Under the new guidance, a woman wanting a female healthcare practitioner is not entitled to have that care in a female only setting as it discriminates against males.
The British Medical Association (BMA), the medical doctors' trade union, has moved to begin lobbying for the removal of single-sex hospital wards, patient access to care by same-sex medics, and pediatric transitioning. BMA's intention is that those who identify as women should share women's spaces in hospital and health care settings.
This determination means that the BMA believes that women are not entitled to single-sex care. Under the new guidance, a woman wanting a female healthcare practitioner is not entitled to have that care in a female only setting as it discriminates against males who feel that they should have access to that space for their own care, or wish to have the right to perform smear tests, and give bed baths to grandmothers, in their role as health care providers.
Dr. Helena McKeown said, although "the tension in the room was 'palpable'" during the debate attended by 250 doctors, the BMA "supports transgender and nonbinary individuals' equal rights to live their lives with dignity which includes the right to equal access to healthcare. We oppose discrimination of all kinds and are committed to ensuring universal access to healthcare for all on the basis of clinical need."
In a society which has lost its moorings in material reality, this is the latest example of what happens when hitherto responsible adults forget that it is fine and good—not to mention legal, in the UK—to discriminate against men in certain situations where women and girls can reasonably expect to deal only with females.
In the zero-sum conflict of rights between women's sex-based rights, and trans activists' "inclusion" claims to be treated as indistinguishable from women, once again women and girls are expected to move over and make no fuss. The BMA calls this "progress," likening giving away women's rights to the fight for gay liberation, when it is nothing of the sort. When homosexual people fought for equal rights, they did not seek them at the expense of heterosexual people.
Tom Dolphin, an NHS anesthetist, debated in favour of the motion, dismissing criticism as "moral panic"—an easy move for a man who will be little effected by the consequences of the removal of single-sex medical provision. He said he was pleased by the prospect of trans-identifying males accessing women-only wards, showers and toilets, pleased by the prospect of men having additional sex rights over women, and of women's sex-based rights ceding to the dominant force of male entitlement which is transgender ideology.
For the transphobes joining this thread, please save your energy. The BMA is not your enemy and piling on will just result in muting.
— Tom Dolphin ???? WASH YOUR HANDS (@thomasdolphin)
As for the British women who stand to lose their safety, privacy and dignity by sharing wards, showers and toilets with any man who claims to be what he is not, the BMA appears unconcerned about the potential for women to avoid having a smear test or mammogram if, as survivors of male sexual abuse, they risk being confronted by a man claiming intimate access.
When it comes to a vulnerable elderly woman receiving intimate care, the implications are tantamount to legalizing sexual abuse: she is under institutional pressure to consent to a male giving intimate care, in which case it is no consent at all.
Is there any guidance in relation to patients? Many ? patients don't want to be examined by a practitioner of the opposite sex and/or want a chaperone.
How is this dealt w in relation to HCPs who wish to the treated as the opposite sex?
Can't just call patients transohobes!
— Maya Forstater (@MForstater)
Dr. Angela Dixon, a GP from Scotland, expressed her concerns at the meeting, addressing the other piece of the guidance. Dr. Dixon said that the BMA should not support medical interventions for gender dysphoric children because they were "far from evidence-based. Nor should the BMA be supporting legal changes that conflict with women’s sex-based rights."
"If the BMA is saying that trans women should be treated as women on the basis of self-ID, it impinges on provisions to ensure that women can access healthcare safely and with dignity."
Dr. Dixon said that puberty blockers and hormone treatment could cause irreversible changes to children's bodies, including infertility and cognitive issues. Some people who transitioned later regretted it, she added. "Trans people deserve safe and effective healthcare, and this is what the BMA should be calling for."
"The BMA is a union of doctors and we should all know sex is binary and immutable in humans. Taking medical and surgical steps to alter one's sex characteristics is a serious undertaking that requires considerable reflection and support, and should not be undertaken by children," she said.
As a British woman who relies on the NHS, I do not consent to males performing intimate procedures. I object strongly to my mother, my daughter, my female friends—to any British woman or girl—being denied single-sex medical care, and female healthcare providers where the need is obvious. I do not consent because there are males who self-identify as women who derive sexual gratification, or as trans activist call it "validation," from performing intimate medical procedures on women and girls who may be too intimidated to object. We are not therapeutic aids for troubled men, neither are we are sex aids for perverted men who bring their sexual wishlist to completely inappropriate situations.
Women are humans with sex-based rights, hard-won protections which enable us to go out in public with a degree of mitigation of our biological vulnerability, as the less muscular, less violent, impregnable sex which suffers from staggering rates of male sexual violence, rape, and resultant PTSD. Why would any respectable organization lobby to reverse those gains for women, placing us at elevated, avoidable risk of harm? Why would it ignore the signals from other public institutions which are now distancing themselves from pediatric transitioning as a harmful experiment on children? It can only be the result of cognitive capture: trans activists attaining positions of influence, capturing respectable fronts by making the social penalties of dissent too high for many to pay.
It's fine NOT to place transwomen in Male accomodation but obscene to place them in female only acc when 1 in 5 women have experienced Rape & sexual violence & when Female Specific Rape Trauma with respect to the functionality of definitively male genitalia is a MEDICAL condition pic.twitter.com/ozbZW3CvlS
— Clare B #JKR Dimyon MBE (@BDimyon)
A man who claims he needs to be treated like a woman should be free to live that lifestyle—abetted by clinicians willing to overlook the lack of evidence that medical transitioning improves mental health. I am unsure why taxpayers should fund non-curative procedures with no evidence of effectiveness—on the proviso that he is never entitled to use women as living props or aids to sustain his delusion about changing sex.
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To treat women in this way is deeply dehumanizing, and misogynist. If we tend to be kind, kindness should not be extorted from us; if we tend to be caring, care should not be coerced from us. If he insists on this access, despite objections, he is a danger to women, and it is shocking that this agenda has captured hitherto respectable organizations.
What the BMA is now lobbying for is anything but respectable. It is downright perverse, as perverse as Stonewall campaigning for men to play rugby against women.
The risks to female patients when male doctors 'transition' are obvious. Take, for example, Dr. Kamilla Kamaruddin, a general practitioner in East London. Kamaruddin is male, claims to have undergone "transition," and is now listed as a female doctor on the practice website. The practice seems to be aware of the implications for intimate care of female patients of his highly public form of sexual expression.
"When I informed the practice to say that I wanted to transition, they gave me applause. They only asked one thing: what shall we tell the patients? I was worried about the reception, so I took the decision to tell them myself… Patients who knew me from before were very happy for me. I didn't receive any hostility. We live in a multi-ethnic society; a lot of our female patients wear long, very modest clothes. After I transitioned they allowed me to examine them. For me that was such a big acceptance. For new patients, either they didn't know or they didn't care."
For Dr. Kamaruddin, being permitted to perform intimate examinations of female Muslim patients serves as validation of his new sexual identity. Gender euphoria is the feeling—however deluded—of being accepted as a woman among women. The personal and religious boundaries of the female patient are nowhere in view, patients being mere props in the doctor's drama of transition. Their interests—and scope for informed consent—are out of the frame.
One can only speculate as to whether a patient making a complaint about requesting a female doctor only to be greeted by Dr. Kamaruddin would receive an apology like the woman who, in 2017, found her smear test nurse had stubble. She might instead be treated with the same degree of contempt as the female rape survivor who in 2019 requested a female medic for her mammogram, only to find her request had been used in NHS training materials about how to manage "transphobic" patients.
The elevation of gender identity over sex has other consequences for medical care. You would hope that the COVID pandemic—which disproportionately effects men—would have helped the medical profession to re-orientate itself towards evidence-based medicine, and the importance of gathering sex-disaggregated data. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be in the opposite direction, towards increased incidences of iatrogenic harm. There are already documented cases of clinical errors caused by the conflation of sex with gender identity, and medics losing sight of the very obvious, very basic need for sex-specific treatment.
For example, a trans-identified female, who insisted upon being treated by society as though she was a man, was not given a vital kidney transplant because the medics referred the male reference range when evaluating her kidney function. Had they correctly used the female reference range, the patient would have qualified for the potentially life-saving operation. Recording gender identity instead of sex, and using preferred pronouns, is potentially fatal in a medical setting.
If "trans awareness" is needed in the medical industry, surely it is this: that ignoring sex means causing iatrogenic harm, opening patients to avoidable risk, and healthcare providers to litigation. Also, that there is no evidence that so-called sex change or gender affirmation surgery works to cure the mental health problems they are proposed for in adults, let alone children, who they turn into lifelong medical patients with cognitive, bone, heart and endocrine problems.
If, by "trans awareness," the BMA meant simply that transgenderism sometimes encompasses body dysmorphia, with a wide variety of co-morbid mental health issues, including sexual fetishes or paraphilias in men, that would simply mean returning to the state of medical knowledge five years ago.
However, this is not what the BMA means at all. Transgender ideology, pushed by the trans lobby (see the Tawani Foundation, the Arcus Foundation and others), has captured the organization which has now become another tool to extend the reach of sex-denialism and pathological body-rejection, into one of the spaces where sex is always significant: medical care.
Here in the UK, people with mental health issues who identify with the sex stereotypes associated with the opposite sex can access a suite of healthcare procedures from the National Health Service, at cost to the taxpayer, in addition to private providers. These procedures include vaginoplasty (slicing open the penis and inverting it inside the abdominal cavity), phalloplasty (stripping flesh from the forearm or thigh to make a roll of flesh), elective hysterectomy and oophorectomy (removal of womb and ovaries), penectomy and orchiectomy (removal of penis and testicles). National health provision extends to laser hair removal for males who want to look more feminine, and even voice-coaching lessons so they can speak in a higher register.
Trans activists claim that, despite all this free provision, waiting list times are too long, conveniently ignoring that waiting list times are also long for people with physical diseases who need operations to save or extend their lives. Trans activists claim that they should jump to the front of the queue, even though rates of regret at gender surgery are high, and the lack of evidence that the procedures alleviate the trans-identified person's distress about their body, and their place in society. Trans activists deny that some men seek sex change operations because of a sexual fetish, and attempt to silence anyone who remembers this uncomfortable fact.
Of course, trans activists also seek to normalize these experimental, non-curative procedures, which were developed by early twentieth century sexologists with prurient interests, such as John Money, for little children, with disastrous consequences. Given that trans activists claim "trans healthcare" is synonymous with procedures which we could call "experimental" had they not been failing to cure people for nearly a century, we should be skeptical about the phrase. Transgenderism and science are like oil and water. They don't mix, but reality and sanity get emulsified by the dissolving agent of trans ideology.
Trans people believe they can change sex. Nonbinary people believe they are above sex altogether. Why would an evidence-based medical industry pander to such unscientific delusions? Does it pander to the pathological delusions of anorexic girls by shortening the waiting list for liposuction? So why pander to the pathological delusions of sex-denialists?
This writer can only hope that some at the BMA are asking themselves the same questions, before they launch into lobbying against the Enlightenment values upon which their profession was founded.