On June 24, we reported the story of a group of nurses from the U.K’s National Health Service filing a lawsuit against the NHS hospital trust over its policy of permitting trans-identifying males to use the female-only facilities. Many of the nurses upset with the policy declined to be publicly identified for fear of backlash, but several spoke out in an interview with the Daily Mail after speaking anonymously in May. Now, a group of them are going public to detail their experiences.
“I think to go public was just to try and gain some attention really from the government to try and look at the polices around this because there’s nothing in place at the minute to protect women,” Lisa Lockey, a nurse at Darlington Memorial Hospital, told Fox News Digital. “It’s literally a self-made situation where any person can just [identify] as a woman and just go in. It’s been ongoing for a long time. We’ve been ignored, and it’s kind of been – swept aside, I think, in the hope that we were going to just forget about it and shut up.”
Unfortunately for proponents of the “self-identification” transgender policy, the nurses have decided that they will not be shutting up – and their lawsuit against both County Durham and the Darlington Memorial Hospital trust details specific and shocking allegations. Over months, they allege, female nurses have been consistently harassed by a trans-identifying male who would walk into their changerooms and stare at them in various states of undress, sometimes attempting to initiate conversations while they were changing.
One of those conversations involved the man – who sports a beard – telling the women that he was trying to get his girlfriend pregnant. Because he identifies as a woman, however, the LGBT movement – and the hospital administration – consider him to be a lesbian. His assertion of femininity was enough for him to walk into the female changerooms and strip down whenever he chose. In one instance, Lockey said, a Muslim colleague was stunned when the man walked into the changeroom while she was partially undressed.
“She knew nothing about this situation going on,” Lockey recounted. “Nobody told any of us… so she stood there in a bra and she hears this man’s voice, and she said she couldn’t move. She was actually just frozen in panic, holding her hands across her chest and didn’t know what to do. She was just so horrified. And I felt really, really upset about that because, you know, these girls, you know, they’ve come across to help, you know, to work [here] and I just thought that was really, really wrong.”
In another chilling case, Fox News reported that one of the nurses involved in the lawsuit, who had experienced sexual abuse as a child, reported being “approached by the transgender colleague while alone in the dressing room and was repeatedly asked to undress while the colleague was only wearing boxer shorts with genitalia visible.”
The nurses only decided to go public and launch a lawsuit after multiple attempts to get hospital management to rectify the situation were rebuffed with insults and condescension. They first sent a letter to hospital management in April 2023 explaining their discomfort, but instead of having their concerns addressed, “the head of HR lectured a manager that the female nurses needed to be more ‘inclusive’ and to get ‘educated’ on the issue.”
This, according to nurse Bethany Hamilton, was “absolutely insulting,” especially as some nurses were trying to find other places to change in privacy during their shifts. “I think people are so terrified. I mean, a lot of the Muslim colleagues work in theaters [operating rooms], and people have expressed that they’ve been silenced,” Hamilton told Fox News. “People have been brought in for disciplinaries, if they’ve mentioned anything about the changing room situation. So they are threatened. And it’s really governed by fear in theaters particularly.”
Fortunately, the eight nurses have been overwhelmed by support since the lawsuit became public, with high profile activists such as author J.K. Rowling sharing the story and stacks of cards and letters arriving to express solidarity. In response to the publicity, the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust sent out a bland, Orwellian press release:
As a Trust, we are committed to providing safe and compassionate, inclusive and respectful care for our patients and visitors as well as an inclusive and respectful work environment for all colleagues. We would like to assure our patients and communities that the well-being and support of all colleagues involved in this, is of the utmost importance to us. At this stage the claims being made need to be fully investigated and reviewed. This work continues through our internal processes. Alternative arrangements and adjustments have been put in place.
We recognize that this is a hugely sensitive issue and as well as taking into consideration the feedback and concerns raised, we need to adhere to legal requirements and best practices. We are committed to working together with all parties to find a constructive solution that respects the rights and dignity of all individuals while maintaining the highest standards of professionalism and fairness. As this is now an active legal case, we hope you can understand that it is not appropriate for the Trust to share further detail at this stage.
The nurses, however, have stated clearly that the intent of their lawsuit is to effect a change in hospital policy – something they asked for last year, and were rudely rebuffed with suggestions that they needed re-education. The hospital administration attempted to use bully tactics and “disciplinaries” to silence dissent from women being forced to change in front of a man for a long time – but now those women will get their day in court, and are telling their story far and wide.
The support they are already receiving is once again an indication that the transgender movement’s agenda is profoundly unpopular once it faces the scrutiny of public opinion – and it may be the hospital’s LGBT enforcers who receive re-education once the case reaches its conclusion.
