Did you know that there is a new category in medicine?

According to Britain’s National Health Service, there is such a thing as people who “temporarily identify as women.” That means they get to share women’s spaces in hospitals, room with women, and be treated exactly as if they are women.

Biological women don’t get to object lest they be accused of hate crimes.

The NHS is letting anyone who fancies a go at being a woman into female-only wards, spurring urgent calls for the Health Secretary to intervene. https://t.co/PGkjo4ruSM

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) August 12, 2023

How times have changed. It was not so many years ago that feminists pressured the NHS to tighten their rules to create more single-sex spaces for women, given how especially vulnerable hospital patients are due to their infirmity. In 2010 the NHS was pressured to create single-sex wards to ensure privacy for women who wanted it. The rules don’t apply if a man decides even “temporarily” to identify as a woman–and that includes male sex offenders who claim female status.

Many hospitals make it clear that patients need only ‘temporarily’ present as women to enter female-only bays and bathrooms.

One NHS trust’s policy states: ‘People who are not living full-time as a woman have been on women’s wards with no issues at all.’ Some liken anyone who objects to the policy to racists, while others make it clear that if another patient complains, it is they who must move rather than the trans person.

'I thought we'd finished with this nonsense.'

Alex Deane reacts to outrage at NHS rules where patients who temporarily identify as females are allowed access to single-sex wards.

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— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 12, 2023

Alphabet ideology has captured every elite institution, and at the core of its success has been the infinite elasticity of language that derives from critical theory. Words that in normal parlance have a well-understood meaning are summarily redefined, suddenly allowing things that were once forbidden to become mandatory. Words are power, not vessels of shared meaning, and seizing the language allows one to seize the levers of power in society. That is the essential claim of critical theory, and for some reason Western elites have adopted that as truth.

The Mail sent Freedom of Information requests to every NHS hospital trust in England, with 65 responding to confirm they allowed transgender patients to use the facilities of their choice.

They also supplied policies making clear there were no restrictions on who counted as a transgender patient. Anyone presenting as such does not have to show they live in their acquired gender, have taken hormones, had surgery or obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate to legally change sex.

Many include a reference in the national guidance telling trusts to provide flexible treatment to all transgender people ‘whether they live continuously or temporarily in a gender role that does not conform to their natal sex’.

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust says: ‘If the patient is in a female role (or vice versa) in their everyday life then that is how they should be treated on admission.’ It adds: ‘For example people who are not living full-time as a woman have been on women’s wards with no issues at all.’

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust says: ‘Some people prefer to occasionally wear clothing that is not usually worn by the gender with which they identify for reasons of comfort. Clinical decision-making should not be affected by things like the clothes someone wears, their voice or their hairstyle.’

It says that if there is a clash with other patients, ‘the focus should be on the person exhibiting prejudicial behaviours not the person affected by them’.

In other words, some people’s mental “reality”–for which we have no actual evidence at all–trumps the reality of others that is backed up by the obvious physical evidence of biological reality. My “feelings” matter more than obvious facts, and your feelings don’t matter at all. Should you desire not to room with a male sex offender you are a bigot and should be treated worse.

Not just treated worse, either. If a patient or caregiver objects to treating a man who “temporarily” identifies as a woman as if he were, indeed, female, they could be subject to legal sanctions:

The Walton Centre, a specialist neurology unit in Liverpool, admits that ‘patients may have difficulties accepting the service user’s gender identity’, but said this could put the transgender person at risk and ‘may involve reporting unacceptable behaviours as a hate crime to the police’.

This is, of course, insane. It is also where the Left is pushing things everywhere. It is all part of the larger plan to redefine everything in society along the preferred lines of the Left without having to engage in the messy and unpredictable process known as politics.

It could easily be stopped if we simply reassert that language is to refer to shared understandings and not simply open to redefinition according to the whims of the “oppressed.”

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has come out strongly against this perversion of the NHS rules, as he has other alphabet ideology measures such as housing males in women’s prisons. Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon lost her position as First Minister of Scotland recently because she insisted on radical gender ideology measures being implemented in Scotland. The case which broke her grip on power was her insistence that a male rapist be housed in a women’s prison.

Rishi Sunak tells NHS trusts they must protect women's privacy after guidance was revealed which says patients who 'temporarily' identify as women can share female-only hospital wards | Daily Mail Online IMPORTANT https://t.co/cmG0DNKrWJ

— Emma Harriet Nicholson (@Baroness_Nichol) August 15, 2023

The row over gender ideology is becoming a defining issue in politics. The US is still much more in the thrall of alphabet ideology than Europe, which is pulling back from the more extreme demands being placed on society by transgender-identifying people.

The concept of “temporary” womanhood reveals the essential idiocy of the self-identity concept itself. There is a reality, and then there are fantasies (or even false claims). Alphabet ideology stands or falls on the claim that reality exists only within the mind and that any physical evidence is irrelevant. One can be anything, even “temporarily.”

To which I respond: this is insane, and it’s not “temporary insanity” either.