NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #22

[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 last 2 weeks. However, after 2 weeks it was not complete and it adjourned part-heard. It is planned that it will resume on 16 July and the last day of evidence will be 28 July and then there will be 2 days of submissions from counsel meaning that the hearing will end on 30 July.

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 caused by 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
Thread 15: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5273119-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-15
Thread 16: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5273636-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-16
Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5273827-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-17
Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5274332-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-18
Thread 19: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5274571-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-19
Thread 20: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5275782-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-20
Thread 21: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5276925-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-21

There are also other eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins & Stephen Pinker who express gender critical views.

https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/denying-that-sex-is-binary-a-study

"No additional impact is anticipated for this protected characteristic but given sensitivity and media discourse communication and stakeholder feedback will be key to make sure the programme does not cause harm by
perpetuating any stereotypes or prejudices."

Why are "stereotypes and prejudice" claimed when women ask for the safeguarding they are already entitled to and statistics demonstrate that they need?

Why are "stereotypes" never decried when straight intact males want to be around naked or vulnerable women? Or when males claim they literally are women because they've adopted the most easy, superficial stereotypes expected of women? Why is the prejudice against women who cannot consent to this never noted?

Trans ideology seems to turn everything that once did good back to front for the benefit of (mostly) white males.

But a group of eminent evolutionary biologists disagreed with them and signed a disclaimer.

They are outliers.

Yes, I'm interpeting this bit as 'of course there's an impact of pretending that some men are women but we have to say that there isn't and we already know some people are recognising that it's a problem and publicly calling this out so we have try to do an excellent PR job to convince people it's not a problem at all'

I love this quote from the Dawkins article
In my opinion Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce” is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.

The link I gave is Richard Dawkin's riposte to the eminent evolutionary biologists ludicrous letter to Trump claiming that “extensive scientific evidence” contradicts the view that “there are two sexes . . . [which] are not changeable.”

Her is another lengthy dissection of the eminent evolutionary biologists ludicrous letter highlighting their hypocrisy as their own resreach papers only mention male & female

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/02/10/more-on-the-three-societies-letter-about-sex/

'Man' and 'woman' are only defined in the Equality Act, as 'a male of any age' and 'a female of any age'. The problem being that some lawyers seem to argue that 'female' can be an acquired gender rather than only referring to sex.

Is there not some principle in law that if everyday terms like 'man' and 'woman' are used in legislation without detailed definitions, then their meaning should be taken to be what they would mean in 'normal' usage?

There are other scientists pushing back, follow Stephen O’Rahilly on X. StephenORahilly

Normal usage would be an adult female but if someone has a birth cert that says Female but the are actually Male does that leave us?

The actual sex / gender or the legal sex?

You ever wish you'd been a lawyer??

Thats right to some extent. But you don’t get a new birth certificate, you get a document entitled “ an extract from the adopted children’s register” . So every time you need a BC, you have to instead show a document that disclosed that you are adopted. Eg each new job, when you get married/ CP, apply for a passport, benefits, police checks etc

So no privacy for ( not stunning not brave ) adoptees. No special units at the passport office to save any hurty feelz. No immersive role play at work. No opportunity for compelling the speech of others .

Just boring old biology.

I have seen NHS EQA impact assessments for various things. They are without exception dashed off in 2 minutes as a box ticking exercises and always record "no impact" with no other detail for the protected characteristic of sex. It's as if the heresy of even considering it is unthinkable.

Ultimately I suspect most of these people think sex should be changed to gender so just go through life as if it has.

@JazzyContemporaneousNotes and @mumsandaunties:

The way I have approached it with my DS was by imagining his worldview as an enormous edifice. I am not going to dismantle that in a single conversation - much as I’m sure many of us were not brought to terfworld in a single leap.

I also try to keep in mind that if someone (anyone, but let’s face it, particularly a parent, and even more particularly my mum) were telling me that everything I knew to be true was false, I would push back SO hard, almost in principle. (Also remember that terfs are “the bad guys” and so in the mind of the righteous, you must push back and educate.)

So keeping those things in mind, I drip fed, and I tried to do it in the guise of asking questions and then very deliberately not bothering to insert my opinion, but allowing him to draw his own conclusions. It helps if the conversations are had while you are both doing something, and preferably if you don’t have to make eye contact (car journeys are v good).

So one conversation went like this: “You know those transwomen on the internet who like, roll around and moan and say how terrible their period pains are?” (I think DS did not in fact know about such people, but they served their purpose…) “Do you think they are doing it for like, a joke, which is totally offensive to women? (DS professes to be a feminist.) “Or do you think they actually don’t understand their own anatomy? Because you know, obviously to have a period you have to have a uterus, and they haven’t managed to successfully transplant one of those yet so…”

And then I moved the conversation on to something else. And didn’t say what I thought or ask what he thought, or indeed say anything further at that point. Plant it and then leave it. You can come back at some later point and do the same again, with some different “weird thing” you’ve “just noticed”. And just keep nudging at those bricks.

Also: Someone somewhere said about cult deprogramming, that one of the key tactics is to enable the cult member to see the cult/cult leader as ridiculous. When someone is in it you cannot logic them out of it. But if you can get them to glimpse the ridiculousness, it helps to crack the edifice. So try for things that would make a true believer look like a lunatic, if examined in isolation - like transwomen suddenly growing uteruses.

I’m really sorry you’re going through this though. It is heartbreaking to think that your child, who knows you and knows you are a clever, thoughtful, person, has just decided that because you don’t buy everything they’re selling you must be a bigot. Sending hugs and strength.

In general yes, but the position is complicated by the GRA which says that, if a man gets a GRC, their sex becomes that of a woman, i.e. they become female. If you put that together with the Equality Act, which says that a woman is a female of any age, the most obvious interpretation is that a man with a GRC is a woman. I hope the courts will agree that is nonsense, but that remains to be seen.

So it looks like the adjournment will mean that NC will have the impact assessment to hand, or more importantly the lack of one, when she cross-examines IB.

That adjournment is looking better all of the time. Especially since NHS Fife will be seeking to reach a settlement for which they won't be willing to make a convincingly appealing offer to get Sandie Peggie to accept, and will be going frantic.

IANAL but I think this was the case before the GRA muddied the waters by making it possible for a man to legally be seen as a woman and a woman to be legally seen as a man. Then later the PC of GR in the Equality Act, for which one does not need a GRC, only to propose to undergo changes (not necessarily medical, it's very vague what these changes are so allows for just saying so, basically) to live in the acquired gender or however it's worded. Might be wrong but I think the Equality Act is the only legislation that defines 'man' and 'woman' because the GRA which came 6 years earlier conflates 'sex' and 'gender' throughout (possibly quite deliberately) and so made a right mess of what 'man' and 'woman' mean legally. I do not know if anywhere in legislation it is spelled out that 'male' and 'female' can mean 'gender' rather than sex. The GRA is so poorly drafted that it seems usefully open to interpretation by those who wish to use it for their own agendas, and seems to have been used to make the PCs of GR and sex even more confusing in how they are to be applied in practice.

The problem here is that the Scottish Greens pushed this and the SNP acquiesced.

When I was still in my permanent teaching post, certain LGBTQ+ youth organisations were coming into secondary schools...I'm not even sure who sanctioned that and I was in middle management. I do know that a local councillor castigated my then HT for not having LGBTQ posters up in the school.

So far as the criminals that I mentioned are concerned, Fife seems to have quite a network advising one another of how to get "easy" prison time and so on.

There was a lot of publicity at the time of the Peter Laing/Paris Green murder trial and it was widely known that he was placed in the women's system while his two associates landed in the male prison system.

Apart from the obvious reason why a man would want to be in prison with women, the women's prison system here apparently has a much greater emphasis on rehabilitation and normally has a much more comfortable set-up than male prisons. As is the case elsewhere, there's a far lower percentage of dangerous criminals in the women's system. It's no wonder that predatory men are claiming to be women.

If the Humanities actually taught real queer theory, rather than its bastardisation by Stonewall and their ilk, they'd realise that most of the work of their overlord, Foucault, adopts a constructivist approach and for the most part takes a very gender critical position.

And then where would we be?

I think you are, unfortunately, right, NotAGentleReminder.

Once the law created the 'legal fiction' of somebody who was born biologically male, who actually remains biologically male, but is now legally a woman, it made a total nonsense of equality legislation.

Nothing short of returning to legal definitions of 'man' 'woman' 'male' 'female' to the most straightforward biological definitions [yes DSDs, but..] based on XX and XY chromosomes is going to tidy this up.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It would be wonderful if we could achieve that on this side of the Atlantic without it being wrapped around a wrecking ball aimed at the institutions of state

My stepgrandaughter attended an English uni. She did a minor in Gender Studies for her first year.

Her uni best friend had a double mastectomy at the age of 20 after coming out as a transman... When my stepdaughter voiced her disquiet over such a drastic operation, her daugher replied "Oh Mum! You're soooo transphobic!"

I’m not sure about this. The Workplace Regulations came into place in 1992. Legal sex was introduced as part of the GRA in 2004. As the workplace regs were in place I’m of the understanding that the GRA couldn’t just override them but had to work with them. They were obviously then based on bio sex. If the workplace regulations were repealed after 2004 then this may be a different story. Just an opinion.

They've walked right into every bit of this wholly self-inflicted public humiliation, haven't they?

NC must be laughing her socks off - or probably would be, were it not that it's yet another poor woman's livelihood and wellbeing at stake.

The more I read of this mess the more admiration I have for Sandie Peggie.

Many universities make completing equality elearning mandatory as a condition of registration, but those equality courses can often include 'gender' instead of 'sex' and TWAW shite. You cannot be exempted, not even on the grounds of religious beliefs. No one seems to challenge this.

We need to return to not needing any legal definitions for man, woman, male and female because those words are commonly understood to only have one meaning. So much time and money is going to continue to be wasted on lawfare arguing about the meaning of previously commonly understood words which name/describe the reality of what sex people are, if the law continues to allow for different or opposite meanings of those words by saying man and woman, male and female can have a sex-based meaning and a 'gender'-based meaning which is different from or opposite to the sex-based meaning. It always should have been seen as completely nuts and not written into legislation at all. And birth certificate mistakes for people with later diagnosed DSDs not used as a reason for anyone to be able to legally falsify theirs.