NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #5

[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. The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton started giving evidence on 6 February.

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.

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.

An alternative to Twitter is to use Nitter: https://nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets

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

Thread 3: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5268347-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-3

Thread 4: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5268942-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-4

One of the few discussions of the "vulnerable" variation of narcissism vs the usual grandiose. I'm ignoring the sex dimension of this discussion but find the "vulnerable" variation something that I recognise.

Researchers have discovered that narcissism can come in two types: grandiose and vulnerable.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21204843/
And Green has shown that while men are more likely to have grandiose narcissism, boasting high self-esteem and extroversion, women more commonly display the vulnerable form, involving introversion, defensiveness and low self-esteem. They may be more brittle and less boastful.
Green believes this is because bragging and chest-thumping simply aren’t socially acceptable for women. “Narcissistic women are abusing in ways that society allows,” she argues. “They often leverage their femininity, present themselves as soft-spoken, but it is cunning; it’s premeditated.” They may still lie, cheat and control others.
In Somma’s study, women with high levels of psychopathy, machiavellianism and grandiose narcissism scored low on agreeableness (how friendly you are) and high on social deviance (breaking rules or norms). Women with vulnerable narcissism, however, were less socially deviant and more agreeable than women with other dark traits. They also had more paranoid thoughts and the worst mental health of all. This is potentially because they are more insecure and eager to fit in. “They’re often better at faking empathy,” says Green.

But we may fail to recognise these traits as narcissistic. “Female leaders with narcissistic traits can cause as much reputational damage, staff turnover, bullying, as male ones – they just go about it in a more sneaky way,” says Green. “Male leaders can be more aggressive and socially dominant to establish authority. But female leaders may blame the higher-ups for why they had to fire you – even if they orchestrated it.”
There’s certainly aggression beneath the surface. Vulnerable narcissism is more strongly linked to aggression in relationships, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920304360?via=ihub
as well as physical and verbal bullying, than the grandiose type. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-024-01477-y

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/02/female-narcissism-is-often-misdiagnosed-how-science-is-finding-women-can-have-a-dark-streak-too

For anyone looking for something to take them to 10am, Desert Island Discs currently being broadcast on Radio 4 is not only terrific, but is also sort of suitable listening for today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027l20

Nemone Lethbridge is a barrister who was called to the bar in 1956. One of very few female barristers working at the time, she encountered misogyny and was one of the trailblazers for women working in the legal profession who followed behind her.
At her first Chambers, she wasn’t allowed to share a toilet with her male colleagues and had to use the facilities in a nearby café. It was hard for her to find work and for some time she represented the Kray twins.
After her marriage to a writer, and former convicted criminal was revealed, she was forced to leave the legal profession and they moved to Greece for a number of years where both of them had careers as writers having their work filmed for the BBC.
Nemone returned to the Bar in 1981 and continues to do pro bono work at 92 years old.

Absolutely. I've noticed the parallels too, having observed and experienced the behaviour of a trans-identifying family member. The mindset seems very similar to anorexia nervosa and it is so so frustrating that, unlike anorexia where professionals know that enabling the behaviours is harmful and overvalued ideas involving body dysmorphia should not be affirmed, with gender identity obsessions, these are enabled and affirmed which just fuels them and makes the person more distressed when they are not enabled and affirmed.

@Skyellaskerry I think that too. How is that clash going to be resolved?

I really hope he shows up today. He’s not going to is he. Thank you for the threads.

After an epidural, my Polish friend lost the ability to speak English.
Her husband had to translate.

Would a disorder like anorexia progress this quickly?
Reflecting on this being the first time someone stood up to him, I think it was actually quite early for him to meet opposition. I’m not sure ‘no one has objected before’ really works to justify his outrage at Sandie.
Surely this process would be an effective bucket of water over the notion that his behaviour is fine?

But it's still illegal not to have single sex facilities.

The very fact a biological man is in a changing room labelled 'female' is a) deception, b) illegal and therefore c) harassment.

The nurses weren't told ahead of time and given the option to go elsewhere, they were essentially forced into changing with a male bodied person. That's quite clear discrimination and harassment. It's discrimination on the pcs of sex, disability and religion / belief

I agree. The whole bit yesterday about the impact of social media on him was a way of blaming SP for this as she named him as a respondent. His own actions led directly to this case but he will not accept that nor that there are consequences for his actions. This plus his previous behaviour towards SP is typical cowardly bullying behaviour.

I don’t know, seeing as up and down the land, there seem to be workplace policies that someone undergoing, intending, or transitioned (which we know can mean just saying so) can use the toilet of their “preferred gender”, thus effectively rendering these spaces mixed sex. I think it’s going to need a few health and safety practitioners in workplaces to challenge and to champion their own discipline against the flavour of the month DEI departments.

Wow what a really interesting post @RethinkingLife . You've just made a light bulb go off in my head.

A relative of mine who I used to be close to has a dad who is a raging narcissist, he was as grandiose as you could get. Anyway, she was always the victim in every situation and when she was abusive towards me and then my parents it was so much like what her dad would do, but different. I couldn't understand it at the time as she always said he victimised her and how big a narcissist he was but the way she was behaving was similar but in a different way. This is it, this is why! She's a narcissist too but the type that is the permanent victim. God. Wish I'd seen these articles years ago! I can't tell you how much she battered my self esteem and then turned it around and made it about her self esteem, the manipulation, the crocodile tears, ugh.

Ff

I've just donated to the fund and read some of the messages. Only some, because I was welling up too much and I've got to work this morning. May Sandie and her family take comfort from them.

What time does it start today? I've got my link ready

We don't know how quickly things progressed.

In recent years, 'rapid onset' has become prevalent. My experience of this reflects young people who have been struggling with life for some time and the narrative that 'this is because I'm actually a boy/girl' is very alluring. Whilst TRAs are keen to point out that 'no-one chooses this' and 'it's a hard road', what the young people I work with are choosing is 'an answer/explanation for their torment' and the belief that overwhelming confusion has been repaired.

After the euphoria of having an answer wears off, they realise that nothing has actually changed and most desist with their trans identities.

I think what I’ve found quite interesting is that Dr Upton comes across as someone who has swallowed hook line and sinker every TRA position on things.

The ‘I’m allowed to be here’ line was very telling to me. I can’t think of any situations where faced with someone else being uncomfortable and needing privacy, I’d refer to being allowed to do the thing that was preventing them from having that.

The things he says and the way he explains things sound so much to me like the personification of things said by TRAs - ‘you are a woman’, ‘you have every right to be there’ ‘you’re brave for going in there’ ‘anyone who challenges you or doesn’t affirm you is an awful transphobe/ bigot etc’, ‘you are stunning and brave and special’ etc. It’s almost like you can hear all those things being said behind his words.

It feels like he is the product of TRA indoctrination in action and everyone else around him (in real life) has let him down by no one at any point saying anything different or telling him that the real world is not like Reddit.

I had anorexia as a teenager and I would say it definitely can, particularly if enabled by online communities which normalise and encourage it much like TRA online communities…

I think it's interesting so much is being made of Dr U's complaint against Sandie. The genderist side seem to have lost sight of the fact, or perhaps are trying to obscure, that it's illegal not to have single sex facilities and I think it's also illegal to deceive staff by labelling facilities 'female' when they're mixed sex.

It's illegal to label a food item 'nut free' if it's not. I don't see why changing rooms or toilets should be different. There have already been crimes where I think you can reasonably argue had the toilets been correctly, clearly labelled they might not have happened. For example the Dolatowski crime against a child in the ladies toilet. I might send a female child alone into a single sex toilet (well I would have done before I was aware of the total lack of common decency in institutions, not now) but I would absolutely not send her into a mixed sex toilet. Also, her Dad can go with her into a mixed sex toilet whereas - as a decent bloke with respect for boundaries and women's rights - he wouldn't do if it's labelled 'woman's'. So in that case Morrison's dishonest sex deception labelling of the toilets could have quite directly lead to that crime (and others such as voyeurism).

Also, the examples of 'harassment' that Dr U's produced are frankly laughable. We'd have no functioning NHS at all if every HCP went off sick because of examples like this! Someone not being chatty, addressing someone else and not them, asking them to do a medical task! Not making eye contact or, alternatively MAKING eye contact. THE OUTRAGE!

Really what it is is not liking a woman saying 'no', not accepting that 'no' and wanting to force the woman to do the thing she's saying 'no' to (i.e. accept mixed sex changing rooms, with eye contact or not as dictated by the male).

Hmmm. I think the use of 'allowed' in 'I'm allowed to be here' highlights permission. I think it directs attention to NHS Fife's policy/ decision to permit him to use the CR.

He didn't, to my recollection, say I have the right to be here'. Whilst this could be inferred from his evidence, I think his barrister coached him not to say this/ advised against taking this line

Online communities and a dose of ND would escalate it all, I suppose. I have a friend who has an interesting take on his life. He’s very protective of his own mental health, there are many things he simply can’t do, regardless of the impact on others of his needs.
He doesn’t try to expand his capacity, or make sacrificial choices at all. The people around him who pick up the pieces are perceived as unreasonable for not doing more or for having expectations of him in return.

It’s a similar bubble.

Sorry when I said he had a “feminine mental state” it should have been in scare quotes. I obviously think there is no such thing. But Dr Upton appears to believe that his beliefs/ feelings make him a woman.

Surely an employer doing something that deceives staff into a disadvantage because of a protected characteristic is discrimination?

So, for example, Dr U is getting what he wants, but given the changing room is labelled 'female' a Muslim woman could be in there changing when he comes in. She has no way of knowing the NHS Trust has by stealth changed what is labelled a single sex toilet into a mixed sex toilet. The NHS Trust have put her in a position where she is breaching the rules of her religion as well as stripping her of dignity and safety without any possibility of her taking steps to stop or avoid that (e.g. waiting in the corridor until sure the changing room is male free). Surely that must be discrimination? Not to mention piss poor duty of care to staff.

Of course this NHS trust seems to have then made staff complaining about the deception and lack of single sex facilities 'harassment' in an apparent attempt to demonise any woman who wants basic female human rights!

This is so true. If a woman entered a changing room in clear distress as SP was, and needed the space, I reckon the vast majority of women would get out asap. Saying 'i have the right to be here' would be very odd.

It's almost like by needing to say that highlights the opposite....

It's illegal to label a food item 'nut free' if it's not.

Naomi Cunningham has in fact written a blog on that very subject.

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

The point is this. Single-sex spaces for women can’t have men in them, because if they do, they’re not single-sex.

I told you it was simple. It’s like the “no peanuts” rule for a peanut-free dish. If you label a dish “peanut free”, you have to leave the peanuts out. All of them. The fact that lots of people like peanuts is no answer. Peanut-free dishes aren’t about those people: they’re about the people who may go into anaphylactic shock and die if they eat a peanut. 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.

What time does battle commence this morning?