NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board - thread #2

[nauticant]

Sandie Peggie, a nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy (VH), has brought claims in the employment tribunal against her employer; Fife Health Board (the Board) and another employee, Dr B Upton. Ms Peggie’s claims are of sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation. Dr Upton claims to be a transwoman, that is observed as male at birth but asserting a female gender identity.

The Employment Tribunal hearing started on Monday 3 January 2025 and is expected to continue for 2 weeks.

First thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5186317-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse

It's being live tweeted by https://x.com/tribunaltweets and there's additional information here: https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr

I never was. I wasn't socialised to be subservient or nice or kind or any of that crap.

I have no issue making someone uncomfortable, because I was never taught to be nice, and kind or subservient. At least not by the person I listened to, my mother. School tried but my mother already had us primed by school age that we didn't put up with crap.

I don't give a stuff if I make someone uncomfortable, not my problem.

I was taught to always put myself first. And I do.

However my mother was a psychopath so.... Not necessarily the best of role models!!

Which attributes would this be?
Doctors in general want to help suffering people and feel confident they are right.

These are both really helpful attributes in that they will fight to help their patients and make timely difficult decisions.

Unfortunately they can also go very very wrong eg doctors in Nazi Germany thinking the best way to help mentally ill people is to euthanize them

Just throwing mud, I guess, to try and portray SP as an unreasonable, bigoted person.

But obviously a person can love Trump (I have no idea whether SP does and neither do I care) and still be entitled to a single-sex changing room.

Attended the court on Monday morning - a group of us were in court 1 watching events in court 4 and I wondered about the terrible sound quality and fixed camera. Someone kindly got a message to the judge (is he a judge?) about the poor quality of sound and he duly asked everyone to speak clearly into the microphones. What a shame he kept leaning back and looking all over the place so that we couldn't hear him properly....Also, he asked the witness to speak slowly so that he could write everything down in longhand. Surely there is a court stenographer/recorder? Was it just a way of making sure the whole sorry thing was dragged out to increase the strain on witnesses or something about control?

No, they don't use stenographers. The tribunal members each have to take their own notes.

I believe the recording can be accessed by the members if they need something clarification, but it isn't readily available to them.

I'm sure Tribunal Tweets are happy with the slow pace. Much easier to keep pace with.

These were the qualities I listed in my original post.

intelligence, determination, dedication and good character

as being necessary to get into medical school. I added that one would think that these would help resist ideologies such as genderism, but clearly they don’t.

I’m not sure where the Nazis come in to it, but people seem to think they do. Odd.

Intelligence - prone to assuming you are the cleverest person in the room and all your ideas are the right ones
Determination - willing to fight people that your cause is right
Dedication - prepared to have total commitment to a cause
Good character - generally nice person who will follow along with anything they think is kind

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24909868.nurse-admits-harassing-transgender-doctor-employment-tribunal/

the National claim SP admitted to harassing BU.

Is that true?

Okay, this is the passage:

Upton put in a complaint on December 30, and Peggie was placed on “special leave”, the court heard.
Russell said: “You are the only person in this case who is guilty of harassment under the policy.”
Peggie said: “Yes.”'

@ArabellaScott Totally not true have read the tweet transcripts

From tribunal tweets

JR - failure to use preferred pronouns, etc also
are bullying.
SP - I tried to use preferred pronouns, but it doesn't come naturally to me
JR - you've called DU a man throughout these proceedings, you're making a choice to use these words
SP - its very difficult to call a biological man a woman, it's the gender speak
JR - you find it difficult, you don't want to do it and you don't do it.
SP - I have tried but it doesn't change that DU is a biological man
JR - I'm surprised, throughout these proceedings you have misgendered DU, and instructed your legal team to misgender them. You've chosen
misgender him.
SP - I believe that DU is a man, he wants to use she/her pronouns, I tried to use them, but its difficult.
JR - you're not trying now are you
SP - no, I'm not trying now
JR - looking at this def of harassment your choice to do so, is harassment under this policy
you are the only person guilty of harassment under this policy
SP - yes,

Thanks. Sophistry, then.

Note JR says “you chose to misgender HIM”. 😂😂😂

The point is that NHS Fife's policy appears to be that any woman doing anything any man dislikes is 'harassing' them. Even if it's doing something completely neutral and normal such as using standard English, for example.

So according to NHS Fife, women are harassing men if the man says so. Which I think is pretty bullying in itself and probably not legal. Certainly not ethical and probably direct discrimination.

However in terms of the actual policy, yes. I assume that's how SP got there.

It's a bit like in Afghanistan women who walk past a window where they might be seen from outside are technically committing a crime - though at the same time being deprived of human rights.

Omg the headline from that article. I'm furious. How dare they twist the exchange between that lawyer and sandy. FFS.

During the exchange the lawyer also misgendered Dr Upton! What a farce.

I hope Mrs Peggie's lawyer picks up the number of times that Dr Upton has been 'misgendered' by his own side.

The whole thing is an absolute farce. Gender always belonged to the study of grammar. It then became a twee euphemism for sex, and now it's taken on a life of it's own so that a number of people, mostly men, but a few women, can argue that they are the opposite sex.

I say farce but it's being taken deadly seriously. I think even 40 years ago no-one would have entertained the idea of men barging into women's changing rooms.

Nice bit of media framing there. Now… which side is this newspaper on? 🤔

NC wrote a blog on this last year (not connected to this case)

It doesn’t matter if the peanut has been mashed to a paste, moulded into the shape of a walnut and scented with walnut oil, so that no-one looking at it, smelling it or eating it would dream that it might be a peanut. It doesn’t matter if it’s got a special certificate that says that for legal purposes it’s a walnut. It still needs to be left out of the peanut-free dish, or the peanut-free dish ain’t peanut-free.

https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2024/11/06/sex-peanuts-and-statutory-interpretation/

Thanks London with knobs on

This is a tribunal, not a court. You definitely wouldn't get a stenographer. There might well be an official recording, but tribunal judges always take notes, at least in England & Wales, no reason to think Scottish tribunals are different. It's called the "Record of Proceedings". Some judges write, some type. But there's nothing remotely odd about him taking written notes, don't worry.

Re: doctors, I have often thought, on this topic, that one of the key attributes that will get you to be a doctor, especially now it is so competitive, is the ability to follow / play by the rules over a sustained period of time. I really mean no disrespect but I think the NHS has primed itself for the kind of institutionalised group think that has developed because to get anywhere you very much have to follow the rules and culture, and completely respect the various hierarchies. Which means in doctors you have a lot of people who are constantly told by society that they are much cleverer than everyone else but have also been trained, or trained themselves, to basically do / think as they are told in order to get into, and get on in, medical school. Obviously we need doctors to follow certain standards but I do sometimes wonder whether the system actually stifles their critical thinking abilities in many cases.

From personal experience of getting into a similarly competitive, professional course (admittedly a long time ago) it’s incredibly easy to start to think very highly of yourself and think you are above everyone else. If you don’t socialize outside your course, or only with other students in equally inflated ego courses, you can really start to look down on others and forget there are values that matter, other than having the fortunate background that allowed you to get there in the first place.

For sure Medicine is one of the most difficult courses to get into and also very demanding. You have to have a lot of self-belief to get through it.

I'm sure I read that a high proportion of psychopaths become doctors

Is the medic goring to be in court or can he do a Wadhwa and send sacrificial lambs to the stand instead?