 11-Nov; SW (day 11), closing submissions

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 now complete. Submissions are being made on November 11th. 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

Sorry - just couldn't resist lowering the tone.

Don't they have a legal department to guide them? I know they didn't seem to consult it, but were they all locked in a cupboard somewhere?

But what is a gender? I've looked it up and it's apparently a person's inner sense of self and a feeling of being a whatever. It can't be measured, and no one has yet defined how someone knows they're a woman or a man without using biological characteristics. If I walk into a doctor's surgery and say I'm identifying as Tim Davie they won't pay me £450,000 a year unquestioningly, yet if I claim to be a man they are supposed to affirm and encourage me rather than explore the possibility that I might have mental health issues that are leading me to want to destroy my existing life and reinvent myself. What's more, no one else is expected to believe that I'm Tim Davie, yet we are punished for not believing unquestioningly. I'm not Gender Critical. I think it's unprovable and hence cannot be relied on.

In the context I’ve used it here, women as a gender group would be the people who are conforming, or are perceived to be conforming, to the socially constructed role of woman.

Which obviously relies on stereotypes.

I wonder how many of their journalists have been grimly keeping their heads down and saying nothing for fear of losing their jobs?

I wondered if that was what he was planning when he arrived on the DSU, but was put off by the Sister, who struck me as the type who'd out-Paddington Paddington when it came to hard stares and had his number. After all, the most successful bullies and abusers are those who know how to fly just under the radar while claiming victim status.

Same! 🤣🤣🤣

Sad times. Sad, sad times.

That’s an interesting post @POWNewcastleEastWallsend. Behind every ludicrous changing room policy appeared to be the desire to improve a Trust’s Rainbow badge status.

I wonder whether Wes Streeting is going to be quizzed on this today?

Justin Webb has a slightly mischievous tone to his voice on R4 this morning.

Also entirely evidence free AFAIK. I'm sure the shy retiring ones would have plucked up their courage to mention it if someone had killed themselves over coverage. Is it compulsory for transgender male to female to model themselves on Violet Elizabeth Bott from the Just William stories?

For younger readers, she was a spoilt little brat who used to say 'I'll scweam and scweam until I'm sick.'

That is a fantastic theory, but surely a petard would be a leotard worn by a dog?

It absolutely would not surprise me if such a thing were being marketed these days. Perhaps for when your pooch goes to agility classes.

I quite like the notion of being lifted aloft by your own farts, though it would be extra embarrassing in a changing room situation. Imagine the MN thread.

Thanks. Can you explain what the socially constructed role of women is? I'm not being sarky but I truly don't understand because I don't think women are homogenous. As another poster said in another context, we can't even all agree on which Tunnocks product is the best. (I think it's the milk chocolate caramel wafer, but I'm happy to accept that others have different beliefs, especially since it'll mean more wafers left for me.)

'Hoist' does seem to have more in common with hanging than exploding, tbf!

I suppose you may well go sharply upwards if you are caught out by your own bomb. It just seems strange to think of the movement in terms of pulling rather than pushing.

Looking at the etymology of hoist, it does seem at some point (and in some usages) to have meant something like 'raise' (i.e. to have been neutral vis-a-vis pushing or pulling. So that makes sense in the context of being blown into the air.

(In the absence of actual lawyers lawyering it seemed right to keep the thread on track by pondering fine and pedantic distinctions of meaning.)

Not sure I can do that justice in a forum post!

In brief, gender is socially constructed through the many stereotypes, expectations, learned behaviours, etc. that society places on people because of their sex. So the pressures that push women towards caring roles, that mean women are seen as less authoritative, that place greater value on looks, that assume they are more emotional than men, and so on. All these pressures constrain women’s lives, make some choices more likely than others and create an idea in the minds of women and society of what it is to be a woman. That doesn’t mean every woman conforms or does so in an homogenous way.

For a more thorough explanation you’re going to have to do some reading. I found De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to be a good, though dated, introduction when I was teen. Fairly accessible. Ann Oakley’s Sex Gender and Society is probably better but, I think, somewhat more “academic”. You could probably also just ask chatGPT, would probably do a reasonable job.

I think the problems with that argument (noting that you are being devils's advocate!) is that it doesn't take into account

1. Croft v. Royal Mail - no right to share change rooms with opposite sex.
2. The rights of the women who can see that he is a man.

And transwomen can’t understand why woman might be afraid of their aggression.

They got evicted so the nurses could change there. They are floating around the corridors pretending to be patients so they do get asked difficult questions such as "what is a woman".

Edit - thank you to everyone who participates in these threads. I only manage to dip a toe in but love all the different ways people add to it 💕

Thanks. I remember Simone de Beauvoir from my teen years too, but it made me want to rebel, because if enough of us said 'my role is whatever I chose' then we could change society? As indeed, brave women are doing now, little by little. There have been matriarchal societies so why not? It always struck me that it made more sense to have a society where children took their mother's names because it was so much easier to tell who they were.

This is the World Health Organisation's definition of gender.

"Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities. Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others. This is referred to as intersectionality.

Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth."

I think it is quite good, but the first sentence does rather imply that everyone has these characteristics, when it could more accurately say that they are expected to have these characteristics.

Use of 'Intersex' is also a bit questionable.

They are floating around the corridors pretending to be patients so they do get asked difficult questions such as "what is a woman".

DO NOT 🙄

Agreed.

The statement starts off alright but veers into nonsense in the second sentence of the second paragraph - they mean sex in the rest of that paragraph. It's sex-based discrimination, not gender-based. And it's sex discrimination which intersects with other forms of discrimination.

But who says people have these characteristics? No one asked me, and this takes me back to being excused from sex education lessons when they covered these topics for questioning too much. Thankfully, my parents just laughed when the teacher got cross, and my Dad kept right on teaching me logic and to question everything. He was one of the first into Bergen Belsen so he felt authority must always be questioned and challenged.

Socially constructed in which society & how?

Masai warrior tribes? Eskimo tradition? Scottish men wear kilts, maybe they’re just Scottish men?

Or a 20 year old abberation in history paralleled with the liberation of porn and enabled by parents with little wit?

Sex realism states - there are two sexes and you are born and die in that sex. What you wear or the length of your hair in the years in between both events doesn’t change that.