Last month a female patient had her operation cancelled at London's Princess Grace Hospital after she insisted on women-only care:
Teresa, a retired solicitor, chose this specific hospital because it was one of a few hospitals in the UK that use the Da Vinci robot that can handle delicate and complex operations and believed they would offer single-sex care. As a vulnerable victim of sexual assault, Teresa also thought that the Princess Grace hospital would be understanding and sensitive to the trauma that she had suffered.
Before she was admitted to the hospital for her pre-op checks, Teresa had already specified that she required a single-sex bathroom and stated that she would only answer questions on the form about her sex, not her ‘gender identity.
During the pre-op check which involved intimate care, a man in a blonde wig and bright lipstick entered the room, for no apparent reason other than to make eye contact with Teresa, which caused her to panic and obviously made her wonder whether she was being targeted or intimidated as a result of her previous requests.
Feeling frightened and vulnerable, Teresa reported the incident as a ‘patient dignity breach’ and requested that from now on, her care was only provided by female healthcare professionals - a request that is entirely lawful under the Equality Act.
Following the consultation, Teresa had to return home for three days to prepare for the operation, and pre-op medication was supposed to be couriered to her. Nothing arrived, so she called the hospital and was told that the urgent operation had been cancelled with no explanation given as to why.
The CEO then sent Teresa an email saying that the operation which was due the next working day, had been cancelled due to a ‘lack of shared values' and ‘to protect staff from unacceptable distress’.
The life-saving operation would have involved two leading surgeons, their clinical entourage, two surgery suites, a robot, a place in ICU and a patient bed for seven nights, and this was all cancelled at the last minute.
Victoria Smith at The Critic on the trans shaming of a rape survivor:
I am not entirely unsympathetic to the problem faced by the Princess Grace Hospital. It is the same problem faced by any institution or political grouping that has been frogmarched into accepting that a woman is anyone who says they are a woman, always and without exception. The trauma of female victims of sex crimes — who cannot switch off their awareness of who is and is not male — does not fit this narrative.
The visceral, physical response, the unwilled terror at the sound of a male voice or the sight of a male body — all of that contradicts the line that trans women are a special, extra-vulnerable type of female person, as opposed to a just another type of male, with the same physical capabilities and emotional unpredictabilities as any other.
The argument against trans women in sex-segregated spaces is not based on their transness, but their maleness. People pretend that’s not true, however. In keeping with the “do nothing” preferences of the bystander, many people would rather impute bigotry and bad faith to rape victims than deviate from the “trans women are women” thought-terminating cliché in which they have become invested.
This investment may have complex roots; perhaps at the start it seemed a low-cost concession (“why not just call people what they want to be called?”), one which didn’t require actual belief (“of course, no one is actually saying …”). Then various other factors — peer pressure, threats of violence, the risk of ostracism, financial incentives — came into play. In the end, no one remembers why they ever expressed doubt. Doubt is for bigots.
We should not be surprised how tenaciously people hold onto their myths, even when faced with the pain of others. A mother will disbelieve an abused child rather than accept the man she married is a bad person; a congregation will send a girl to a Magdalene laundry rather than admit that the head of their flock might be a rapist. Similarly, even women who call themselves feminists would rather denounce women terrorised into fearing all male people than admit that there is a problem with pretending that maleness is in the eye of the penis-owner.
This is why “reasonable compromises” are impossible in the trans debate as it stands today. Any admission whatsoever that maleness matters — that it is real and politically salient — is heresy. The faithful will sacrifice the vulnerable rather than lose their religion.
The degree of shaming to which survivors of rape and child sexual abuse have been subjected in order to preserve the “trans women are women” line is utterly obscene. Women who ask for female-only spaces are told they must reframe their boundaries; that they are obsessed with genitals; that they are weaponising trauma; that they have the wrong values and the wrong perception of reality. It is vital that they are vilified. Stop to consider their pain and you, too, might start pulling at the thread of the dogma.
Because this is the sad truth of modern trans activism: it is completely incompatible with the recognition of female trauma as anything other than a fetish. Genuine female fear of male people is an affront to “I am whoever I say I am”. It is viewed as an attack, therefore all shame must be projected back onto women themselves. Like Medusa with her snake hair, once again the female victim of male sexual violence is made into a monster.
The operation was eventually re-scheduled, but the damage was done:
The email sent on 7 October was not just an operation cancellation. It was an act of shaming, the same shaming to which victims of sexual trauma have been subjected throughout history for daring to suggest their truths matter more than particular party lines.
This is the context in which we need to understand the Princess Grace story: as not just related to “the trans debate”, but clarifying the way in which said debate not only replicates but amplifies the traditional, millennia-old shaming of female victims of sex crimes....
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