ANOTHER GIANT LEAP FORWARD FOR THE SISTERS

Former male nurse wins sex discrimination case (John Carvel, The Guardian, June 10th, 2006)

A former student male nurse yesterday won a landmark sex discrimination case against NHS hospitals that refused to let him perform intimate medical procedures on women patients unless he was accompanied by a female chaperone.

The Equal Opportunities Commission said the ruling challenged assumptions that all men are sexual predators. It would help to open up nursing for men, who make up only 10% of the workforce.

The case was brought at the employment appeals tribunal in London by Andrew Moyhing, 29, who said he abandoned nursing because he was not allowed to do the job properly in a female-dominated profession.

During training last year at NHS hospitals and health centres in London he was denied the opportunity to provide cervical smears or electrocardiogram tests that might expose a patient's breasts unless he was chaperoned by a female colleague. He complained that female staff were allowed to provide intimate care to male patients with no chaperone present.[...]

Jenny Watson, who chairs the EOC, said sex discrimination was wrong whether it was directed at women or men. "The tribunal was right to find that it was not acceptable to have a chaperoning policy based on lazy stereotyping about the risks to patients and assumptions that all men are sexual predators," she said.

But the point, of course, is not that all men are sexual predators, although the potential probably lies in most men. The point is that almost no women are. It is truly alarming to see how the ideologues of dogmatic feminism and gender equality have become so divorced from reality that they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the safety of dependent women and children to further an abstract agenda that runs completely contrary to what ordinary folk experience most days of their lives.