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.

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”Dr Upton is a named respondent hence someone against whom a judgement could potentially be made…. exposing her to a significant financial liability”

thats rather upped the stakes!
how does that work?!

It wouldn’t surprise me!

I bet it kills tw medics that the job titles aren't gendered; Doctress, surgeonne, consultante😆

JKR's tweeted about the case but i've lost the link. May have been in the Courier? I remember thinking the article seemed quite reasonable considering other papers coverage yesterday. I don't know if that's typical for the paper or if they didn't wish to cross a wealthy woman.

Yep. It's not about safety, it's not about comfort, it's about using unconsenting women.

I agree with this analysis - they made the changing room mixed sex by stealth, and didn't let the other men (or indeed women - who found out only when confronted with a male) know. So it is direct discrimination on the basis of sex. I also think lying to your staff isn't a good look although not sure if it's illegal.

I've always said - I want single sex spaces but if they're really not going to be truly single sex then i'd rather mixed sex includes the men who don't want to override women's boundaries alongside those who do. Obviously this spoils the very purpose of it all for the latter men, but tough shit.

The saying used to be the good men stay out so the bad men stand out. I think this still applies except now you lose your job for objecting for the ones who stand out, rather than security / the police coming and escorting them out / arresting them for the crime of indecent exposure.

Found it, I think.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/fife/5176497/jk-rowling-nhs-fife-employment-tribunal/?cx_testId=7&cx_testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=0&cx_experienceId=EX8NGCWN9OKA&cx_experienceActionId=showRecommendationsWFKJUAU92VLE45#cxrecs_s

It's very worrying for any patients of Upton. He is apparently simultaneously so upset by a woman not wanting him in her changing room nor making eye contact that he needed time off sick yet at the same time fit to practice. And thinks everyone sees him as a woman when he is biologically, scientifically male.

Personally, I'd like my doctors to have some kind of passing acquaintance with reality and I'd think this level of delusion should be incompatible with fitness to practice.

What if he decides he identifies as a patient having a medical condition they don't have or identifies them out of having a condition they do?

He also was taking notes in A&E because he wasn't happy someone saw him as his biological sex, rather than the sex he wants to be. Instead of working and focusing on patients. If he's so obsessed with getting others to pretend to agree with his delusion how can he do the job properly? And how can patients who see him as male but are told he's female not wonder what else he's lying about?

LOL

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/s/X9bXLWnHKa

I can't make any sense of that "critique" at all

This is brilliant.

It is, on the other hand, bullying and harassment for Upton to even have to listen to Peggie use the language she needs (at no point has anyone told Upton he must use the same words as her).

From Upton, there is no “thank you for saying nothing the first two times”. No “the fact you didn’t speak up at first must have cost you something”. No “I didn’t realise I was making you feel this way”. No “how many others feel this way, too, and are saying nothing just to please me?”

It’s not Upton’s job to think any of these thoughts. Just “you shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve done it before. How hard can it be? (For you, obviously. Never me.)”

I do hope NC will get to why Upton can't use male pronouns to be kind to all the many many colleagues who find wrong sex pronouns hard, distressing, upsetting, impossible, a safeguarding failure for patient care, a lie.

🖕

I also agree with this summary. I also suspect the reason for time off was performative. Those transitioning are nowadays primed to exhibit hyperbolic distress at being challenged, where earlier transitioners were carefully brought to understand that such challenges would occur, and how to cope with them.

Had Dr Upton responded with empathy, as I dare say almost any woman would have done when faced with a colleague who was asking for privacy for a specific reason, this entire situation could easily have been sidestepped. After all, from previous encounters, it is obvious that Sandie Peggie was willing to wait until the changing room was free, rather than pushing herself into a situation she found uncomfortable.

Quite.

I may be wrong but didn't I read that Dr Upton was in psychiatry? How is a Dr who is labouring under a delusion, and expects those around him to play along with that delusion, treating patients suffering from delusions?

How does the GMC or the hospital square that circle? This case does highlight some of the utter batshit that swallowing gender ideology has brought our healthcare system to.

There probably isnt any chance of Dr Upton being found responsible for sexual discrimination, although as he didnt wish to use the men's changing room it seems likely he would have responded very differently to a man who had said I'd uncomfortable with you changing here. It is more likely that the court could, but probably wont, find it harassment to continue using the changing room when asked not to do so and then to make a formal complaint against the nurse.

I do feel sorry for Dr Upton and that some of the comments on here are unworthy of a feminist board. He is a victim of the trans bandwagon and his employer should have encouraged him to withdraw his grievance and change in the cupboard. As it is not only does he have to face comments about his inability to pass as female but also questions about fitness to practise. I regard those questions as perfectly valid but I very much doubt his employee or his activist friends have ever explained that possibility to him.

He's not a child. He's responsible for his own actions. He is also abusing his position of greater power as a doctor. He is wilfully manipulative. You don't need to feel sorry for him.....not in any immediate way, anyway.

in a philosophical sense there are many victims of trans ideology....but we're living in everyday reality; one which has consequences.

Even so, I don't think we should be commenting about Upton on here in terms of possible motivations, appearance, etc. As I wrote earlier, I expect that these threads will be monitored and I wouldn't be surprised to see screenshots end up in front of the panel.

If Upton does appear to give evidence, I would urge people to think about what they post. Yes, it is self-censorship, but there's a prize at stake, to not cause problems to Sandie Peggie's case.

I concur.

@nauticant I’d be very surprised if any party had the resources to ‘monitor’ social platforms, tbh, particularly a tribunal. But comments about the doctor’s appearance, about whether he ‘passes’ as a woman, are off the mark anyway. It’s not about whether any man passes; it’s about women’s right to privacy and dignity (and safety), away from men’s eyes. And the right not to have to share a room with men taking their clothes off.

My concern with this case (although women keep winning) is that the judiciary and courts system has been wholly captured by gender identity theory; it just takes one ‘be kind’ judge.

The threads here are monitored by trans activists.

It is my perception that those men who insist on pushing themselves into women’s spaces when it becomes clear that other women don’t want them there are pretty narcissistic and in no way the victim or mislead by trans activists. They are the trans activists. Lia Thomas, Emily Bridges, Imane Khelif, Laurel Hubbard, Mridul Wadwa just to mention a few. There will be plenty of men who call themselves women who don’t attempt to enter women’s changing rooms because they understand that it will make many women uncomfortable. Good men stay out.

Quite.

Whoever encouraged Dr U to make a claim of harassment against SP has done them a great disservice.

I’m struggling with the hypocrisy of it all.

Insurance companies profile people and act based on known risk factors for a population rather than per individual. Why is it socially unacceptable for women to make similar risk assessments about men?

Why is it OK for a hospital to make a policy which infringes the rights of a significant proportion of staff without widespread consultation? and sensitive advice to ALL employees? And then when help is sought from HR to then do nothing to fix the mess they made?

Why is it OK for the respondent’s barrister and the judge to mis-gender Dr U and JR to repeatedly mispronounce MF’s name, but for the same behaviour SP is suspended from work and accused of harassment?

Why is it OK for NHS Fife to suspend SP and support a claim of harassment against her (due to a situation caused by their failure to protect both employees) yet SP’s employment tribunal claim is called “vexatious” by NHS Fife?

Why is it vexatious for someone who has been publicly accused of being a bigoted bullying harasser to want the change to clear their name?

Sigh

I think this is unfortunately a bit in line with demanding we do work for Upton as Glosswitch's article so clearly outlines.

I also think there's a difference between generally discussing the motivations of men who claim to have inner womanly feelings to change in front of unconsenting women rather than using gender neutral spaces and specifically about Dr Upton and most of what I've seen is the former just in the context of this case.

Also, JR, Upton's barrister is the one who is introducing the details about motivation and actions. Pretty much everyone on here is fully in favour of single sex means single sex no exceptions, have as many gender based alternative changing rooms as you want for people who don't want to be the sex they are. If the court case was going in that direction it would be very short. But no, we're having SP's motivations, words, when she said them EYE FUCKING CONTACT dissected.

It's Open Justice and we're allowed to comment.

Personal attacks are over the line but I haven't seen any of those. Simply comments about what is in the public realm as a result of watching the case and the TT tweets.

I note that the reddit threads show no such restraint.

Do we know how Sandie is funding this case? Is her union supporting her (unlikely)? I don't think she crowdfunded, did she?

I saw something on Facebook by her daughter who is trying to encourage people to go down to the court on the last day to show their support for her. I wish I could go.

Do we know who the witness today is? Is it SP's or the other sides?

Yes there are plenty of male transsexuals who stay out.

E.g. Miranda Yardley.

No-one ever seems to think about the impact of behaviour like Upton's and NHS Fife's on them.

Oh my. Why am I not shocked that a group of people who swear by people denying reality for their own personal gain are denying reality for their own personal gain.