Tag: gay rights

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Healthcare

We must remember our hippocratic oath – first, do no harm

I have looked after a trans patient who I met through the injuries they got when they tried to commit suicide.

I then knew a neighbour’s kid who became trans and requested to be known as a different name. This kid’s parent is employed as a parenting expert running Council courses on parenting and I was intrigued and worried as to how miserable they seemed despite a v supportive family.

My sister is lesbian and on the more butch end of the spectrum when she goes to parties though not in day to day life. I realised she would have had pressure to trans if she was living her childhood now and I feel protective to both my patient (who had life changing injuries) and neighbour’s kid.

I have two daughters who are very girly though I myself am a tomboy I would say. As a paediatrician I particularly strongly object to the treatment of rogd (rapid onset gender dysphoria) and in fact all gender dysphoria with hormone blockers /hormones /surgery in children. Logically any of these treatments should be reserved for age 25 plus when brain is emotionally matured.

Legally treatments should be reserved until age 18  I believe but this is against usual medical practice.

I hate the thought these unhappy kids and teenagers may lose sexual health and function, plus libido and osteoporosis etc etc all because the medical profession is failing them. We must remember our hipppcratic oath – first, do no harm.

I have discussed with my sisters who defend trans rights and tell me I’m wrong (including my sister who is lesbian). I have briefly mentioned to my husband. I have read widely on line. I have posted on twitter  once asking whether lockdown may be good for teen trans kids. Otherwise I have not posted as I’m scared of personal and professional repurcussions.

My sisters are slightly distanced from me and critical of my beliefs.

JS, Paediatric doctor and mum of two kids

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Healthcare

Women’s rights were hard won. They shouldn’t be dismantled as though granting them was a favour

Women’s rights were hard won. They shouldn’t be dismantled as though granting them was a favour. I’m sick of black women being used as evidence that black people are not really people. I’m personally insulted at the racist, homophobic and misogyny of most trans narrative.

How have women’s rights and needs advanced incrementally by millimetres, but trans issues are now forefront of public and private policy?

I have shared schools guidance with friends worried about the school decision to turn toilets into mixed sex areas with no consultation.

I have challenged at work (raising safeguarding implications), discussed with family and friends, donated to crowdfunding and amplified the voices of those doing the hard work on social media.

I have been warned off for flagging implications for other protected characteristics. I’ve also been accused of attacking a trans person in a private and left-politics Facebook group for providing alternative information to challenge the statement that trans people started Pride and Stonewall.

Barbarara, Sister, not Cister

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Healthcare Others

The silencing of women on this issue is driven by men

I care because I worry about the future for girls and women and I’m outraged about the slow creep of corporate subservience to organisations like Mermaids and Stonewall.

As a little girl I would have expected my Mum (and Dad) to stand up for my rights and although I don’t have kids I have an 8 year old niece. Why should she have to get changed into her swimming costume in front of men masquerading as women? Why should she have to compete against boys masquerading as girls if she chooses to play competitive sport.

The silencing of women on this issue is driven by men and I say this as a heterosexual woman who is in a loving marriage. But if you speak up you are dismissed as transphobic: possibly the laziest insult around these days. I’m increasingly uneasy about being a member of my company’s ERG LGBT group which is aligning itself with Stonewall and all its dubious misogynistic views. Lesbians are being erased and expected to accept male bodied partners. Children being told they are a different gender and young ones being given puberty blockers. A very frightening world.

I am regularly educating and raising awareness with my friends. Only last night two gay friends who are big Harry Potter fans were saying they were confused and didn’t understand the issues with JK Rowling. They were shocked when I told them the issues. It’s easy to assume that all LGB people know all the facts: many are blissfully unaware.

I would absolutely love if someone in the movement could create some materials which people like me in corporations could share internally to raise concerns about the likes of Stonewall who have a jack boot on the neck of big companies in the UK. Most organisations have an internal ‘speak up’ whistleblower mechanism which can be used if people are concerned about anonymity. Not really for me.

I’m a confident and articulate person. I tend to find that those who I speak to are  totally unaware of the facts and when they hear them they are horrified. I suspect many people are watching on the sidelines terrified to be labelled transphobic especially those in the public eye.

Lou, A left leaning feminist who can no longer tolerate the erosion of womankind

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Healthcare Parent

To throw our rights away on fantastical lies is abhorrent

This matters to me because through studying history I have seen the struggle that women went through in order to garner our rights. To throw them away on fantastical lies is abhorrent to me.

I have also watched as the TRAs (trans rights activists) have engaged in attacks straight out of Mao’s strategy book attacking individuals whose only crime is stating the truth.

The erasure of women’s rights, the re-writing of history, the erasure of lesbianism and the erasure of safe spaces for the vulnerable is a coordinated attack and one I feel that I must stand against.

I have made Twitter posts and I have driven my husband mad with my rantings about indoctrination of children at school

I have experienced vitriol on Twitter.

A, I was part of the silent majority, now I add my voice

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Healthcare

This matters to me personally, as a gay man, and professionally as a social worker

This matters to me personally, as a gay man, and professionally as a social worker. I see the erosion of women’s rights and LGB people’s rights happening before our very eyes, and do not want the country to be taking such a regressive step.

I have raised my voice at work with certain colleagues, though they have largely been in agreement and supportive.

I have been called a TERF on social media and blocked by various people online. My main fear is a complaint to Social Work England, the regulator. While I find it ludicrous that someone would complain when a social worker raises legitimate concerns about women’s rights, LGB rights and child safeguarding, I have seen it happen already to a social work academic.

BF, Social Worker

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Healthcare

As a doctor I fear that predatory men will take advantage of “gender identity” rules to assault vulnerable women in hospitals

I’m a senior doctor, who qualified into a very male dominated profession. Sexism (even when inadvertent) was & is the norm, and difficult to get addressed. As it is, female patients’ problems can be dismissed readily if the diagnosis isn’t obvious.

My biggest fear is that predatory men will take advantage of “gender identity” rules to assault vulnerable women in hospitals, as they have in prisons already.

I have started to engage on Twitter: the pile-on to JK Rowling’s tweets have been galvanising for me on this issue. It took a while for me to understand that “transwomen” had extended beyond the realm of people who had actually transitioned (or were in the process of it) to people who are male-bodied and not committed to transition.

I have also contacted my medical indemnity association: the NHS guidance is very woolly on what happens if female patients object to the presence of an obvious man in a hospital ward.

Essentially, the staff are told to try to justify it to the other patients and if all else fails, find a single room for one or other of the parties.

I have been told that I should be ashamed to be a doctor, that they feel “sorry for patients” having to deal with me. I have been placed on a “TERF” blocklist. I have been called racist, homophobic, and inevitably “transphobic” (and that was after bringing up examples of women prisoners being raped).

I have had to lock my account, particularly as I am worried that I will be reported to the regulator for being critical of gender-identity, and could face sanctions on my career.

N, Doctor

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Healthcare

In my youth I went on gay rights marches every year. I marched with trans people

I  first became aware of the misogyny in trans ideology in 2015. I was doing an MA in Social Work and the subject was ‘the value of feminist theory for social work practice in domestic violence. I was 50 at the time and although I have always been a feminist I joined the NorthWest feminist and anti capitalist group to get some up to date theory.

A colleague of mine was doing her dissertation on the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. I hadn’t thought much about this until then. Her dissertation was pro reforming it to allow people to instantly self ID. I then read an article by Miranda Yardley in the Morning Star questioning the effects of any proposed reforms of the GRA on womens rights.This was the first time I had heard of Miranda Yardly.

It was a brilliant thought provoking article and I posted it on website of said feminist group and asked that we discuss it. The very next day I was piled on by three transwomen who called me a TERF, said I was transphobic, mocked me and kicked me out of the group.

I was in shock! I was so upset. In my youth I went on gay rights marches every year. I marched with trans people.

I have raised awareness on Twitter, Facebook and supported others in doing so. I have spoken to friends and family.

Apart from getting kicked out of feminist group (described above)  I am treading a fine line in friendship with a friend of mine who is a lesbian but is totally pro trans and wont hear a word against them. She unfriended me for a while on FB. She said she knows I am not transphobic but is worried other people will think that I am. I am not.

CB, The truth matters

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Healthcare

It’s a small life, I can’t trust all that easily and the wounds I carry bleed from time to time, but it’s a life and I owe that to the women that looked after me as soon as I left the airport.

I care about this issue because at the age of 14 I was raped to try and correct my homosexuality. I came to the UK as soon as I could at the age of 18 to seek asylum due to the harassment I received in my home country following the very public trial.

The people that raped me knew what a woman was, if I’d have been a gay man they would have hit and physically assaulted me and not raped me. It is important that we acknowledge and deal with the issues at the heart of violence against women in the UK as well as internationally.

If women coming to this country to seek asylum for MVAW (male violence against women) cannot tell their stories and get meaningful help because their language is now hate speech or exclusionary then how much of a safe refuge is this country?

I was broken when I came here in 2001, I’d experienced an unwanted pregnancy due to the rape and tried to abort at home due to abortion being illegal in my home country. It didn’t work and I was forced to carry my trauma with me for 9 months only to give birth to a child that only survived for 76hrs due to damage caused to his brain by my attempts to terminate. I have to live with this. A lot of women have to live with these kinds of wounds.

We need a place and a language to talk about our issues and to heal. To find support that demands nothing from us, not validation, not that we change our language, nothing.

I managed to get the help I needed and have managed to carve out a life here. It’s a small life, I can’t trust all that easily and the wounds I carry bleed from time to time, but it’s a life and I owe that to the women that looked after me as soon as I left the airport. The female doctors and nurses I was able to ask for, the female therapist who was with me for 15 years and delayed her retirement to help me stand on my own. The lecturers at my university who guided me and helped me gain a degree and become financially independent of the state. The lesbian community that helped me accept myself. They became my tribe, I am thankful.

I have written to my MP, I have been to his surgery to speak to him. He seems sympathetic, he’s from a Religious minority group himself and seems sympathetic but I’m not sure he has really done much about this as his party is firmly pro trans.

I have joined online forums and signed petitions and donated where I could. All the people I speak to seem to be very sympathetic and understand the insanity of where women find ourselves but many fear speaking publicly as do I.

I’ve lost friends. I work in an NHS mental heath setting and most of the people I work with understand the insanity of the current trans movement but this is whispered in dark corners and can never be said openly.

Everyone is scared, I had a colleague say to me a while back that we, as mental heath services, are going to pay dearly for this in a few years time but we daren’t go against the Stonewall lobby that is everywhere in our Trust.

As a mother, grandmother, feminist, educationalist, woman, this matters to me for a number of reasons. As a survivor of domestic abuse, I know how vital to me were women only spaces. I would not have been able to get the support I needed if I had not been confident that specific spaces were open only to women. The fear of such spaces being available to male-bodied people, however they identify, is very real and, I believe, would prevent women from accessing safety, support and much needed resources.

Sex is real. Women are women. Women’s oppression is based on sex. Women’s hard-won rights are in real danger of being eroded. Trans people have rights and, obviously, shoukd do. These are safeguarded in law. As are sex-based rights. The two are separate. One set of rights should not, and need not, trump another. Women are women, transwomen are transwomen and both should be safeguarded.

I am deeply concerned at what is being promulgated in schools and what children and young people are being told online. Feminism has fought for years to break down gender stereotypes. Our nonconforming children should be allowed/encouraged to be just that. Dress wearing boys and tomboy girls should not be told they are in the wrong body.

It’s clear that many young people, disproportionately girls, disproportionately those with conditions like autism, are being put on a path to medicalised transition too early, too quickly and often inappropriately. There is insufficient research into the impact of puberty blockers and what evidence there is suggests not the ‘pause’ as is often cited but the first step in an increasingly inevitable pathway.

Women are being silenced. We are afraid to speak for fear of casually being labelled and abused as transphobic. We are not. Generally, we are progressive women with histories of fighting for human rights and many causes. We haven’t suddenly become bigots. We are not transphobic. We ARE supporters of women’s rights.

I’ve made social media posts, attended consultation at House of Lords and submitted evidence to the Gender Recognition Act consultation.

P, Women matter

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Academics and researchers

I know what awkward teenage years are like

I care because, having been 6 feet tall since I was 12, I know what awkward teenage years are like. In my late teens my parents came under pressure from medical professionals, which they were ultimately able to resist, to allow my younger and taller sister to be prescribed carcinogenic drugs to stunt her growth and keep her within socially acceptable height limits for females. It was the participation of tall women in Olympic sports that changed that perception.

I care because from childhood onwards I was subjected to criticism and sanction for attempting to participate in society on equal terms with boys and men:

  • At the  university I attended female students (only admitted 3 years previously) were massively outnumbered, routinely harassed and the subject of derision about their intellectual abilities in the absence of any female faculty.
  • At Westminster, where I spent the next 20 years as a researcher.

I care because my daughter fitted the model of awkward, bullied, girl with ASD, unsure about her sexuality and  susceptible to the argument that she was “born in the wrong body”. Referrals to groups where she never met another girl with her diagnosis until she was 13 did not help her feel more comfortable, however well-meaning they were. Lesbian role models in her family and social network did. Representation matters.

I have contributed to discussions on social media, attended meetings and events and discussed these issues with friends.

I have lost some friends, although not close ones.

Miriam, Legal & criminal justice policy researcher, administrator, migrant

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Healthcare Others

I was fortunate enough to attend the WPUK conference and was inspired by so many wonderful speakers and to be in a room with 1000 women who ‘get it’

I care because it’s the absolute injustice of it. It’s just not fair. If men and women were truly equal then swapping between wouldn’t be an issue, but we’re not and there are a few meagre provisions we’re allowed for our safety and progression and now we’re told we’re bigots if we won’t give them up to narcissistic men with a fetish. The gender stereotypes I fight against for myself and my daughters are now being pushed as intrinsic and deviation from these is seen as a reason for mutilation.

I have posted on Mumsnet, Twitter and my personal Facebook. I have had countless conversations with friends. I am also involved with Safe Schools Alliance.

In December I called a radio phone in and asked Jo Swinson what a woman is, she struggled with the answer and I was allowed to ask further follow up questions.

It was widely reported on (appeared in newspapers and on GMB) and seemed to show the crux of the argument – you can’t have women’s rights if you don’t know what a woman is. In February this year I was fortunate enough to attend the WPUK conference and was inspired by so many wonderful speakers and to be in a room with 1000 women who ‘get it’ and would actually like to get out of the ‘cul-de-sac of identity politics’ and back to the fight against everything else women are facing.

I have had some difficult conversations with friends who feel like I’m being unkind, gay friends especially. I’m at the age where about half my friends have children and that seems to be the dividing line. Pre-kids it’s easier to believe that equality of the sexes exists but once you go through pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, maternity leave, reduced employment opportunities, mental load – the full force of the patriarchy hits home, and men donning some lipstick and claiming womanhood feels incredibly offensive.

Anna, from Warwickshire