I salute the nurses who took a stand against this women-have-penises nonsense

Three cheers for Bethany Hutchison, Lisa Lockey, Annice Grundy, Tracey Hooper and Joanne Bradbury. Their names are unknown as yet, but these brave nurses could easily become as significant in the annals of feminist history as the Ford Dagenham women and the Suffragettes. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, the five nurses who work at Darlington Memorial Hospital, which comes under the control of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, have filed a legal action against the Trust claiming sexual harassment and indirect discrimination after having to share a changing room with a male colleague who identifies as a woman.

The male operating department practitioner, who, it is said, openly admits he does not take female hormones and is trying to get his girlfriend pregnant, nevertheless insists that he is called “Rose”. The nurses claim that Rose has walked around the female dressing area wearing only tight boxer underpants while allegedly staring and initiating conversations while female nurses are getting changed.

To the average person, Rose’s alleged behaviour sounds creepy.

One nurse, who experienced sexual abuse as a child, spoke of her horror when she was approached in the changing room, which she assumed was a women-only space, by Rose in a scrub top and boxer shorts with holes in. International nurses, from cultures that forbid them being unclothed around men other than their husbands, have suffered panic attacks before trying to fulfil their duties in the day surgery.

Some 26 nurses wrote to County Durham and Darlington Trust to raise their concerns about this deeply unsettling and potentially unsafe situation. Guess what? It turns out it was all the womens’ fault! Of course it was.

Human Resources managers replied saying that they support “Rose” and – listen to this, dear reader – the nurses need to “get educated”, “broaden your mindset” and “compromise” in order to be more “inclusive”. What kind of compromise you are supposed to reach around a sexually-active biological bloke who is around you when you get your kit off in your workplace may only be clear to those in the advanced stages of gender derangement.

The Trust’s policies apparently permit any member of staff to “identify” as the opposite gender and to access single-sex changing rooms, toilets or showers. Simply because “Rose” says he’s a woman, he can use the female changing rooms regardless of the feelings of, you know, actual women. (Presumably, he can also give a bed bath to a patient who has requested a female nurse to carry out that intimate task?) Adding insult to injury, the man calling himself Rose has reportedly offered to educate the distressed nurses on the matter. I believe there is a technical term for such a creature: arrogant p—-.

Nurses reported that they felt “threatened” and “intimidated” during HR meetings at the hospital, fearing for their jobs if they spoke out. Lacking JK Rowling’s protective cushion of wealth, eight (three remaining anonymous) summoned up the courage anyway.

“We want women to be aware that there are transgender policies, particularly in the NHS, that are putting us at risk,” said Bethany Hutchison, a spokesperson for the group. “This should not be something women even need to think about. However, the extreme transgender ideology that is putting us at risk is so ingrained and has gone so far that we and other women have no choice but to speak out. Other nurses are terrified of sticking their heads above the parapet. We are speaking out for us and for those who are too afraid to. This cannot be right, and we want a change in policy, not only at our hospital but across the NHS and wider society. I am a Christian, but these policies are and will impact every woman from every background.” Well said, Bethany.

How, you may well ask, has the apparently harmless requirement to be “inclusive” ended up causing so much dread and fear to those nurses? Well, what you have to understand is the NHS is effectively a socialist state operating within our country, albeit one given £180 billion of taxpayers’ money a year to employ diversity managers, purchase Pride lanyards and occasionally carry out an operation if they absolutely have to.

The instinct of activists, who run the health system (very badly, but that’s another story), is to identify persecuted minority groups that need to be protected at the expense of bigger “privileged” groups, even to the point of irrationality. Just under 100,000 people in England and Wales identify as a trans man or trans woman, according to the most recent census, compared to a population of around 30 million women and girls. Labour has apparently concluded that it’s better for the party’s prospects to pander to aggressive members of the trans superminority than to consider the safety and wellbeing of millions of women and children.

This is “progressive” groupthink – the dog whistle of the Left. It goes something like this:

Labour: We’re the party of equality that respects women’s spaces, sport, single-sex hospital wards, domestic violence shelters, changing rooms, workplace and school safeguarding.

Everyone else: Great, go on then, what’s a woman?

Labour: Er, it’s complicated, it depends on the context. What matters is trans rights and people feeling safe.

Everyone else: What about the rights of women and girls?

Labour: Well, yeah, obviously. Most women have vaginas, but some have penises because they were born men and are now women – not too sure of the details tbh! – but, don’t worry, we’ll make it much easier for men to become women so everyone’s happy and safe.

Everyone else: Women aren’t safe.

Labour: Don’t start with your toxic culture war!

Everyone else: But if men identifying as women are allowed in women’s spaces it isn’t safe.

Labour: Transphobe!

Keir Starmer will have been exposed to that monstrous intellectual dishonesty when he was a leading member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and privately remains committed to it, I reckon. Hence his disgraceful, rude behaviour towards Rosie Duffield, one of the only Labour MPs prepared to state that a woman cannot have a penis. A concept Sir Keir has struggled with. In September 2021, he rebuked Duffield for saying that only a woman had a cervix. When he was asked if the former MP for Canterbury was transphobic for taking that view, Starmer replied, “It is something that shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.” He subsequently refused to confirm whether a woman can have a penis, eventually volunteering in 2023 that “for 99.9 per cent of women it is completely biological… and, of course, they haven’t got a penis.” It was only last week, when Tony Blair said “a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis”, that Starmer finally capitulated to biological reality; perhaps because the assertion had been made by an Alpha male he fears, not by a mere woman without a willy?

I suppose little in the way of consistency can be expected from a man who once absentmindedly claimed he had two sons (the Starmers have a girl and a boy), but it is a sign of the power the trans cult exerts that his party have revealed these vote-losing ideas so close to the election. The trans lobby is already crowing unpleasantly. “With increased confidence of winning, the language coming from Labour has improved,” tweeted one sanctimonious trans councillor. Or Labour’s language has deteriorated worryingly if, that is, you happen to be a working-class woman or girl, the main victims of these middle-class metropolitan notions.

Labour, whatever their obfuscations, is going to weaken the new guidance that gender ideology should not be taught in our schools (more fool Gillian Keegan and the cowardly Conservatives for not putting it into law while they had the chance. Too busy being “nice” and trying to impress their enemies). More vulnerable youngsters are going to be able to dictate their pronouns, more teachers like the excellent Kevin Lister will be sacked for refusing to address a student by a name/pronoun her parents don’t know about. More teenagers who are allowed to socially transition in the classroom will, as the seminal Cass review warned, follow the path to binding their breasts and taking cross-sex hormones because a bunch of Lefty loons think child mutilation is a branch of social justice.

Labour will ban conversion therapy so psychiatrists won’t be allowed to give a gender-questioning kid the holistic therapy which might make them think twice. (A senior therapist tells me that, of the scores of children with those feelings that he counselled for a year, only one went on to transition.) Our new socialist state will take over the parental role, criminalising parents who dare to discuss gender identity with their own child. Chilling, isn’t it?

Labour will also make it much easier for a man to claim he’s a woman. Very shortly in the UK, it will be more hassle to get an abortion than a Gender Recognition Certificate which gives a male, with or without a penis, Access All Areas to women’s spaces. Labour says it wants to remove the “indignities” experienced by transitioners. Hey, what about the indignities suffered by female nurses having to undress in a changing room with a bloke called Rose?

Responding to the County Durham and Darlington case, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting tweeted: “I support the nurses and I’m horrified they’ve had to resort to legal action. We’ve got to find a better way through this and I’d be happy to meet with them.”

Wes, a former member of Labour Against Transphobia, doesn’t get it, does he? Bethany, Lisa, Annice, Tracey and Joanne don’t want “a better way through this”. What they want is for the rules and boundaries that have applied in every civilised society – based on biological reality and female experience – to be upheld by the NHS. There is no case for men being allowed into private female spaces. Period. No man walking around in his underwear should be allowed to call himself “Rose”, claim he’s a woman and be backed by his employer. Period. Trans-women do not have periods. Period. Frankly, anything else is a madman’s charter.

Like the hapless Joe Biden, Keir Starmer will be swept along on the deluded progressive tide to buy off the shrill far-Left of his party. That much we can foresee. The good news is he will increasingly appal decent people, especially the working class, once so important to Labour, now a socially-conservative, commonsense, only-men-have-penises embarrassment.

I salute those courageous nurses – soon to be the Famous Five – who are taking a stand for every female against the great gender nonsense of our age. “We will pursue this matter for as long as it takes to ensure women’s spaces are protected,” they say. With their claim of “victimisation” and “sexual discrimination” they are playing the Left at their own persecution game. Brilliant, girls! This is how we win. This is how we are going to have to fight. Case by case, activist by activist, Rose by Rose. Women aren’t safe with Labour because men aren’t women.