Conservatives for Women
Our public sector is swept along by irrational fashion, or perhaps bullying by LGBT+ diversity champions
Caroline ffiske was a Conservative Councillor for Eight Years. Published on 15 April 2021.
The Conservative Government continues to allow gender ideology to be rolled out across the public sector. The latest example is the Department of Health and Social Care in its important consultation on reforming The Mental Health Act. This is the Act which sets out when someone can be detained in hospital and treated for a mental health disorder, at times against their wishes. (Sometimes called being 'sectioned'.) The Act sets out the process for assessment, treatment, and the protection of people's rights.
If you respond to the consultation,
here is what you come across, directly after providing your age.
Not 'What is your Sex? ' but 'How would you describe your gender?'
Why has sex become irrelevant? Who decided that the consultation should ask the question in this manner? What about the Equality Act and the protected characteristic of sex, in law?
What answers can you give? Options provided are: male (including transgender men); female (including transgender women); prefer not to say; or prefer to self-describe. Examples given for 'self-describe' are: 'non-binary, gender-fluid, agender'. How many people will even know what these terms mean? I just googled 'agender' and got: 'genderless, genderfree, genderblank neutrois'. Got it?
Who decided that 'transgender men' should, for the purposes of this consultation, be counted amongst the men? And 'transgender women' amongst the women? Why wasn't categorisation by biological sex used? What was taken into consideration? How might this format skew the results?
Men are significantly more likely to be sectioned than women. I expect that it is very often women who are involved in the traumatic decision to participate in the sectioning of someone who they love and who they may have come to fear. The consultation specifically refers to harm: 'We also want to change the detention criteria so that an individual is only detained if there is a substantial likelihood of significant harm to the health, safety or welfare of the person, or the safety of any other person'. Mothers might be involved in the tragic decision to section a son; a wife her husband. These are serious, difficult, and tragic decisions involving the state depriving vulnerable individuals of their freedom. There is sometimes violence leading up to or during the act. Yet the government decides to muddle gender ideology into this important consultation - grab another opportunity for promotion.
It also seems likely that women, as a group, will make different judgments to men about the sectioning process. Perhaps women would like lower barriers to state intervention; perhaps they would place a higher value on protection from potential harm or violence. It would be useful to be able to see whether this is so in the results of the consultation. Well that has been judged to be irrelevant by the Department of Health and Social Care. They'd rather know how people feel, 'by gender'. They want to know whether non-binary people have a different opinion to agender people.
Compared to this tragedy, the next question is comic. It indicates the willingness of our public sector to be swept along by irrational fashion, or perhaps bullying by LGBT+ diversity champions. The State would like to know your sexual orientation before you respond to the Mental Health Act consultation. It tells you that if you are bisexual, this means you are 'attracted to more than one sex'. You can also say if you are pansexual or asexual. (To save you googling: 'Pansexuality means being attracted to all people regardless of gender identity or sex'.)
People responding to this consultation may have been involved in serious situations involving state incarceration of disturbed loved ones. And the Department of Health and Social Care, and its 'diversity champions', have the audacity to gatekeep the start of the consultation with this ideological drivel. Use the opportunity to spread the word, irrespective of the harm done. At the end of the consultation, we won't really know, for sure, how women feel differently to men about the tragic and significant process of state sectioning of the mentally ill.
Women's views and voices matter. But they are in danger of being lost. Science, truth, and logic are being undermined. And the validity and precision of social and medical research. But the Conservative Government seems casually indifferent - or captured?
