NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #23

[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
Thread 22: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5280174-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-22

she just finds him irritating because he would lecture the hind leg off a donkey, so keeps their interaction as short as possible

That alone would make leaving changing rooms and patient rooms as soon as safely possible totally reasonable! And 'being a crashing bore' isn't a protected characteristic.

Ah, that makes sense - I stand corrected, thank you.

@KnottyAuty, my apologies, we still need your crunching skills!

Where do I go to report an Orange Walk? Sorry, what, they’re ok are they? Police escort for them…? Ah right, I get it, Scotland.

Not entirely true. A very small number of actual women have been convicted of rape under "joint enterprise".

It is shocking. We need to get to the bottom of this.

@KnottyAuty love the stats.

I would laugh except that The Troubles really isn't funny.

If I understand right, the the Scottish Hate Crime Act specifically excluded religious hate crime. This is apparently not uncommon in Scotland. Why do we think they excluded it?

Because there isn't enough prison space in the whole of the UK to accommodate the crowd of an Old Firm derby.

Sorry - that's not linked into anything I have found - but in a suitably Caroline Criado Perez style, the elephant in the room is of course that most of these crimes are by males...

But I had a quick look and found this from 2013 in Wales:

(pp7) The gender of hate crime offenders is overwhelmingly male, albeit participation in hate offences motivated by sexual orientation, age and disability, involves female participation in around 18% of cases.

https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/58880/1/understanding-who-commits-hate-crime-and-why-they-do-it-en.pdf

So if you follow that logic, trans people need separate unisex facilities for their own safety - because being in the women's also comes with a fairly high risk which is separate and different from the need for women's needs for female-only changing rooms.

DU reported this as a hate incident - so the Sandie Peggie case could be used to show why it's not safe to assume that trans people will be safe from hate crime in the ladies CR... we all need to campaign for trans safety in the unisex room away from the horrid horrid TERFs.

For the same reason they waffled on about why they weren't including misogyny against women on it.

Because there wouldn't be enough police to go round to arrest all the sectarian numpties or all the men committing misogyny against women.

However men in dresses were allowed protection. Because of COURSE they were...

I actually had an interesting chat this morning about an incident of homophobic abuse that was caught on store CCTV and ended up in court with the perpetrator charged with a crime (didn’t get details of exactly which crime, unfortunately). It is great that we now take such abuse seriously. What was interesting was that the perpetrator did not actually know that the victim was gay but assumed - as it happened, correctly - that he was gay based on his appearance and demeanour. I think thus does demonstrate that we have a legit problem with how gender non-conforming people are viewed, especially gender non-conforming males. There is an issue and for that reason it is right that the law seeks to protect such individuals. But it simply means you should be allowed to go about your business undisturbed as a gender non-conforming person … not that you actually become the other sex! It’s the conflation of that with actual sex change that is the issue…

Typing on phone - but hopefully you get my gist!

disclaimer: of course I know that not all gender non-conforming people are gay and vice versa etc etc . Just so happened that the two coincided here which made me think about how lots of ignorant people still can’t handle either of the two things!

Yes I checked those numbers too... english born residents are 7% of the Scottish population and subject to a lot of abuse - eg bus driver hauled out of buss and beaten for wearing an english rugby shirt, verbal abuse so common that english bastard in parlance is barely noticed. It's like scotland's grubby secret - so all this crap about hate crime is just baffling when there is such antipathy towards the neighbours

Hmm. Indeed.

I came back to Scotland having been driven away by this nonsense hoping things might have improved since the 80s… I was disappointed!

I think you are being generous - not sure my creative accounting would be classed as "stats"

Can anyone point me towards an equalities risk assessment template please? I'll have a go at drafting one and we can crowd source the info here...

I know but that is very rare. The error in assuming that all rapists are male is so small that it won't make any difference for the kind of calculations being done on this thread.

DU waffled on about sex being nebulous. THIS is the reason that even if the many and varied markers of sex he alleges are relevant were relevant (and obviously the jury is out on that), the only thing that actually matters from a crime perspective is genitalia.

www.uhbristol.nhs.uk/files/nhs-ubht/UHBristol%20EIAguidance%20June09V3.pdf

@KnottyAuty - this one is for Bristol, I guess it might also be possible to look for one specific to each area.

Love the question, have you identified a high negative impact on any group? (One assumes women aren't an important enough group to qualify).

Actually this one is NHS Fife - www.nhsfife.org/media/5rj9nvdq/nhs-fife-equality-impact-assessment-toolkit-1.pdf

Helpfully defines sex as male/female

IANAL and will defer to @prh47bridge for an informed response if that’s OK.

However it also states:
Sexual orientation: lesbian; gay; bisexual; homosexual, transgender, heterosexual
The Equality Act 2010 calls them transexuals but why is transgender lumped in with sexual orientation?

Very good point. How transphobic.

Oh, they haven’t a clue, have they? It’s just spitting out random words from inside your head isn’t it…

It isn't compulsory but NC may want to recall DU for further cross examination in this situation.