NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #3

[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.

Access to view the hearing remotely can be obtained by sending an email request to [email protected] headed Public Access Request (Peggie v Fife Health Board) 4104864/2024 and requesting access.

Thread 1: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5186317-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse

Thread 2: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5267591-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-thread-2

The hearing is 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. This also has threadreaderapp archives of live-tweeting of the sessions of the hearing for those who can't follow on Twitter, for example: archive.is/xkSxy.

To be fair to someone who I'm not at all sure deserves fairness (given his bullying behaviour), has it been suggested that he made notes on his phone while in the changing room? I had the impression that "contemporaneous" meant that he made notes soon after the conversation, while it was fresh in his mind (which does not guarantee that his notes were accurate).

That is a superb piece by Glosswitch.

Contemporaneous means in the same period of time rather than at the exact same time. So a contemporaneous record of a conversation would have to start before the conversation finished but could also start before the conversation did so long as it didn't finish before the conversation started. A record of a conversation that wasn't recorded until after the conversation ended is not a contemporaneous record.

So he was whipping his phone out in the female changing room?

Hello to everyone from Fife. I was a bit worried posting about my Kirkcaldy recollections.

Me: 18 yr old med student, sheltered life, Home Counties, cut glass vowels
Him: 28 yr old, worked in homeless shelter, obsessed with Fife Flyers

He used to have to translate what his friends were saying as we were mutually incomprehensible to each other. Also his idea of a good night out was fights in the car park after a hockey match.

He was also clear that everyone thought Kirkcaldy was superior to Glenrothes. Meanwhile I thought his house was so disgusting I refused to eat there.

Dates were spent on tour buses watching Chubby Brown videos which obviously I found revolting.

However what has struck me looking back, was much as I loved him in a deranged 18 yr old way, I always thought I was superior to him and his mates. Now it feels more like I was full of luxury beliefs.

I'm pretty certain Dr Upton feels the same about Sandie and her Trump supporting husband.

Baffies = Slippers. That’s a term used in Tayside too (across the river from the Kingdom of Fife).

I think it's as likely that "contemporaneous" was misused in the tribunal. But if he did use his phone in the women's changing room, that's unacceptable. I would be very suspicious of any man who used his phone in a men's changing room. Not normal behaviour around unclothed or partially clothed people.

From For Women Scotland, on TwiX:

"Jane Russell who led the questioning – more accurately, badgering – of Ms Peggie is a woman, but a woman who seems to have graduated from head mean girl to sententious CBeebies presenter by way of the witchfinder charm school."

I thought this curious too. The Scottish legal system has been separate from the English legal system since the start so very definitely Scots law. The Equality Act applies across the UK but precedent’s set in one jurisdiction are not binding on the other (apart from possibly at Supreme Court) though they definitely have a lot of weight. However, other laws do differ eg the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 which states:

(7)A person is a member of a group defined by reference to transgender identity if the person is—
(a)a female-to-male transgender person,
(b)a male-to-female transgender person,
(c)a non-binary person,
(d)a person who cross-dresses,

Thank you.

Jane Russell has represented CGD in the (first?) Forstater tribunal and Garden Court in Allison Bailey's tribunal, and has a transed child so Fife NHS presumably decided she had relevant experience for this high profile case. I am shocked at the lines of questioning that she's pursued, and that the Judge hasn't intervened.

The fact the judge didn’t intervene is worrying.

Jane Russell has a 'trans child', @Seastoat? That figures. She was certainly going down the gender critical = racist, homophobic, transphobic route.

I get the impression that ET judges can allow quite a leeway with permitted lines of questioning, at least from what I've seen of them. No wonder ETs take so long.

And, of course, his reply that he had as much right to be there as she does isn’t indicative of fear. Someone genuinely afraid would not stop and get changed, but would leave and return when the person they were afraid of left, as Sandie Peggie did, except when faced with the position of really needing to use that space immediately.

Yes, exactly that. Thank you for stating it so clearly.

I didn’t say that he did. I don’t know that he didn’t either. On this particular case, it may become clearer what he did when he is questioned by NC and the J. Also what NHS Fife says was the sequence of events. So, I wouldn’t want to dwell on that particular man.

It is just that it would concern me that if a male (in general) was in a changing room without the women being able to object, he would possibly have the opportunity to whip out his phone. He would certainly have full access, even when there was no one there to monitor what he might be up to.

My reference is to the principle of a situation where males would be given full access to female changing facilities, they could do lots of things. And, I find this really concerning considering that today I gleaned;

1. Female changing rooms are apparently quite popular p*rn genre, and
2. So many possible fetischistic behaviour exhibited by males was raised in evidence today.

What was the lawyers blog referencing this again please?

I thought I'd saved the link to read this eve but clearly failed ...

Yes, although the questioning was insanely frustrating today, at least it allowed certain issues to be aired.

I assume that JR followed various lines of questioning because she was hoping to discredit info in Maya's statement, but it prompted discussion of

• female changing rooms being a popular p*rn category
• cross-dressing coming under the Transgender umbrella as per Stonewall definition until their reverse ferreting last year
• transvestite fetishism and autogynophilia
• criminality levels in transwomen being (at least) as high as in the general population

So people observing/following will now be aware of these issues. If they'd been left in the statement unchallenged then they wouldn't have had the same audience.

The Glosswitch essay is really good!

Found something

www.rollonfriday.com/discussion/female-nurse-suspended-after-male-doctor-complains-she-wouldnt-look-him-eye-when-he?page=1

It was questioning yesterday that I think the judge should have intervened on. But if JR has a trans child it might explain a bit. One thing that I would find difficult as a barrister dealing with issues close to my heart would be to focus on the case and not get distracted trying to prove a personal point. That is what it felt like today - she wanted to prove something, to argue points with Maya so she could win against her not against SP. Hence her derogatory name-calling throughout and stuff that is irrelevant to the case. She had her gotchas lined up. I wonder how she felt it actually went?

Thank you for posting this. Thank you so much Victoria for writing it. I had an astonishing 'click' of recognisong something I had felt dumbly, deepdown, but had never floated to the surface. Something that is absolutely true and there in front of me but I had never seen.

@DemeraraAbyss i agree with you. I do not know if it is true about her personal circumstance but it seems that she was grandstanding and making sweeping assertions that were not in keeping with the conduct of a barrister i have ever come across.

If she does have a trans child that explains an awful lot - she sees it as defending her child's rights and she can't possibly accept that she might be wrong because as with so many parents of trans children it would mean accepting that they had chosen to damage their child.

@CheekySnake

We need to start responding to these attempts at shaming by saying that actually, we don't know if you're a rapist/paedo/consumer of violent porn/upskirter/domestic abuser etc etc, and we're not going to apologise for acknowledging that. If men don't like it, that's tough. This is the reality of the world that women live in.

I think the only way men might get it would be by comparing it to a man walking into their club house with a visible gun in his belt. They don’t know if he’s going to shoot them, but they see he has the equipment to shoot them if he so wishes, and they have no knowledge of his character. Would they admit to feeling fear?

she did come across as slightly unhinged, like the cackle and not taking the hint from the judge that her line of questioning was not of any use to them, then just carrying on.

And what seems to me quite personal attacks on Maya, and sex matters, which she must know are a registered charity.

I have been in plenty of legal proceedings, (mostly family) and have never come across anything like it.

I wonder about her mental health TBH, and hope that her chambers, persuade her away from such briefs as these.