I wrote about Canadian nurse Amy Hamm’s three-years-and-counting disciplinary process for UnHerd:
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warned that “professional misconduct must not be permitted to be redefined to include speaking unpopular truths” — in this case, unpopular truths that bear directly on Hamm’s medical training and responsibilities as a nurse and nurse educator. Hamm knows that sex is observed, not “assigned”, at birth. Her case highlights the contradictory expectations professionals in her position face: to pretend to go along with a strange new set of beliefs about sex and gender without forgetting her nursing training, in which sex is not a postmodern riddle but rather a constantly relevant factor in medical evaluation and treatment.
The disciplinary process is so drawn out and absurd that it could almost serve as a theatre piece for our times — from the actors (Hamm’s lawyers are up against a self-described “old white cisgender queer lawyer with disabilities” who spells her name without any capital letters) to the dialogue to the reviews. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage has been predictably partisan, as indicated by the headline of a recent piece about her case: “Nurse tells B.C. hearing she’s not transphobic, but calls gender identity ‘metaphysical nonsense.’” The CBC is eager to reprint Hamm’s occasionally insensitive tweets but reluctant to give airtime to the substance of her case.
When philosopher Kathleen Stock and athletic coach Linda Blade testified as expert witnesses on Hamm’s behalf, opposing counsel declined to ask either woman a single question, perhaps fearing any elaboration on the common-sense views they share with Hamm. “We’ve had language for boys and girls, men and women, since the beginning of time,” Stock testified on Tuesday. “Biology hasn’t gone away” — something a nurse should know better than anyone — “but all of us have lost the ability to freely refer to facts about ourselves, important facts, for instance that we are a sexually dimorphic species.”
This sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone. I have a Big mouth and a friend who appreciated my Big mouth wrote to me 30 years ago and asked me to please never shut up. Thank you for having some Big writing in all this insanity. Please keep it up and vaporize this rot.
"The number of people currently claiming to have a gender identity is less than the number who were claiming aliens were probing their bumholes 20 years ago. Just because a phenomenon has been studied doesn't mean it exists outside a belief in it" @ Shatterface (Twitter) 3:02 PM May 9, 2021
https://cutdowntree.substack.com/p/gender-identity-isnt-real