NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #25

[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
Thread 23: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5285690-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-23
Thread 24: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5301295-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-24

Continuation thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5335861-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-26

Please would posters continue posting on this thread to fill it up before moving over to the next thread. Thanks!

Thanks @nauticant It's normally me who strays onto the new thread so I promise I will hold myself back this time!

Thanks to everyone for the ongoing updates and discussion, it's been a busy few weeks for me so just properly catching up now.

@prh47bridge but isn’t the GLP the grift that keeps on taking the money and running - so that’ll be a win-win every time! I think the ‘no debate’ was a better strategy but unfortunately for the fox killer it seems the courts aren’t so keen - so I’m looking forward to this latest case!

@Hermiaxx - You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment!

GLP had an ad in the Law Soc Gazette recently. Looking for reinforcements ….

A lot of the delays in this case came from NHS FIFE not disclosing relevant material. Dr Upton contributed to that but he certainly was not the entire reason for the delay as there were NHS FIFE documents not disclosed, including the ones that led to a request to add another respondent.

Hopefully that will be reflected in the costs order.

I'm so sorry @Hoardasurass - what utter bastards NHS fife are.

If you have the email correspondence regarding Haldane I wonder if it's worth sending it to SP's lawyers? May help them pierce the 'we didn't know', 'we're desperately confused', 'we thought it was reasonable to defer to an EDI person with no legal experience rather than consulting actual lawyers and expect this to be entirely consequence free' defence that seems to be becoming the go to now.

Sounds like you have grounds for a legal case yourself if you wished to pursue it.

Give PALS utter hell about their law breaking behaviour! If they want a meeting I'd recommend taking a friend with you and ask for you to be able to record it. The SP trial is a good reason as to why you may question them to be acting in good faith - if they are acting in good faith they cannot reasonably object to this I'd think. They've shown themselves to be utterly incompetent, law breaking and without a care about the impact on staff or patients of their gender religion zealotry in the SP trial.

It’s already happened multiple times unfortunately. I have accounts of deaths from schools and hospitals and supermarkets. The problem is that unless the actual family complain and then it is found that the design was the thing that made the difference, then the EHRC won’t help.

It’s common sense that it makes a difference. I know because I saved the life of someone. What frustrates me the most obvious ones - that children have been assaulted in enclosed toilet rooms in the busiest places you could imagine. If the children were able to be seen and heard no one would have let that continue. I am as sure as can be it would have prevented it happening in the first place.

I have no words. Just so sad.

Justice isn't really accessible to anyone who isn't rich and / or has incredible superhuman levels of resilience and organisational capacity (such as Maya Forstater). Someone who's just lost a relative to unsafe toilet design is unlikely to have the resilience or resources to bring it to court.

And supposed regulators seem to be too busy with their rainbow lanyard training and political posturing to actually do their supposed job, despite the vast sums of taxpayers money they absorb.

It's just wrong.

Oh good God.

In my case, my GP told me that she'd request a female gynaecologist for me. She asked my permission to tell them that i have vaginismus.

As I said above, I got a female gynae the ultrasound and biopsy but the first phone call where I was told that my request for a female gynae would lead to a longer wait had an awkward feel to it. This may well be why.

I'm really sorry that you've been through all this.

I agree about it being hard for individuals and families to push without organisations behind them, but I wonder if it is the sort of thing that could arise from a Coronors prevention of future death notice? It would depend on individual coronors issuing the notice, but I monitor the notices in a professional capacity, as do the press and other organisations.

I was thinking about Coroners when I read it too. Surely the background behind the death is exactly what they're looking into?

How can the message be passed onto Coroners to consider in their verdicts?

I’ve just had a very quick scan of the results under the search term toilets, and haven’t yet found anything directly related to toilet design, although arguably it might have been a contributing factor in some of the hospital and mental health deaths.

The link is below if anyone wants to search further, but please do be aware that some of the contents might be distressing. https://www.judiciary.uk/page/4/?s=Toilets+

I’ll keep an eye out moving forward, and if I see anything that crops up - I wonder if it would be worth asking sex matters or another organisation to write to them?

The evidence I have is from newspaper reports, from FOIs and from government reports. I don’t count anything that can’t be proved.

I don’t want to link to individual cases of deaths here. I really don’t think people get that design is a problem as these fully private toilets haven’t been risk assessed as far as I am aware - despite them being the standard secondary school design for the last few years.

Pupils go to the toilets to vape. The fact that 1 in 6 vapes are spiked and that several children have had seizures and stopped breathing shows you what can happen. Luckily this has only been in playgrounds and corridors as far as I know so someone has seen them and cpr has been successful.

As far as sexual assaults go, the numbers have been discussed but no one has linked it up to design. I am an ex teacher. I would never have thought serious sexual assaults and rapes happen so frequently in schools. But high numbers are reported after the event. These must be happening in private areas in the school. In 2015 the BBC investigated and it was discussed in Parliament 600 rapes in 3 years (a school year is 190 days). The location of a rape was a store cupboard. I also have a report in a disabled toilet. The reporters at the time thought the numbers to be an underestimate. Ofsted then looked in 2021 and commented no one was collating and centralising evidence. However they too said sexual abuse was going underreported and should be assumed to be happening. There are lots of stories and reports of sex going on in school unisex toilets but I can’t evaluate that as it could be consensual.

What I have done for schools is to put a lot of the evidence together and it has been sent to several people and organisations. So hopefully, designers and the DfE will start to factor in safety.

As far as getting data, the problem is it doesn’t exist. For example you can get how many deaths/ assaults have happened in public toilets in a county but there’s no way of knowing what design these were. If a newspaper report says disabled toilet or train carriage toilet then I know it was enclosed. I also have no way of knowing who was saved unless it’s reported. Paramedics have told me toilet rooms are where they find people in public and in homes but there are no records as far as I am aware.

What is clear is, and I agree with @CarefulN0w, it can be distressing so I don’t tend to search that often.

A tweet from someone who's been mentioned several times on these threads@sartay

https://x.com/sartay2001/status/1923823638572122554

She has a crowdfunder:

My name is Sarah Holman and I believe single sex facilities are vital for women and that you can’t change sex. I believe I have been discriminated against for having these views.

I've been listening to a few different podcasts and trying to hear different POVs so I am not in an echo chamber. I foolishly tuned into James O'Brien's show from 16th April.

It was really difficult to listen to someone so hostile to women's views but I really listened to what he was saying and it seemed really clear that he had met a trans man at some point in the past, was impressed by them and their committment. He felt a great deal of sympathy and thinks he is "protecting the most vulnerable" who have all had lots of surgery and are in a "vanishingly small number".

It has been really thought provoking. I think trying to challenge the "most vulnerable" rhetoric is very difficult because for most people it is difficult to understand that somone can be both vulnerable and simultaneously a risk to other people. That is not an easy topic to discuss and often involves revealing details about family members which is complicated.

But it is the "vanishingly small number" which struck me.
This is the easiest to deal with by far. Looking at the census data for Scotland from 2022 (who didn't have a whoopsie with their questions) we can see that across the total population, trans folk are 1 in 230 people.
And for under 35s it is 1 in 95 which is a lot higher than even I expected!

So where maybe people previously would have said that it is OK for women to "budge up" when the numbers of trans people are vanishingly small, that doesn't work when the numbers increase to rates of 1 in 100 (and presumably this will rise over time). So third spaces, unisex, are the best way to go...

What I find frustrating is that there is a very easy-to-grasp bit of information that people like JOB find very easy to overlook. That's that the changes in the law over the past couple of decades were for a very particular cohort expected to be about 5000 people, and presumably would have included the transman, and that the cohort making all the noise now, are a very very different group indeed. Keeping oneself ignorant of that key piece of information, or knowing it and making sure never to engage with it, is profoundly dishonest.

Quite! I'd have loved to have phoned in and said - gosh James you're the journalist and I've only been looking into this for a couple of months but what about this 1in95 figure then?

You would soon see if it were dishonesty or ignorance. I always assume the latter until proved otherwise. And I would say that ignorance defo applied to me until very recently - but then again I am not hosting a popular current affairs news programme so it isn't my job to know...

ETA - it was fairly breathtaking ignorance imo tho!

Sarah Holman's tweet was interesting, didnt know that to fly some flags (including at least one pride flag) you need planning permission! I knew you needed it for a flagpole but not that your choice of flags was still limited! There are birthday flags, jolly rogers and all sorts of others flags - but you need specific planning permission to fly them!

Funny how journalists are keen on "protecting the most vulnerable" but entirely ignore that many women are very vulnerable. No interest in protecting them.

Whether now it's 1 in 95 or 1 in 230, that compares with an original number, (the 5000 in circa 2003) of about 1 in 13000. To avoid enaging with that is terrible bad faith, particularly by a jounalist.

It is a balance but third spaces are going to have to be balanced very carefully - unisex are never as safe as single sex so we need to keep unisex numbers down to as little as possible.

The overall impression is they are dirtier and people spend a longer time in them doing things they shouldn’t (and this is from people who want them as well as people who don’t).

Because you have no idea what’s going on in them, there’s no prevention or safeguarding so that’s what we are losing for women, children and medically vulnerable.

I think the ‘most vulnerable’ has been a big part of the issue and the way it's covered. What exactly makes these people the most vulnerable and deserving of the kid glove treatment including the special tone of voice reserved for them? I think it’s actually extremely patronising and it’s out of feeling sorry for them. But why do they feel sorry? Is it because people like JOB think it’s a mental illness rather than an innate state of being?

Anyway, we're just about there so I'll now do the official ribbon cutting for the continuation thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5335861-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-26

@nauticant thank you