Peggie case: controversial opinion

Sorry, Jamie Doyle is head of acute nursing rather than overall head of nursing.

Read his reaction here and see if you think Sandie would have done better to report the problem to him rather than her female line manager: www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/sandie-peggies-boss-wanted-report-35626027

The NHS is mainly staffed by women, so it's not a surprise that most of the people involved were women.

Men are employed in higher proportions at higher levels. High enough to throw their (female) juniors under the bus whwn there's an incident rather than taking the flak themselves.

Don't assume that men weren't involved simply because they're not being dragged into the tribunal. The head of HR and head of nursing are both men. I don't know the former's position on this but the latter did indeed stand with Upton, without proper investigation of the events or the legal position. He appears to have been instrumental in the suspension and to have joined the chorus of condemnation.

I reckon they feel obliged to demonstrate that they have no truck with the "weaker" women, that they have crossed over into the "correct" viewpoint and aren't going to cause any problems if a trans woman comes along.

Possibly because of 'be kind' socialisation. There is also the problem that girls and women have it hammered into their heads that men come first.

@SlipperyLizard “The risk of hurting the feelings of trans identifying men has always been seen as more dangerous than the risk of disregarding women’s rights to safety, privacy and dignity in single sex spaces”

I’d say it’s more that, once asserting the latter became accepted as an example of the former, there was no way out other than to deny there was a conflict at all.

Ultimately this might be about where we strike the balance between prioritising the group or prioritising the individual. The more we as a society have moved towards the extreme end of prioritising the individual, the less we are able to articulate why any individual shouldn’t be able to get what they want. The more so if pre-judging anyone is the biggest taboo there is.

In that context a concrete example of harm (hurt feelings) is inevitably going to win out over an abstract example (infringing dignity) – especially in an area like HR the very purpose of which is protecting individuals.

I agree @Underthecanopy a lot of the time these matters are left to HR departments, who have fully embraced the nonsense. See Isla Bumba etc - people totally unqualified for a role and navigating legal questions based on feelings of kindness and “I’m liaison”. But I’m not convinced that if legal advice had been sought, it would have been correct.

The risk of hurting the feelings of trans identifying men has always been seen as more dangerous than the risk of disregarding women’s rights to safety, privacy and dignity in single sex spaces.

@Jellycatspyjamas @SlipperyLizard Yes I wonder to what extent lawyers get consulted at all on these matters.

I don’t work in the area of HR at all, but my impression has been that it’s ‘slipped the net’ and turned into something of a separate universe, which runs mostly according to its own ethics and guidelines.

While nominally it reflects the law, my impression is that in practice law is actually only paramount either when it comes to the helicopter view (don’t discriminate) or the worm’s eye view (how do we defend this particular case) – and that in reality the day-to-day is mostly codes, manuals and best practices. If that’s right, then I can imagine lawyers don’t actually get called on to check those things very much?

That could also explain why the response to the Supreme Court decision in FWS has been largely ‘we must wait for clarity from the forthcoming EHRC guidance’. To us it may seem axiomatic that the SC decision is the final word, but from within the HR universe it might just look like one of a number of possible sources, and not even necessarily the most important one either.

It the tribunal evidence shows there was no policy and no HR guidance - simply a bit of google search which disregarded the 1992 Act and equalities legislation.

Precisely.

Sometimes I think 'be kind' is used synonymously with 'know your place'.

you made absolutely no concession to being seen as female.

That does at least makes sense.

But then why support an ideology that insists that your gender identity is at the very core of your being and that you must remind people of it in every email communication?

I’m not an employment lawyer but I work in firms that do that type of law, for big (and small) employers.

I’m afraid almost all of them seem to have been getting the law wrong and essentially following “Stonewall law” when advising clients. That includes sports lawyers advising governing bodies on “inclusion” despite the obvious safety & fairness issues with men competing in women’s sports.

As you can see from the thread on a man trying to join the WI, and the response from the corporation of London re: swimming ponds, there are still many lawyers peddling nonsense in this area to clients. Whether that is because their clients have instructed them to come up with the best legal argument for including men (in the knowledge that they’ll likely lose in court, as their solicitor understands the impact of FWS), or whether the solicitors themselves really really think their interpretation of the law is correct and have told their clients they might win, is another question.

Why has this happened? Same as for the rest of society, institutional capture and a “be kind” culture, plus consequences for anyone who dares step out of line. Easier for an employment lawyer to peddle the accepted nonsense than stand up to the firm’s position.

A combination of female socialisation to ‘be kind’ and fawning as a means to try and reduce risk to themselves?

Or is it that male dominated sectors (eg banking) have completely fallen and women’s objections are just not heard at all?

That really just sends the question back though - why is it that female dominated sectors have fallen so hard for GI?

TiM's are actually a small number of people.

Statistically it's female dominated. Not a landslide by any means, but more women than men are adherents of GI.

Yes, men don’t have to ‘care’ about this, even unto the reality that many are quite happy to offload these ‘cissy’ men into the female estate. (Spell-checker fought me hard on that word!). In the same way as there are men quite happy to distance themselves from ‘lesser’ gay men. Or, in heavily patriarchal societies, will regard their Khelifs as girls as no boy is ‘like that’ (til sports scouts come sniffing around).

Note, no one is suggesting the men #BeKind, are they? But they don’t have to when enough women are rolling over.

I’ve cut from the OP to here. And I want to say I tend to agree. If all women had said ‘No’ collectively, we wouldn’t be here. The vast majority of women have been frustratingly silent, but, an alarming number have swallowed the #BeKind KoolAid. Not just the weird fawning of Kate Searle, but, an example:

I worked in NHS X-ray. You should avoid irradiating pregnant women, ‘nipples to knee’. Prior to this bollox, the question was: ‘(Women, 12-55)- Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?’. Please sign here, and I will countersign it. And scan it onto your record.

Then, post ‘all this’, it became ALL 12-55. So, small, alone female radiographers now had to, of a Saturday midnight, make a lairy, drunk 45 year old trucker called Steve sign a declaration that he wasn’t pregnant before his X-ray, countersigned by the radiographer. Maddening him and debasing her professional credentials.

But here’s the kicker. Our 26-38 yr old band 7 female managers would CHECK ON MONDAY THAT WE HAD COMPLIED. They’d fall over themselves to do so, emailing the miscreants to chide them for wrongthink. Abetted by a union that warned us to ‘uphold trans rights’.

It deeply pains me to know that large numbers of #BeKind TWAW are actually women.

Respectfully, I disagree, OP. Woke mysoginy is so outrageous, stupid and clownish, that it makes us forget what the old-school mysoginy looks like.

A question for you.

I'm assuming that over the last decade or so, battalions of lawyers have been giving advice on the Equality Act that due to the recent Supreme Court decision turned out to be wrong.

Or was there likely to have been correct advice that was ignored because it wasn't the advice people wanted to hear?

HR departments across the UK would have been advised on this? Or recieved guidance that was based on advice?

Folks there is a much simpler explanation that requires no need to resort to gender stereotypes to explain. My understanding is that NHS Fife’s workforce is 88% female. That means of every 10 employees there, 8 are women. So of course almost everyone involved in this clusterfuck is female.

In the civil service world, this is just an estimation, but actual trans people are a distinct minority of the TRA caucus. Not saying there aren't some who cause issues, but numerically they're quite thin on the ground.

I'd say the ideological enforcers are:

• gay men who run the LGBT+ networks
• parents of trans-identified children, who are extremely evangelical about the cause
• female handmaidens who run the "gender networks", which is the current rebrand for what used to be women's networks - in any case they march in lockstep with the LGBT+ networks

We might add senior leaders who are very anxious to champion inclusivity, but they tend to gravitate towards certain characteristics - sexual orientation, gender identity, to some extent race. (A colleague, a Jamaican woman, once told me she'd never felt so black as in her current job - not because of hostility, but because of white bosses trying to be inclusive in a really clunky way.)

I hate to be cynical, but I can't help noticing that rainbow lanyards and Black History Month are a lot cheaper than sorting out chronic issues around, let's say, age or disability. Sex doesn't get much of a look in, but perhaps female senior leaders feel that's been sorted.

I think there is a special place in hell for women who support men like Upton over their female colleagues (and who beclown themselves pretending they don’t know what sex they are), but I think in Peggie’s case it is mostly reflective of more women than men working in the NHS.

I’m a lawyer and (apart from HR), there are more senior men than women. In every firm I’ve worked for since this bonkers ideology got a grip on the world, there has been a gay male TRA heading up the staff Pride network and championing the rights of their fellow men to trample over women’s rights. I have never seen a senior lesbian lawyer do similar (maybe partly because there are so few “out” senior women, but that’s a discussion for another day).

The tribunal case linked to above has been well summarised by Maya Forstater on Twitter, there were plenty of men in the civil service willing to enforce this nonsense.

x.com/mforstater/status/1947730180489023877?s=46&t=X1ma7_QJJ_PDVp-SdExAEg

I also was lucky enough to go to a girls' school, mostly staffed by women, too. I came out sure of my worth and have never acquired this idea that women are not 'people' to the extend I remember not understanding a Joanna Russ story about men arriving on a planet inhabited by only women and asking where 'all the people' were!
I would advocate for single sex schools for all children. Then girls get a proper education and no hassle from boys.

Well, most TiMs support it and they are men. Judging on crowds there do seem to be a disproportionate number of young women - which is worrying.

Of course not. However, you’re just spreading a mindless right-wing meme with little basis in fact. The stereotype doesn’t exist at all. Do you have some kind of evidence that it does?