British Health Secretary, Wes Streeting has given a fairly clear and comprehensive statement on the “gender issue” to The Sun newspaper:
“I have always and will always respect people’s identities and I have no trouble whatsoever referring to trans women by their names, referring to them as women as shorthand, or using pronouns like she and her.
“I don’t think that’s an issue and I think the vast majority of people in our country would also want to be respectful in that way.
“But by definition they’re not the same as biological women.
“There are important differences and that is particularly important in a health context.
“It should not be beyond the wits of all of us in the country to live in a world where women are protected and respected and their rights upheld, and so are trans people, and that’s the approach the Government’s taking.”
I think this is a fairly balanced an reasonable position, and in Streeting’s case, not a typical Labour frontbench u-turn, as discussed in a previous post. Streeting has mostly held a balanced and sensible view on the issue. When he was a shadow minister, he told LBC Radio, as reported in The Independent:
“Men have penises, women have vaginas, here ends my biology lesson. That doesn’t mean by the way that there aren’t people who transition to other genders because they experience gender dysphoria and we should acknowledge that and conduct the debate in a respectful way that respects those people’s rights and dignity.”
Again, this is a perfectly reasonable position.
It is certainly more ‘reasonable’ than my own, which has hardened more recently because of the antics of the ‘Trantifa’ mobs, attention-seekers, and ‘progressives’ attempting to introduce enforced speech around pronoun usage. I am now more likely to dig in.
Anyway, now according to the Daily Mail, Streeting suggests private spaces might be provided for trans people to be cared for in NHS hospitals, saying that the Supreme Court ruling has caused them ‘palpable anxiety’, but indicating that trans women will be barred from women’s toilets, changing rooms and wards under new policies.
Cost implications aside, I think this is a good idea. A separate space will deter the two most bothersome groups: (1) the ones using access to women’s spaces as a form of validation of their self-proclaimed ‘gender identity’; and (2) the sex perverts pretending to be women to access their spaces.
Those remaining will be a very small group, and I daresay can be treated on a case by case basis. Streeting seems of a similar mind. He told the Mail: “It comes back to the question of scale. We’re talking about a relatively small number of people in our country, a tiny number of people who might be accessing a different range of NHS services at any one time.”
The question remains as to whether “The Blob” who really control the NHS will agree and comply.
