Darlington nurses have declared it is now "illegal not to make a change" following the Supreme Court's landmark ruling that defined women by biological sex, yet they continue to wait for a response from their NHS Trust.Despite the unanimous court decision and warnings from the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the NHS must update its guidance on single-sex spaces, the nurses report they are still being forced to use an inadequate changing room.READ THE FULL STORY HERE
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00:00Thank you very much. Tremendous to see you. I'm joined by Lisa Lockie and Bethany Hutchinson.
00:04Thank you so much for joining us. OK, so where are we actually up to with changing room gates then?
00:11What's that? What's the state of play there? We've not heard anything at all from the Trust.
00:16They haven't bothered or had the decency to confront us at all.
00:19So we await hearing from them and discussing it with them.
00:24But this must have presumably given you a bit of hope now. And Lisa, what do you think about this?
00:29Surely this is the wake up call for your NHS managers.
00:34Oh, I certainly hope so. You know, we've we've sort of been putting up with silence from the Trust for about the last year.
00:44They've now got much clearer guidance that they can that they can create a new policy with.
00:53We just hope that that's what they're going to do.
00:55But again, just waiting, still using our little changing room.
01:04It's absolutely ridiculous. We played a couple of pictures of it before.
01:06I don't know if we might be able to bring them back up. But I mean, you know, Bethany, just explain what you've had to go through, really.
01:13Because as I understand it, again, it is it is one bloke who is identified as a woman, has a girlfriend and the other relevant bits that make you a man, I suppose.
01:25And because of that, you've been you've been forced into a side room.
01:28Yes, we were forced into a side room and it's been extremely uncomfortable.
01:33It's been awful for us, really, really stressful.
01:36And I think a lot of us have felt like we've been gaslighted by the trust.
01:40We feel like we can't actually trust senior members of the team, that they don't actually have our back and that they'd rather put the rights of one male over the rights of women and the concerns of of women.
01:53And genuine concerns of women who have some have been abused by men in the past and have had trauma and they'd rather allow for a male to be in the female changing room,
02:06causing this disruption and this uncomfortable situation and remove the the biological women who have concerns and put us in a tiny cupboard with no hardly any lockers.
02:18And which opens onto a very, very busy corridor where people can look in and see you get changed.
02:24Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely shocking to think that as well.
02:27I mean, the added icing on top of that particularly awful tasting cake is, you know, after a long day of saving lives, you're then thrust into a side room.
02:36But presumably the NHS trust and other public services have been guilty of this as well.
02:41Dare I say there's probably a lot of private companies out there as well who have felt absolutely terrified that they didn't want to.
02:48And misgender someone or be seen in any way, shape or form to be transphobic.
02:52But that that should all have changed yesterday. Now, there's been clear guidance.
02:56There was a really clear verdict, a unanimous verdict that hopefully restores a bit of common sense to proceedings.
03:04So, you know, this is something that needs to be serious action taken on it and taken quite quickly, really,
03:10because I don't see what possible justification they could have for not doing it now.
03:14Well, you would think it would be illegal for them not to, you know, the it's the guidelines are clear now.
03:24You know, surely if they if they don't make a change, then they're going against the law.
03:31So we were just hopeful that they are going to that something's going to happen.
03:38But in our experience with the trust so far, it's been very slow moving.
03:45And I mean, we've had our court date now put back to October, whether that's even going to need to happen.
03:51And now we don't actually really know what's going to happen, because hopefully this new this new ruling might actually prevent us needing to even go to court.
04:02You thought so. You would have thought so. And it should do.
04:05And by the way, that absolute lunacy of all of this is that it should not take a panel of Supreme Court judges to be able to tell to say what a woman is.
04:14But, you know, here we are now, at least if the right thing is done in the end.
04:19Look, you know, full square on your side here. I hope that sanity does prevail.
04:24I'm tremendously sorry that you've ever had to be in this position and that you've had to have the discomfort and the inconvenience and all of that stuff and the gaslighting.
04:32You know, I really do hope as well that they don't try and gaslight you further and say, oh, well, we were always on your side recently.
04:39You know, if there's any way of really going after them and getting any kind of compensation that you deserve, then please do go full throttle for it, because the vast majority of the country are very much on your side.