An NHS hospital is being sued after it hauled a popular nurse over the coals for calling a six-foot transgender paedophile “Mr” – despite him lunging at her and calling her a “n*****”. The Mail has the story.
Like all good nurses, Jennifer Melle projects a mixture of benevolence and calm authority. Patients greet her warmly as she glides around St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, dispensing smiles and soothing words. For as long as she can remember, nursing was her chosen profession. As a schoolgirl newly arrived from Uganda, she was told by her father that Britain was a place where she could fulfil her dreams.
Taking nothing for granted, she worked hard, gratefully seizing every opportunity. Now aged 40 and a mother of three, she is universally liked and respected.
Not once in her 12-year career has she received a complaint.
That, at least, was the case until one day last year when a burly 6ft-plus convicted paedophile, shackled to two prison escorts, shuffled into Ms Melle’s ward and loudly complained about a urinary problem.
Legal reasons prevent Patient X’s identification, though why this person, who was jailed for grooming young boys, is afforded such protection will doubtless confound many. Not least because that night, in a fit of rage, Patient X screamed racist abuse at Ms Melle – calling her the N-word three times.
She says: “It was terrifying. I’d never been called that word before. And I thought I was going to be attacked.” At one point Patient X lunged towards her, straining against chains.
“The whole thing – the terrible racial abuse, the aggression, which all happened in front of patients and staff – left me traumatised. And I was only trying to help.”
It is what happened next, though, that truly beggars belief. One might imagine that on hearing that one of its black employees was on the receiving end of possibly the most insulting and inflammatory slur in the English language, the diversity-obsessed NHS would back her to the hilt. Instead, her bosses decided she was in the wrong.
In the eyes of Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust, the greater sin was that Ms Melle had referred to Patient X – who was born male but now identifies as a woman – as “mister” and “he” during a phone call with a doctor [about the removal of a catheter]. It was this which prompted Patient X’s aggressive outburst.
Afterwards, Ms Melle was investigated and disciplined and, having been labelled a potential risk to the public, now fears losing her job. She wonders what happened to the “England of fair play” of which her father once spoke.
After being given a final warning by the trust, she received a letter from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) last month saying it was investigating concerns about her fitness to practise because she “referred to a patient in a manner inconsistent with their gender identity”.
Yet it is one of the ironies of this case that Patient X had exploited gender identity by posing as a teenage girl online to incite under age boys to perform sex acts.
Ms Melle says: “I was put at risk, but I am being treated like a criminal. Sadly, if you put your head above the parapet and speak truthfully on these issues in the NHS, the risk is that you will be knocked down, punished severely and demoted. The message to me during the investigation was that I should put up with extreme racism and deny biological reality and my deeply held Christian beliefs for the sake of inclusivity.”
Culture wars’ excesses abound and to some extent we have grown inured to them. But Ms Melle’s experience, say campaigners, is “on a whole new disturbing level”. Last night there were demands for urgent government intervention.
In an unprecedented legal action, meanwhile, Ms Melle is suing the hospital trust for harassment, discrimination and human rights breaches. It is, of course, a case in which the NHS once again risks being accused of sacrificing common sense on the altar of gender ideology, and follows that of eight nurses from Darlington who took their trust to court after being forced to share a changing room with a biological man who identifies as a woman.
There is also the ongoing case of the nurse suspended after complaining about a trans medic using her female changing room. Sandie Peggie was put under a disciplinary investigation for a year by bosses at Victoria Hospital, in Kirkcaldy, Fife, after she objected to sharing the facility with Dr Beth Upton.
Worth reading in full.
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