NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #15

[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 was expected to continue for 2 weeks although once it was in to the second week it was looking like this would not happen. The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton gave evidence from Thursday 6 February to Wednesday 12 February.

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

However, as a result of problems with the livestreaming, apparently, as a result of a very large number of observers, remote public access to the hearing was suspended on Tuesday 11 February. It was suggested that it might be reinstated at some point but don't count on it.

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
Thread 10: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5271723-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-10
Thread 11: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5272046-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-11
Thread 12: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5272276-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-12
Thread 13: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5272398-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-13
Thread 14: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5272939-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-14

Column in today's Times on the case www.thetimes.com/article/b73c5e6f-639b-4cb3-bb50-6e9e47ac68d7?shareToken=46e659c843758f5f090d018a7146c2c4

For me, the tell is that #bekind only goes in one direction. No kindness from DrU to Nurse Peggie. No respect. No empathy.
There's zero kindness shown to women by any man who decides he fancies entering the women's change rooms.
#Bekind applies only to women towards men. When it comes to men towards women then it's #PutUpOrShutUp and that proves its nothing to do with kindness or respect. It's about them demanding deference under the pretence of kindness.

Good to know AI doesn't recognise Weetabix ... we can all hide in Weetabix houses when the time comes. You could probably construct an alternative ie old fashioned women's changing room out of Weetabix come to think of it. Put it in the car park and see how much use it gets, although it would need some kind of protective layer for the very occasional moments of rain in Fife. Can someone start a crowd funder?!

Would this be grounds for appeal if it goes against her?

There's also the small matter that no amount of drugs or surgery will actually change a person's sex, however much they wish it would and however many procedures they undergo.

😱

I've just read his second middle name aloud!

Seems rather appropriate.

You could try this but using language like "assigned female at birth" is accepting the language gymnastics of GI ideology.

We already have a word that describes this group of people, women.

Does anyone else get the impression that all of this fuss, everything Upton did, was with the sole aim of making sure that he didn't lose access to the female changing room. That seems to have been his main priority. Ignore all the patronising gender waffle, and that's what is left.b

The performative hysterics when SP told him he was a man. Immediately seeking out a senior (and female) member of staff. As he said yesterday, he was scared that SP might persuade other staff to say they didn't want him in there either. He had to get in there first. Make sure senior staff were on his side. Then embellishing the story with some vague thing about a patient in resus. He can't remember who or when or what they were in for, or if they were even left, and we know they weren't left completely unsupervised because he was there and he claims to be a doctor.

All of it was about access to the female changing room. He could quite easily have got changed somewhere else, he agreed with NC there.

And in the background, he's been tracking and keeping a diary of female nurses use of the changing room for months.

It's creepy.

If a Dr who was a trans woman who didn't declare their sex were to perform a smear test (speculum) on a female patient who had requested same-sex care would this cross a legal threshold for "no consent" for sexual assault?

Consent can be conditional

Also, there have been prosecutions for sex by deception

What an absolute mess

Can I ask a question about narcissism, in case there are people reading who have knowledge of it?

We often hear that narcissists who are in a coercive and controlling relationship with a woman will appropriate her claims of being frightened, manipulated, misrepresented, etc, turning her narrative on its head by alleging that she is in fact the one who frightens, manipulates, etc.
Obviously one motive for doing this is to control how other people see the relationship and prevent them from stepping in to help her. But is there an additional motive? Is it the case that the narcissist in this relationship sees something in her that he wants for himself? He recognises that being a victim of abuse brings positive attention and affirmation from others and is in that sense something 'positive'. His ego cannot tolerate (or even understand) that there is positive attention flowing in any direction other than towards him, so as far as he is concerned he is the one deserving this positive attention, he must be.

If this is the case, what I wanted to ask is: Could this 'appropriative' aspect of narcissism, be one possible source of a trans identification? -- a kind of colonisation whose logic is something like: All positive regard/attention is rightfully mine; women receive positive regard in virtue of being women; therefore I am a woman.

What might be particularly painful for a narcissist is that he himself adores, desires, needs women. How can that be, when he is the only person to whom adoration, desire, etc belongs? -- unless he himself is Woman.

Obvs there are other sources of a trans identity that don't involve narcissism (and other forms of narcissism that don't involve a trans identity). But could there be overlapping subsets of each, in which narcissism explains the trans identity?

Good morning everybody. Yesterday's tribunal seems to have triggered my exploding head syndrome so every time I tried to sleep I just kept getting woken back up with a bright flash and a loud bang. Grr. Very tired today.

Still, I can't wait to tune in today.

You'd like to think so. When I worked in the NHS informed consent was a very important issue.
I really like to think it still is but this case and the NHS/BMA capture really has me concerned about consent, patient safety and the whole idea of patient centric care that not that long ago was so important.

Donated

archive version: https://archive.is/xHFok

Nicola Sturgeon has left Scotland a land where words mean nothing
Trans doctor employment tribunal highlights the absurdity of politicians and officials indulging the legal and moral fraud that a biological male can be a woman
…
In this case, however, referring to Upton as “she” is not just a legal fraud but a moral one too. The entire case rests upon Upton’s sex and the consequences which flow from that. The good doctor may be a fine physician and an estimable person in any number of ways but the plain, incontestable, reality is that at the time the alleged incidents took place he was a man. A man, moreover, seeking to change into and out of his working uniform in a changing room hitherto reserved for women.
It does not matter how often Upton says “I am not a man”. It does not matter, because he is male. A man biologically and a man legally too. Saying something does not make it true, no matter how often it is said.

AFAIR Upton argued that if patients had a right to know the gender identity/sex of the person treating them it would result in every encounter with a patient being prefaced with an announcement of the HCP’s sex “assigned” at birth, gender ID, pronouns and childhood pets (I may exaggerate). This is a classic slippery slope argument, only deployed by people less clever than they think they are. Many of his arguments showed the same sort of thing, particularly the biological woman one.
This is someone with a facility for words, quick but superficial understanding, brought up in an environment where these things matter, with an unshakeable belief in his own superiority (which has probably been encouraged and enabled by all around him), completely lacking in real emotional intelligence and unable to break out of his solipsistic world view.

Me too

This is a good point, particularly as Dr U is a very junior doctor and would be changing dept/ job regularly anyway. He isn't on a training pathway and is not a career ED Dr from what I've read - so he wouldn't be in ED medium to longterm anyway. He also is a dangerous liability if he denies biological sex in terms of interpretation of blood results and managing someone with an acute abdominal problem (ie when to do a pregnancy test & when to call obs & gynae)

I was thinking this morning, imagine you were a relative or friend of DU who had had some misgivings, but went with it in order to be_kind - and then you witnessed/heard/read what was said this week under oath. Gosh.

@AlbertCamusflage Sorry to @ . wrt narcissism

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

This is the part where the rubber meets the road, isn't it?

At the moment the answer seems to be that we don't know until it ends up in court.

Upton's smug take on it was that unless a woman who had asked for same sex care refused him to his face, she had consented. Or at least no-one could say she hadn't consented.

It's an argument I feel I have heard before 😶

It's plausible that taking sex hormones might affect some pituitary hormone levels; but more in the direction of 'abnormal' than a new reference range. I speak from ignorance here.

@nolongersurprised you've found one of the good ones! 😀

Like most men, your DH is free not to 'Be Kind' because he's not been conditioned by society to prioritise other people's feelings over his own perception of reality. He sees the truth and speaks the truth.

But women have to resist a lifetime of societal conditioning to get to that point, so we spend years Being Kind and shooting ourselves in the foot in the process. I'm glad you (and I!) finally made it to the place your DH was at all along.

He better hope the panel members aren’t religious or climate sceptics.

If this is the case, what I wanted to ask is: Could this 'appropriative' aspect of narcissism, be one possible source of a trans identification?

That's a really interesting idea.