NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #6

[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

Thread 5: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5269149-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-5

If I worked in NHS Fife I'd be very interested in whether notes had been kept about me. In particular the other nurse who waited outside rather than share a changing room with a man - did he write anything about her?

I assume that will be something NC explores next week

Uh?

It appears from your comment that you haven't been keeping up with the tribunal, let alone the thread. Everyone is entitled to an opinion but yours bears no relation to the facts of the case.

if I found a trans woman in a changing room I would be venting at them, I'd take action to remove myself even if I was there first!

Are you really sure you want to admit to such transphobic views? You'd remove yourself from a changing room if a 'transwoman' came in? You do realise this is what Sandie Peggie did and Upton claims this is evidence of her transphobia, don't you?

Thanks for posting this. It seems like the reporting takes a more serious tone about procedural matters? And they’ve not manage to link Trump to anything this time lol

You do realise @Booboobagins that removing yourself would have been enough to put you in Dr Upton's little black book of non compliant women? That this started because Sandie waited outside the changing room?

Agreed, that's clear from Upton's notes quoted here:

https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1887839672568541346

It will be interesting to see how this plays out but what does JR do - professionally speaking - if the interests of her clients move apart?

Surely at the nub of things the point is that she did try to take cooler action by speaking to a manager, but that (a) they did not take any meaningful action, (b) the trust had no policies in place that would enable them to deal with this very obvious difficulty created by their casual admission of men to women's changing rooms and (c) that the trust did not even seem to have conceptualised the legal and moral need to prepare for this difficulty (or the illegality of their decision).

She must therefore have felt doubly stressed - by the doctor's presence and by the completely egregious lack of support. Who can maintain the right tone in that situation? Whose voice wouldn't be breaking and rising, whose words would be very carefully chosen?

100% @AlbertCamusflage

Yes, indeed, Times Scotland articles on this topic can be very different depending who writes them.
The very first comment under the article is this one:
"Hooray. The Times has started to catch up with the facts "

If that’s the email (from Kate Searle) to 17 A&E colleagues on 29/12/23 (?) then I don’t think that was titled “hate incident”. It was about staffing and the.start of SP being withdrawn from work/suspended. It’s info about the process

It seems JR has 3 clients of whom 2 are respondents:
NHS Scotland (providing legal advice to NHS Fife): not a respondent
NHS Fife Respondent 1
Dr Upton Respondent 2

IANAL and I've no idea how much longer, if at all, this is sustainable or if, as JR asserts, there are no mysteries that she cannot explain away. I'm governed by professional standards and Nolan in pretty much everything that I do so I don't understand the absence of tension between her duties to her different clients.

I want to make sure that @Booboobagins sees this.

Your suggestion, Boo-boo, of taking yourself out of the changing room if you didn’t like who was there was what DrUpton didn’t like.

Sandie wasn’t toxic, she just failed to pretend well enough that Dr U was a woman. Dr U didn't like that and started making notes and scrutinising everything Sandie did. Whether Sandie looked at him funny, whether she failed to look at him.

Remind me again who is toxic here?

What derogatory comments?

What anti trans beliefs? If you mean that humans can't change sex and Dr Upton is a man then that is a belief protected in law.

Her employer by law has to provide single sex changing rooms. He is biologically and legally male and had no right to be in female spaces.

She removed herself from the changing rooms several times but had no choice in one as she was leaking menstrual blood and needed to be in there. What sort of person wouldn't have given her privacy to deal with that when she asked for it?!?!

I'm not saying I wouldn't be angry, my point is she is discriminatory borne out by her and her husbands other behaviour.

Noone has thought about women's rights in and amongst transwomens rights have they? It's a good trial case.

Bring back private changing rooms then everyone is sweet.

Ah, I see, @KnottyAuty thanks for clarifying.

What has her husband's behaviour got to do with this? He wasn't in the changing room. He's not part of the tribunal. Women are not responsible for what their husbands do.

Noone has thought about women's rights in and amongst transwomens rights have they?

What does this mean?

And even if she'd stayed that wasn't good enough. Eye contact bad, no eye contact bad. Talking to him bad, not talking to him bad.

Sandie was probably never going to placate this man unless she totally submitted to the trans ideology and declared that he was the one true woman in the whole hospital, the most special of women whose recently chosen woman status was the most important factor in the whole universe.

I was reading this article about the case on STV news. Does anyone else find the photo and it's description confusing or even misleading?

news.stv.tv/east-central/nhs-trust-accused-of-failing-to-disclose-details-in-transgender-doctor-tribunal

@oldcrone

Noone has thought about women's rights in and amongst transwomens rights have they?
What does this mean?

I literally said those words out loud to myself - Although I may have said "what the fuck does that mean?"

And don't forget to compliment him on his hat!

@mrshoho yes they obviously have a photo of SP and not BU.

A bit of a compromising position if true..

I'm not saying I wouldn't be angry, my point is she is discriminatory borne out by her and her husbands other behaviour.

I don't think the evidence did actually include any 'anti-trans' behaviour or words from SP. There was some attempt to suggest that she was racist, but (a) that seemed rather weak and (b) it is irrelevant to the case. She said something like "it isn't bad to be white".
That might well make me feel personally alienated from her (depending on the context and what she meant by it) but it has zero bearing on the case and indicated the depths to which JR was prepared to go to simply smear her rather than relying on the facts and the merits on the case. That seems to have been exactly the same stance that the trust took: If you say anything contrary to the TWAW mantra you are a bigot and that in itself dissolves every other consideration of fact and law and process.

You seem……confused.