One of the more obvious things in human society is that there are men and women, and in some times and places, men and women require separate areas. In occupations that involve changing clothes, for example, men and women have always traditionally (and with good reason) had separate changing areas; men and women have separate areas for "necessary," and so on.
In recent years, though, transgender activists have been seeking to blur that line, and now, in the United Kingdom, a group of nurses who actually are women are taking it to the courts to have transgender women - men - barred from their changing spaces. And they aren't about to back down or be ignored any longer.
They have good reasons for this.
A group of nurses in the United Kingdom who filed a lawsuit against a National Health Service hospital trust over its transgender employee policy are speaking out publicly for the first time to demand the NHS protect female staff.
"I think to go public was just to try and gain some attention really from the government to try and look at the policies around this because there's nothing in place at the minute to protect women. It's literally a self-made situation where any person can just [identify] as a woman and go in," Darlington Memorial nurse Lisa Lockey told Fox News Digital.
"It's been ongoing for a long time. We've been ignored," she continued. "And it's kind of been — swept aside, I think, in the hope that we were going to just forget about it and shut up."
What are the policies in question? As mentioned above, policies allowing dudes in women's changing spaces, which these women rightfully find intolerable. Policies like this claim to be inclusive. They are not. They are exclusive; they favor the "transgender" over the actual women by creating an environment in which the women, people who by the way are dedicated to the delivery of competent health care to the people of their community, no longer feel comfortable to enter their workspace.
That's not right, it's not fair, and it will damage the healthcare professional community by driving competent women away from nursing. What's worse, some of the encounters described by the women in the lawsuit appear not to be accidental but deliberate; these dudes LARPing as women appear to be deliberately provoking a response from their female co-workers.
County Durham and Darlington Memorial Hospital Trust allows employees to use changing rooms or restrooms that align with their gender identity, the suit claims. The nurses say this has led to several uncomfortable encounters with this individual.
One of the nurses in the suit who had been sexually assaulted as a child described how on one occasion, she was allegedly approached by the transgender colleague while alone in the dressing room and was repeatedly asked to undress while the colleague was only wearing boxer shorts with genitalia visible.
Lockey said a Muslim colleague had also been terrified to encounter the biological male colleague in the changing area while she was half-dressed.
"She knew nothing about this situation going on. Nobody told any of us. And, so she stood there in a bra and she hears this man's voice, and she said she couldn't move. She was actually just frozen in panic, holding her hands across her chest and didn't know what to do. She was just so horrified. And I felt really, really upset about that because, you know, these girls, you know, they've come across to help, you know, to work [here] and I just thought that was really, really wrong," she continued.
This can't continue, of course. Fortunately, on both sides of the pond, there are early indications that people have had enough of this crap.
See Related: Texas Judge Slaps Down Biden's Title IX Expansion for Transgender Students
J.K. Rowling Slams Critics Over Jabs Against Transgender UK Soccer Club Manager
Here's the real problem with the NHS's policy: It's not centered on the delivery of health care. Just the opposite, in fact; this was a political decision, made for political reasons, to appease a tiny but noisy minority, to grease a squeaky wheel. It is actually anathema to the delivery of quality health care, which depends in large part on hiring and retaining the very best healthcare workers available and working to retain them.
Having dudes LARPing as women in the women's changing rooms does not further that goal. Having them suggestively approach their female colleagues, as has been described by the nurses involved in this lawsuit, will degrade the delivery of health care, and worse, will deter any more young women from choosing nursing as a career.
The nurses suing this NHS hospital trust appear to be determined. They won't be ignored, and they won't be threatened. And, if there is any justice left in the United Kingdom, they will prevail.
This seems appropriate.
