A recent article published in The Hill by three clinicians, Nina Silander, Catherine Novotny and Edward Waldrep (see his previous article for CTA here), highlights their increasing concerns that the VA is abandoning women veterans’ rights for gender ideology. They open up their piece with the following statement:
“VA leadership, perhaps inspired by President Biden’s executive order on “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” recently began enforcing in earnest its directive from 2018, injecting concepts of gender ideology into our clinical work. From here on, the distinction that will matter in patients is their self-identified gender, not their biological sex. We believe this effectively extinguishes the entire class of women, undermining many physical and legal protections for female veterans.”
The authors spell out the implications for women veterans who need dedicted single sex spaces in order to recover from sexual trauma. (In the UK, there have been similar significant problems emerging in Rape Crisis services over the last couple of years – see a CTA post from 2021 – and there is a current legal case underway that challenges gender ideology policies on the grounds of discrimination.)
“Yet female veterans are now required to share vulnerable recovery spaces with men, including speciality clinics, therapy groups and residential recovery programs. These are violations of women’s privacy, and especially of victims’ privacy.”
The rest of this important article, written by three clinicians with a total of over 44 years’ clinical experience, can be accessed here at The Hill.
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