Cassandra Voices

Tag: amy

  • Nurse Amy Gallagher Takes Woke to Court

    Amy Gallagher, nurse and psychotherapist, has initiated legal proceedings against Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for religious discrimination; racial discrimination; discrimination on the basis of philosophical belief, harassment and victimization.

    While the story has appeared in British newspapers, mainly the right-wing press, it has not been covered in Ireland. I came across it when Gallagher was interviewed on the right-wing podcast The New Culture Forum. Her story was, however, unhelpfully flagged in a partisan manner that might have the effect of alienating people in the centre.

    Amy Gallagher’s troubles came about when she was on a final two-year training course in a Tavistock Trust training centre to complete her psychotherapy credentials. She was struck by the emphasis on so-called Woke ideology in the lectures and seminars, often to the exclusion of psychotherapeutic instruction, involving handouts guiding students towards ideological harmony.

    She found this curious and irritating at first, since these diversions had little to do with the discipline she was there to study. Two lectures in particular caused her to more seriously question what she was hearing. One was based on the assumption that Christianity was a racist religion, while the other was titled “Whiteness-A Problem For Our Time,” which was summarized in the online description thus: “The presentation is rooted in the assumption that the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness.”

    Ideas and Perspectives

    Gallagher had studied Arts and was aware of the ideas being promulgated: a strange amalgam of French intellectualism married with Freudianism and Marxism to form “perspectives” that will be familiar to anyone who has studied English, Sociology or the now compulsory Gender Studies in university.

    During an interview, in response to the interviewer saying, we all know that there is “Inherent racism in all white people,” this stated as a fact, without any backup, Gallagher objected and said she didn’t believe that. The interviewer gave her a look of impatience and said it’s like the way “sexism is inherent in all men”. Gallagher said she didn’t believe that either. Gallagher was immediately seen as “difficult” and a “problem”.

    During a later interview, called to assess her as a “problematic” individual, when she continued to hold her ground, simply asserting her right to disagree with the various tenets of the ideology, she was directly ordered to “stop speaking”.

    As a psychotherapist Gallagher realized that she couldn’t simply take such blanket group judgements as fact. You just couldn’t say that all people in a certain identifiable group are this or that, based entirely on their skin colour or appearance. Her job as a psychotherapist is to treat individuals, who tend to be quite unique, regardless of group identity. To accept the prejudices being pressed on her by management would mean that she would be claiming to know her patients just by looking at them, judging them entirely by appearances and group identity, which, in her view, undermines the core idea of psychotherapy.

    Ideological Crimes

    Gallagher researched the material being promulgated by management and found that the ideas were essentially ideas taken from critical race theory populist Robin DeAngelo, ideas which Gallagher describes as academically irrelevant, backed up by nothing, and little more than racist propaganda.

    She claims that the Tavistock Trust, in seminars, refers only to this material and not to any other relevant academic material. When she queried this approach, she was told she was not up to speed on anti-racism, that she had “problematic views”, the implication being that she was racist for having queried some of the odd assertions quoted above.

    It was assumed by management that in questioning the ideology, she had committed some kind of “crime” against it. Attempts were made to strike her off the nurse’s register. But the nurses and midwifery council defended her, saying simply that nurses are entitled to disagree with ideas.

    She was then accused by a member of management of racial harassment, of making that person feel “unsafe”, and of having a twitter account that made that person feel “unsafe”. Gallagher had started a stand-up-to-Woke twitter account which was then described as putting out “hate speech”, apparently just by sheer dint of its existence.

    She was then prohibited by the faculty head from entering the main reception area any longer, based on the idea that the sight of her might re-traumatize certain people offended by her views.

    The Psychotherapist

    Then it gets really odd, and even a bit comical. Having studied psychotherapy, her training kicked in and she began assessing the various individuals in management she was dealing with.

    So, after being reprimanded for speaking her mind, and after being warned off bringing “personal opinion” to bear on what the management regarded as self-evident truths about racism and white privilege and so on, she realized that the ethos of the antiracism ideology she was facing bore all the hallmarks of neuroticism, the very conditions that she was trained to treat, to move people away from. For instance, she says:

    The ideology itself…goes against all the things that I’ve been taught as a mental health professional. It’s hysterical, it catastrophises, it jumps to conclusions about certain things, it assumes what is going on in the other person’s mind, it’s very all or nothing black or white thinking, excuse the pun, it’s kind of, you know, there’s baddies and there’s goodies. These are all psychological mechanisms that I’m generally trying to help people move away from…It’s like they’ve embraced neuroticism and they’re advocating for it…Critical race theory and woke ideology is negative thinking, essentially.

    Legal Challenge

    She says she wants her legal challenge to be as impactful as possible. That she isn’t just taking the Tavistock Clinic to court for the what they did to her, but that she is taking critical race theory itself to court.

    She describes the people who essentially bullied her as being out of control, believing themselves to be above the law and above institutional procedure. For instance, they would verbally threaten her with certain procedures of reprimand, but then wouldn’t follow up, since to do so would have required putting this in writing and on the record.

    One of the bizarre assertions made to her by a member of management was that “Christianity is responsible for racism because of its use of the words light and dark.” This is the type of observation that might be acceptable in an undergraduate essay, but it is hardly a foundation for serious philosophical progress on any front.

    The forthcoming court case should make for an interesting spectacle, assuming it is even reported on in mainstream media. In many ways, Gallagher’s action, will for some, mirror the case taken by writer Deborah Lipstadt against the holocaust denier David Irving. On the other hand, it might also mirror the case taken by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry.

  • All About Amy

    “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
    Saint Teresa of Avila

    Can’t blame U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Barrett for being born Amy Coney. Nor would I fault my fellow New Orleans native for having Irish Catholic parents who, like mine, sent her to St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Back then it was cool. We were both in the same boat. And far as I know, we still are, that is if you’re in the habit of comparing educated middle class white females wielding our kinda funny Louisiana convent French accent. Women’s tuition is typically tubular. What I mean is, it’s wampum well spent.

    Sod it, hatched on the same patch of swamp, Amy n’ me should be two peas in a pod. However, I’m not ashamed to say gun control and reproductive rights are where we part ways. These were fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Seventies and Eighties, for girls, rich or poor, growing up in The Big Easy. Matters of… deep breath… life and death.

    But in order to begin a coherent conversation on either issue, one must comprehend this. Paired like a couple of chromosomes, the right to bear arms or avail of an abortion are inexorably intertwined.

    The Honorable Amy once penned a unanimous opinion affirming the summary judgement against a claimant in the case Smith vs. The Illinois Department of Transportation, finding while egregious, it was not racial discrimination when a supervisor dismissed an employee for what was later stipulated “poor performance” as, and I quote, being a “stupid ass nigger.” Because they were both black. Thus, perhaps she’ll pardon my French when, with Malthusian enthusiasm, I need point out that, unlike me, Barrett is a breeder.

    The greedy GOP plucked this pro-lifer directly out of her indoctrination by a secretive charismatic Christian cult called People of Praise and would have you, me and Barrett herself believe the proceedings around Roe vs. Wade were about her unqualified opinion. One based on a bizarre Czar-like wish to not squish the least little fish. A sweeping generalization to keep inconsequential caviar in its crevice, no matter how marred things get. So, you see, as women we are now all set. In a bind. Because profoundly blinded by nothing more than good faith, the Sturgeon General’s brand of justice finds it sound.

    This is not my first rodeo. I’ve a habit of being in the right place at the wrong time. Managing marketing and advising on regulations in several sovereign nations for a British boss at a bank based in Hong Kong during a currency crisis and the Handover of our S.A.R. to the P. R. C.. Watching an IPO window slam shut on a tech boom not sparing the white knuckles of a thousand plus entrepreneurs, including Connecticut fat cats, four Finns in Malaysia and more than a couple of Kiwis that like a Trojan camel we tried to pass through the eye of a needle. Not tired, I got hired to launch Tokyo ops for one of the U.S. firms which then perished in their entirety when the Twin Towers fell. Sometimes you might as well call it a day.

    Only to sit spitting nails, like an old spy in from the cold, wearing a crusty trusty power suit at a hedge fund desk high up in the Empire State Building. Swearing my federal tax dollars were squandered by an incompetent Army Corps of Engineers, while Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath sinks New Orleans’ natural defenses into the drink. Five years on, an unfettered BP blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig heaved 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Left every last bivalve bereft.

    Thing is, for all the money in a world I can’t unsee as my oyster, I wouldn’t trade this front row seat watching Ireland’s Celtic Tiger tumble, jigging in The George the very night same sex marriage legalized. Seeing medical cannabis and safe abortion made less murky than a transubstantiation of the Magdalene Laundries into this tip top corporate tax haven. And learning how to ask for the Ban Jax.

    Where me and homegirl differ, is before we had graduation under our Prince of Wales plaid chastity belts, God didn’t see fit to show Amy how it felt to be raped at gunpoint and escape.

    Hence, the power of Christ has yet to compel the now anointed Coney concerning exceptionally unsexy circumstances. Those surrounding the sort of nonconsensual contortions likely to lead to a swelling belly aborted.

    Maybe I don’t have a womb with a wide-angle view at high tide, but my bet is Barrett’s not tangled in a “long game” as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article subtly suggests. At best she’s a half-baked Trump tumor deposited on the Supreme Court, but what if she’s been groomed Brothers Grimm style? The Manchurian Candidate meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? She’s one of seven who, come hell or Haitian high water is spawning seven more into a scenario not of her own making. Ingenue actress? Goodbye RBG and Hello All About Eve? Or anchor baby for the alt-right?

    What I ask political strategists who bask in what few filthy cards they’ve slipped up their starched sleeve is a burning question. At what point did conservative Christians earn what they’d always yearned for? Carte blanche to pull up to the Republican bumper, and dive in like Flynn to the D.C. dumpster. When did The Religious Right become your Rumpelstiltskin?

    Knowing the ropes on the lesser navigated, one could almost say, fallopian-like, canals of Venice, I’ll venture vetting Casanova’s confessions is yet an even better trip. I for one am not impervious to stumbling on stuff our nuns neglected having Amy, blessed vessel that she is, translate directly from the French. Simply for shits n’ giggles mightn’t they have wiggled something cunning like Sade in to Sophomore English Lit? Not the sublime Nigerian-born British chanteuse…but the felonious philosopher of freedom. An equally smooth operator. I’ll explain.

    Couple hundred years before we were in high school, if memory serves, the year 1787 saw yes, a libertine, one of Fibonacci proportions, imprisoned in the Bastille. During his two-week incarceration, minus a lick of obscenity, the Marquis de Sade managed to nail a novella he named Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Seems his fictitious femme fatale was willing to bend over. Take one for the team. Don’t know about Amy. Wouldn’t blame her for being game, but, as for me, I’m not. Not anymore. Are you?

    There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.
    Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

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