INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2024

I’m a bit late posting this but as ever there’s a good excuse, apt for today. It involved a full day appointment, in Glasgow, for a fitting for a new leg where my prosthetist was a woman, as were the receptionist, physiotherapist and the cleaner. 

In the waiting room beside me were other mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. United as limbless but otherwise from the most diverse of backgrounds and experiences. Each of us though recognises the vulnerabilities and fears of the others and understands the sisterhood that comes when paralysed or marooned by disability accompanied by fear. It’s a different experience for a female amputee than it is for a male, for reasons too numerous to detail.

My clinic has treatment rooms divided according to sex because donning and removing false limbs require privacy and dignity. I haven’t yet met a woman in there who stares at other women in states of undress but we’re all there to blether with each other about the lives we used to have and the lives we now live. The introduction into that haven of a male posing as a female would render that gentle supportive alliance asunder.

Worse still have been the experiences of women seeking help from rape crisis services learning they can’t be guaranteed single sex spaces and services free from men; parents of disabled daughters living in fear at the outcomes for their daughters once they are gone; abused and traumatised women in our jails, for punishment and rehabilitation, accommodated beside men expressing female feelings or joining them for a day’s practice on how to woman.

There’s much battling still to be done in Scotland if women are to have equality. Use of the word ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘sex’ sets us back by decades when there is promotion of self-ID by stealth, including by newspapers who claim to feature women only but include a man self identifying as female. 

So tonight I take my hat off to the famous women we follow and applaud for their efforts challenging warped ideology and politicians naive, deluded or corrupt, but most of all I say a huge thank you to my Mum, my aunties, cousins, sisters and friends who held me up when life was hard, washed my ill body, fed me, cleaned up after me, built my legs and kept me alive and upright, able to shout, challenge and demand for Scotland’s women and girls. You know who you are. Thank you. Happy IWD. #WomenWontWheesht.