Juno News - December 05, 2019


UK hospital punishes women who refuse to share room with transgender patients


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

165.60681

Word count

816

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Andrew Lutton talks about a new policy in the United Kingdom that would force trans women to share a single-sex ward with a biological male who identifies as a woman. He also discusses a similar policy in Canada and why feminists are on the wrong end of the battle.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If a biological woman doesn't want to share a hospital ward with a biological man identifying 0.66
00:00:10.580 as a woman, the biological woman is the one in the wrong according to a British policy passed 0.98
00:00:17.620 by the National Health Service, the government's health care system. This comes from a report in
00:00:23.160 the Daily Mail specifically detailing a gender reassignment policy passed by the NHS Greater
00:00:29.380 Glasgow and Clyde, the NHS GGC. In the policy, which has been accused by women's group of failing to
00:00:36.680 uphold the sanctity of single-sex wards, hospital wards for just women and just men, the government
00:00:43.900 basically says that if you are the one who's making the complaint, you're the one that has to
00:00:49.800 be moved. This is what the report says. Medical staff will be expected to deal with those who object
00:00:56.520 to trans patients on single-sex wards as if the complainant is a racist or homophobe, the guidance
00:01:03.720 states. Rather than relocate the trans patient such as to a single room, it will be the person who makes 1.00
00:01:10.280 the complaint who will be moved according to the policy. Now this policy was swiftly condemned by
00:01:16.440 Susan Sinclair, who's a feminist advocate in the United Kingdom, who says that women cannot be 1.00
00:01:22.060 expected to feel safe if their right to women's only spaces are not protected. The government's
00:01:28.620 response to this is that all women who say they're women are women, that a biological woman is no 0.99
00:01:34.180 different than a trans woman, is no different than all of the other types of gender-affirming
00:01:39.620 identities that we are to embrace. And there was actually a statement from the NHS saying as much,
00:01:46.760 actually putting cis women on the same plane as trans women in the context of receiving healthcare
00:01:53.000 services. The Daily Mail quotes the health board spokesperson as saying, when a patient with the
00:01:58.960 protected characteristic of gender reassignment uses our services, we will challenge anyone who has 0.99
00:02:05.520 a them and us position in our facilities. We ask that all patients, staff and visitors adopt an
00:02:12.020 understanding that we are all part of the same diverse gender spectrum. The official rationale
00:02:18.960 for this policy from the British Health Service is that gender and sex are not binary. There's no such
00:02:25.920 thing as male or female. Everyone, no matter how you identify, no matter who you are, falls somewhere
00:02:31.260 along a spectrum. And anyone else who disagrees is just a racist, homophobic, transphobic, whatever,
00:02:37.940 a phobic bigot. Now this is not to say that people who identify as trans are not deserving of healthcare.
00:02:44.660 It's to understand that you cannot force people to re-evaluate their comfort levels based on things
00:02:51.600 that as a society we have not yet found cogent and coherent answers to. And if you think this is just
00:02:57.860 some faraway problem in the United Kingdom, you are sorely mistaken. There was a case a little over a
00:03:03.240 year ago in Toronto where a woman in a woman's shelter in Toronto was forced to share a room
00:03:09.960 with a biological male who identified as female. Now this is a woman who herself was a victim of
00:03:16.600 domestic abuse, who was very sensitive to the presence of who she feels were males around her 0.93
00:03:21.960 and who biologically were. She took her concerns to the Human Rights Commission in Ontario and they told
00:03:28.040 her that she was the one who was discriminating because how dare she not want to share a room 0.97
00:03:33.080 with a trans woman at a woman's shelter. This is causing issues for a number of groups,
00:03:38.440 even groups I might add on the left. Earlier this year, Canada's oldest rape crisis center lost its
00:03:45.320 funding. This is in the city of Vancouver because it would not recognize trans people as being the
00:03:51.480 identical gender to those whose biological sex is that gender. And Vancouver Rape Relief says they 0.88
00:03:58.280 were the victim of discrimination against women in the name of inclusion. This is happening and
00:04:04.200 identity politics is causing these different groups that have always been in alignment on the left to
00:04:09.800 start cannibalizing each other. But all of a sudden, women's rights are seen as less significant
00:04:15.720 than trans rights. So there is a hierarchy of rights that's being projected and most importantly,
00:04:22.360 the feminists are finding themselves on the wrong end of the battle they've been fighting unless they 1.00
00:04:27.640 go along and accept that women and men and anyone who thinks they're a woman or a man, regardless of
00:04:33.160 any other factors, is to be taken at their word. This isn't just a UK problem, it's happening in Canada,
00:04:39.240 it's happening in the US, and as a society we need to have a compassionate response, but we can't deny
00:04:45.320 facts at the same time. And more importantly, we can't start pitting groups against each other,
00:04:50.840 which is what these policies are doing. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.