As a cisgender woman with a chronic "women's illness" I have a lot of thoughts about the Tories’ latest announcement banning trans women from women's hospital wards.
I spend a lot of time in hospital, in parts of the hospital that cater for majority female patients. You know what there are heaps of in those parts of the hospital? Men. They're partners, they're porters, they're nurses and doctors. Every surgeon and consultant I have seen for my endometriosis is a man. Given recent reporting from the British Medical Journal that nearly a third of female surgeons have been sexually assaulted by their male coworkers I'm substantially more concerned about my safety in the hands of a male surgeon than I am about another patient somehow getting themselves out of bed, evading the ward staff, locating me, a lone woman, behind the cubicle curtains and then what? Undoing their own hospital gown (despite it fastening up the back) and showing me their genitals which may or may not correspond to the sex on their birth certificate? The scenario is ludicrous. So ludicrous that it has literally never happened. There are zero (none, not one) complaints about trans women in NHS hospitals. Or are we assuming that cis-men are going to pretend to be trans, and then fake an illness so convincingly that they are admitted to hospital with the sole aim of assaulting women while they’re there? Given that 8 in 10 men don’t go to the Dr even when they are actually ill, this seems like the kind of far fetched nonsense even J.K. Rowling wouldn’t come up with.
When I was recently admitted to hospital for gynaecological surgery I had essentially no knowledge of who else was in the ward with me. Nobody could see anybody else because we were all behind our own curtains. Prior to being taken to theatre I was substantially more concerned about my upcoming operation than about the gender identity of my fellow patients. After surgery I was so whacked out of my mind on fentanyl that I couldn't have given fewer shits about who else was in the ward with me if they had been Sauron himself. When I did get to see some other patients upon being discharged, I realised lots of them were men. That's because single gender wards by and large do not exist in NHS hospitals.
I'd like to ask the tories what the goal of this ban is? Can they state an objective? Is it a vague cry of "protecting women"? If so, from what? The only logical reason for banning trans women from sharing hospital wards with cis women, would be if trans women were a threat to cis women's safety. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that they are not, and in fact trans people are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than cisgender people.
It seems very obvious to me that this a transphobic dog whistle, designed to stoke the flames of an existing culture war so the tories can claw back some kudos from their waning supporters. And it will cost them approximately £0 to enact, because, with the exception of maternity wards, there are no single gender wards. And - spoiler alert - trans women probably aren't giving birth any time soon.
An aside here - trans men are, as usual, noticeably absent from this 'debate' about women's health and safety. It's almost as if it was never about transgender people at all and it was always rooted in misogyny? Whaaaaaat?!
If the Tories cared about women's health and safety, here is a non-exhauastive list of suggestions of things they could address:
The average 8 year wait to be diagnosed with endometriosis
The lack of any effective and non-invasive treatments or cures for illnesses like endometriosis or PCOS
The complete lack of research and treatment into long term chronic illnesses like ME and fibromyalgia that affect women at much higher rates than men
The disproportionately high rate of fibroids in Black women
The unequal safety outcomes and higher rates of maternal deaths for women of colour
The lack of functional long term contraceptives for men, leaving their female partners to spend their entire adult lives on hormonal contraception
The refusal to test men's fertility (despite at least 30% of fertility issues in straight couples being due to male infertility) without first subjecting their female partners to years of mentally draining failures to conceive
The rates of sexual assault and harassment faced by female medical staff while at work
The general disbelief of women in medical settings, leading them to be diagnosed with anxiety instead of pain and prescribed antidepressants instead of referred for investigative treatment.
The epidemic of male violence against women and girls in society
But they don't seem to be mentioning any of those things at their conference… I wonder why…
The only outcome of this announcement will be the continuation of the harmful exclusion of trans people from society, risking their physical and mental health. Trans women are not a threat to women’s safety, and never have been. The Tories, on the other hand, are a threat to all of us.
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