U.Ok. Tribunal: Hospital Should Preserve Males Out of Ladies’s Locker Rooms

A U.K. tribunal ruled last week that a National Health Service (NHS) policy forcing female nurses to share a changing room with a “transgender” nurse is illegal.

The Newcastle Employment Tribunal wrote last Wednesday that, by promulgating said policy, the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust

engaged in unwanted conduct related to sex and gender reassignment which had the effect of violating the dignity of the Claimants and creating for the Claimants a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment.

In addition, by refusing to address nurses’ concerns about the policy, the trust created “a hostile and intimidating environment,” declared Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney.

Nervous Nurses

In 2023, several nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital began voicing concerns over the fact that hospital policy required them to share a changing room with a man. JP reported:

The nurses, who must change clothes both before and after their shifts, say that a male colleague who claims to be transgender but still has his male genitalia hangs around the women’s changing room, ogling them as they undress. The changing room is an open area with no cubicles that “clicks shut and has a lock system that makes it slow to get in and out of,” wrote the CLC [Christian Legal Centre].

The Daily Mail reported that the man, who goes by the name of “Rose,” “told fellow workers at Darlington Memorial Hospital [he] had stopped taking cross-sex hormones because [he was] trying to get [his] girlfriend pregnant.” Yet under NHS policy, which allows employees to use single-sex facilities corresponding to the gender with which they identify, the man called “Rose” has become a thorn in the side of his female colleagues.

“You scan the changing room before you start to undress,” nurse Tracey Hooper told the Mail. “It’s just very uncomfortable. I don’t want to get changed in front of a biological man, and I don’t want to see him getting changed either.”

Another nurse, who was sexually abused as a child, said she was accosted by a partially clad “Rose” while searching for her locker-room keys. The man repeatedly demanded to know whether she was “getting changed yet,” she claimed.

“I felt glued to my seat, I could not move. My hands started to sweat. I was petrified and felt sick and began hyperventilating,” she told the paper.

Rose Guardin’

Getting nowhere with hospital management, the nurses sent a letter to the Trust in which they repeated their concerns and suggested that “Rose” be afforded another place to change, whether in the men’s changing room or in a separate location.

According to JP:

Although the director did not directly reply to their letter, the hospital’s human-resources head held an “impromptu meeting” to discuss the matter, penned the CLC. At the meeting, the nurses were allegedly told that “the hospital supports [the transgender colleague] ‘150%’ and that they “need to be educated,” “broaden their mindset,” “be more inclusive,” and “compromise.”

One senior hospital staff member was allegedly so clueless that he or she felt the need to ask the nurses why they didn’t “feel safe” changing around “Rose.”

In May 2024, the nurses filed their claim with the employment tribunal.

Two months later, reported Christian Concern, they were “informed by management that their ward manager’s office was being cleared out and would become a ‘temporary’ locker room for anyone uncomfortable getting undressed in front of a man.” Unknown to the nurses, the space continued to be used as a locker room even after the hospital learned that it was “not fire safety compliant” for such a purpose, noted Sweeney.

Thacker’s Crackers

Legal proceedings commenced last January; closing arguments took place in November.

During this time, the Trust was warned that its policy was illegal. On March 27, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) sent a letter to the Trust saying it expected the Trust to “provide single sex changing rooms without delay,” such facilities having been mandated by 1992 regulations. The RCN added that the temporary locker room was “the obvious choice for a gender neutral changing space.”

A week later, the Trust’s director of workforce, Andrew Thacker, republished the policy without change. That policy, by the way, explicitly stated that complaints about transgender employees in changing rooms would “not be tolerated.”

On April 16, the U.K.’s Supreme Court ruled that the words “man” and “woman” in U.K. law mean what everyone understood them to mean until a decade ago, when the transgender madness swept the world. Most government agencies immediately began revising their policies to comply with the decision.

But not the Darlington Trust. So committed was it to its transgender lunacy that it had “not considered” the “risk, health, safety, or wellbeing” of the nurses even when fire-safety violations were brought to its attention, Thacker testified in October.

Almost a year after proceedings began, the employment tribunal issued its decision, which was based in part on both the regulations cited by the RCN and the Supreme Court decision.

In a press release, Darlington nurse Bethany Hutchison said:

This is a victory for common sense and for every woman who simply wants to feel safe at work. Women deserve access to single-sex spaces without fear or intimidation. Forcing us to undress in front of a man was not only degrading but dangerous. Today’s ruling sends a clear message: the NHS cannot ignore women’s rights in the name of ideology.