The NHS is allowing five subgroups of people with various gender and sexual orientations to meet and discuss personal issues in “safe spaces” during the working day.
A scheme by NHS England’s LGBTQIA+ staff network allows aromantic, demisexual and bi+ staff to talk about their experiences, in addition to the main network’s meetings.
The five groups involved in the scheme include asexual and aromantic, bi+, non-binary, rainbow family, and trans.
It's like allowing religious groups to have their own special spaces and times off for prayer meetings and the like. Then again I suppose these are, if not exactly religious groups, certainly cult groups.
Safe spaces for women, though? Ha!
Describing the meetings as safe spaces is understood to have irked some NHS staff who are battling for women to have the right to single-sex spaces including toilets, showers, and hospital wards.
One source told The Telegraph: “Safe spaces are really important but not if you are a woman who wants to use toilets or changing rooms without men who identify as female there with you.”…
Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at human-rights charity Sex Matters, said: “By running these events, NHS England is perpetuating the myth that people with a so-called ‘gender identity’ are automatically at elevated risk of harm. Employees with special gender identities should of course be treated fairly – that is, the same way as everyone else.
“It’s extraordinary to see this being pushed in the name of ‘inclusion’ at the same time as a group of nurses in Darlington are being treated as bigots and excluded from their own changing rooms because they don’t want to share with male staff who identify as women.
“NHS England should provide genuine ‘safer spaces’ for female NHS staff and drop the performative gender identity nonsense.”
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