Townhall has covered how women have been forced to share their spaces with biological males who identify as “trans women.” One example of this is the women who swam on the same team as Will “Lia” Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania. Paula Scanlan, one of Thomas’ teammates, said in a recent interview that the women on the swim team were told “do not talk to the media, you will regret it.”
This week, reports broke that a woman named Teresa Steele had a surgery canceled last year after complaining about being seen by a nurse who identifies as “transgender.” The delay, she claimed, could have killed her.
According to reports, Steele was scheduled to have an operation last year on Oct. 10 at The Princess Grace Hospital in the United Kingdom. The center is owned by private healthcare provider HCA and specializes in women’s health. At the hospital on Oct. 6, Steele requested that only biological women be involved in her post-operative care “after a transgender nurse entered her pre-op examination room uninvited,” according to the Daily Mail.
Reportedly, the hospital accused Steele of discrimination after she made the request. The surgery was canceled. And, after delays to her operation, Steele reportedly developed an abscess. She had to undergo surgery in February (via Daily Mail):
She told the Daily Telegraph: ‘I was very traumatised and on the point of collapse following the cancellation. An abscess that had not been visible on scans only a short time earlier had suddenly appeared.
‘They endangered my life by cancelling that operation.’ Ms Steele had required single-sex lavatories and said she would not discuss pronouns in her admission forms for her operation on October 10 last year. She believes she was ‘targeted’ over her gender-critical views when a trans nurse ‘wearing a blonde wig and bright scarlet lipstick’ and not involved in her care entered her private examination room.
After her complaint, emails between hospital staff said they ‘perceive the patient’s … rationale as a discrimination on gender and sex against… hospital employees’. The following evening, she was told the operation was being cancelled because they did not share her beliefs and were not ‘able to adhere to your requests’.
After mass protests, she was offered surgery on October 31 at HCA’s Wellington Hospital. But surgeons found she had an abscess and abandoned the procedure. It was finally done in February but has taken months to recover from and left deep scarring. Ms Steele is calling on HCA to ensure patients are given protections based on their sex-based rights.
GB News noted that Steele said: “It is not a personal issue for me,” adding that "Since my experience with HCA, I have been contacted by many women patients who are now too afraid to speak out.”
“It is particularly distressing to hear from disabled women, including a young woman who is paralysed and has been forced by a private agency to accept intimate care from men under threat of her care being withdrawn,” Steele continued.
A spokesperson for the hospital reportedly said “‘the privacy and dignity of our patients is incredibly important” and that Steele had been invited to contribute to a policy review.