NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #10

[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 February 2025 and is expected to continue for 2 weeks. The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton started giving evidence on Thursday 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: https://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
Thread 6: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5269635-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-6
Thread 7: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5270365-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-7
Thread 8: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5271511-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-8
Thread 9: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5271596-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-9

@mrshoho sinister is exactly the right word.

These threads have been great but I also feel yuck. I don't want to hear this man soap box how he'll control and dominate women with speech and behaviour.

I'm sad for SP and for women and girls that society and its laws have enabled this without thought

Personally I think Fife and Theodore are nailed. The Judge is doing his job by not giving his indication either way. I am confident that any right-minded person will determine SP should never have been exposed to that situation.

(Just had a wicked thought, maybe NC should ask the Judge what pronouns he wishes to be used when referring to him.)

It really wasn't - the judge was writing notes long hand and would indicate when he was done so that she could go on to the next question. I agree it had that effect - to us - but am not sure that we should extrapolate from that to imagine how the jusdge was receiving the information.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/has-there-been-a-cover-up-in-nhs-scotland-trans-case/

I also wonder about the wider impact across many other public and private businesses that have transitioning at work or similar policies that include the “use whatever facilities you feel most comfortable” or similar. And in particular also for employees in those companies who want, but can’t currently, speak up (for fear of repercussions etc)

Just as I wouldn't accept transubstantiated wine in blood banks, ...

That is a genius way of expressing the unreasonableness of the demands made by gender identity theorists, @BonfireLady . Thank you. There is an imperialism in their ideology that isn't remotely present in mainstream religion. Of course some religious organisations seek to colonise and overturn science and medicine. These are the ones that we call cults.

I also agree with your suggestion that the g i theory instantiated by Upton should be viewed through the lens of Prevent. They are already moving towards viewing incel-type beliefs in this way. In practice, Upton's beliefs and attitudes are very reminiscent of incels

Helen Staniland was spot on when she said “It starts with pronouns and ends with a six foot male getting their cock out in the female changing room.”

Have so been mulling on this overnight. I have not come across a legal issue before that seems to be being legislated not through the statute books, but via crowd sourced employment tribunal after employment tribunal.

This is such a shitty way to fix bad law. It depends on people like MF and SP having the gumption to go through it. It can only ever address a small number of issues at one time, e.g. the primacy of sex in single sex space, that GC beliefs are WORIADS,

As yesterday demonstrates we are so far down the GI rabbit hole, we need to do something about the law otherwise we will still be doing this shit a decade from now.

Or they have a Muslim doctor so all female employees have to wear hijabs.

Or are forbidden to speak or look out of a window . . . in fact, they wouldn't be allowed to practise if the Muslim doctor was as extreme as the trans cult.

I take your point, but I think there is more to the pauses than that, at least I hope. Anywhere other than the lower courts or first round of Tribunal Hearings then the transcripts are automatically available and foc. I have personal experience, £2000 in for transcripts where a solicitor has tried to defraud me out of ownership of all of my legal estate by misrepresenting handwritten words in typewritten form. My case will end up at the ECHR, and SP is free to petition the ECHR as well, let's hope that is not necessary and she is relieved from the burden of litigation. Support for her is vital.

Organisation: Use the facilities you are most comfortable in.

Woman: I'm comfortable in single sex, woman only spaces.

Organisation: You are suspended bigot.

Only certain people get to choose where they are 'comfortable'.

It does. But sadly it goes further

It ends with adults telling children they should believe a lie and accept this

How bad is that?

Us old feminists knew pronouns were significant long before "trans" was a thing. We knew that using the male pronoun for everyone, which was standard in my youth, meant that the default person was male and the usage stopped people visualising the effects in women. Using "he" for both sexes made it easy to ignore women. From the 1980s on there was a lot of campaigning and then effort to use gender-neutral language for anything that applied to both sexes. And it did become accepted. Neo-pronouns were proposed and rejected but texts would alternate "he" and "she", or avoid pronouns. Some texts said they would just use "she" to balance things out. It started to be taken for granted that you didn't use "he" unless you really meant "men".

I had a specific example of this effect... a short text about people making tech errors gave an impression that women made more errors. There was a lot of argument about how people got this impression. The nunber of examples and the amount of space was about evens. But I counted the pronouns and guess what - there was lots of she/her for women's mistakes and far fewer he/him/his for men's. The article even used the passive tense - "a mistake was made" - which everyone hates and was often used to argue against gender-neutral language for women's equality - to avoid saying "he made a mistake". Easy enough to use the passive tense when it benefits men!

It seems pretty consistent that using "she" for a man makes people visualise a woman instead. Even judges can be affected... And that is why trans politics has become so insistent on pronouns. They know how powerful pronouns are.

@IamnotwhouthinkIam Either I am not understanding your meaning or is this backwards ? She/her pronouns were words developed over time in the vast majority of languages specifically to refer indirectly to people of the female sex - they weren’t floating around in a linguistic ether, used at random to apply to that person there/not here, until ‘people decided …they were feminine too’ Same applies to he/him and the male sex. The cart did not come before the horse. They aren’t abstract concepts at all and are important for truth and accuracy.

I have gone back to s/he for some time now, where suitable. I actively avoid using they. If I know a person’s sex, it’s definitely she or he.

Can any legal bods say, does anything we've seen so far look like grounds for SP to appeal if it goes against her? Most obviously, would all the late disclosures count as "did not follow the correct procedures" in this list?
https://www.gov.uk/appeal-employment-appeal-tribunal

You can only appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) if you think the employment tribunal made a legal mistake. This is called 'appealing on a point of law'. You can't appeal just to challenge a decision you're not happy with. This means it's quite rare for cases to be appealed.

Edited to add: I see from your link fanOfBen that there are other grounds for appeal but these are far more significant than late/chaotic/incomplete disclosure.

I'm by no means a legal expert but from what I understand his repellent personality and insane beliefs are not on trial. It's not illegal to believe what he does. Although I firmly believe he isn't fit to practice and his beliefs are lunatic for anyone but especially a Dr.
I think whoever wins will be decided by if the correct procedures were followed re: suspension, him being in CR etc

Bewilderness's rules of misogyny

1. Women are responsible for what men do.
2. Women saying no to men is a hate crime.
3. Women speaking for themselves are exclusionary and selfish.
4. Women’s opinions are violence against men, thus male violence against women is justified.
5. Women and Feminism must be useful to men or they are worthless.
6. Women who go around being female AT men by menstruating and breastfeeding babies deserve punishment.
7. Women should always be grateful to men for everything.
8. Men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are.
9. Men always know the “real reasons” for everything women do and say.
10. The worst thing about male violence is that it makes men look bad.
11. Whatever women suffer from, it is worse when it happens to men.
12. Women’s ability to recognize male behavior patterns is misandry.
13. Angry women are crazy. Angry men have trouble expressing themselves.
14. Women have all the rights they need: The right to remain silent.
15. Men are the default human. Women are strange subhuman others.
16. Everyone owns and controls women’s bodies except the women themselves.
17. Men are better at performing femininity than women are because they invented it and it gives them a boner.

A gentle reminder.

This case hits many of these. I normally don't post the whole list for various reasons but I think it's important to do so here because so many are present. Go down the list and decide how many you see in this case for yourself without me doing it for you.

The most striking one from this list and this particular case for me is the use of no14. It doesn't often happen to this degree and it's presence is very chilling:
14. Women have all the rights they need: The right to remain silent.

NHS Fife have effectively tried to adopt this into policy. And for this reason I do believe this case will ultimately reach the threshold for sexual discrimination. And why it will be a scandal regardless of the eventual ruling by the judge.

The reference to 1984 fits perfectly with this point too.

I think people struggle to understand the concept of Authoritarianism in modern society. 1984 is the thing that bridges that lack of understanding.

@rebmacesrevda There is nothing that peaks people faster than listening to trans activists. It's why NHS Fife tried so very hard to have this heard in private. I read a lot of discussion by TRAs when doing my initial research.

Many of the young people being affected are autistic and/or same sex attracted. Some have experienced child sex abuse. There are disproportionate numbers who are in care. These are often troubled young people who find a community that tells them they are wonderful and that they wont be troubled if they change their body. For a while it may work - and if it doesnt then you just need to change your body further or cut out of your life anyone not entirely supportive.

Yes it's a medical scandal to rival contaminated blood or thalidomide.

This is really important.

Just as Sandie would deserve single sex changing spaces even if she were a racist bigot, DU should not be in women’s spaces no matter how sweet and appealing he may seem.

He makes it easy for us to see why we don’t want him there. But we have to look past that!

I hope at some point all her letters are published together. I'd buy the book "Letter from the Baroness". A few paragraphs before each one on what was going on followed by her letter about it.

It would be fantastic

Thank you.

I don't believe people who say they aren't affected by pronouns. If you've been brought up as a native English speaker then at least to some extent you unconsciously are. (Well, there might be some exceptions e.g. among people with autism who deal less with connotation and seem to deal with pronouns differently but it's not been studied as far as I know)

Sure I can call someone "she" and still know they are male, but seeing "she" for a man has effects on an unconscious level that we don't always pick up and need effort to overcome when we do notice. I bet the author of the article I metioned upthread wasn't even aware that he'd favoured men.