NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #33

[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 resumed 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] by 5pm on Wednesday 9 July. Detailed instructions were provided here:

drive.google.com/file/d/16-9POEZ7yHWUr6EmbfquJZO18Gv78bSm/view

The hearing is being live tweeted by x.com/tribunaltweets and there's additional information here: tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-005 and tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-bd6. 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.ph/WSSjg.

An alternative to Twitter is to use Nitter: nitter.net/tribunaltweets or nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets

Links to previous threads #1 to #29 can be found in the header of thread #30.

Thread 30: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5375337-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-30
Thread 31: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5375819-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-31
Thread 32: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5376072-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-32

Perfect description.

Surely it doesn't help their recovery? How can they be expected to shed delusions if they're being told that James is a woman?

It’s outing not as in a one-time nobody-knew-until-that-moment sense. It’s outing as in a continuous, ongoing, grinding recognition of reality that brings them down from the fantasy. If you’re only able to be content while the fantasy is in place around you, I see why not using the wrong sex toilets is a problem. Each brick depends on every other brick to hold it in place. Take away one brick and the edifice is weakened throughout.

So true. It makes it a lot harder for them to keep denying reality. Using gender-neutral toilets outs them to themselves as much as to anybody else.

Moving on a bit, I notice from the Herald article that a computer forensics expert called Jim Borwick is due to give evidence on Tuesday. Anyone know what that's about? I assume it's to do with identifying who wrote which email when and that kind of thing - though the article also says that Peggie's team's request for Upton to hand his phone over to forensics had been denied by the judge.

Which, I think, is why it confuses people. For the analogy to apply, the client is the one on the cab rank.

Upton gave the phone over so the judge didn't have to order it.

Well exactly. When you are questioning your own sense of reality and you have people telling you that the obvious man in front of you is actually a woman, it doesn't help at all. It's cruel and undermines trust in the people you are supposed to work with towards your recovery.

They think the nurses are lying to them. Or they accept the nurses are telling the truth and think they have actually gone mad and are hallucinating a man instead of seeing a woman. It's not right at all.

Edited for spelling and missed words..again

It's the price of a sense of self that relies on everything else changing to reflect what you want. That's why it's not comparable with being gay. Being gay changes nothing externally. If I turned gay overnight, nobody would know unless I told them, and even then it would require absolutely nothing from them. But to be trans (setting aside those reasonable people who don't make these demands and simply dress or present in certain ways) is to require everyone around you to change their behaviour and language and even what it means to be them. It is entirely external and requires the right reflection from everyone. That's why you aren't allowed to do or say anything that suggests you don't believe or perceive that this person is the opposite sex. It's an identity that lives in what everyone else thinks, so they can't be allowed to express wrongnthink.

It is the most inauthentic way to exist. And it's why they claim "genocide" and "extinction" when you don't think the way they want you to.

If you Google Jim Borwick and forensics you'll get his cv. Military police followed by civilian investigator for, inter alia, the DEA. Sounds like a serious chap.

This concept leads to my philosophical question about whether it’s possible for someone to be trans if they were the only human. If there was no ‘other’ sex, could gender dysphoria be a thing?

If the answer is no, then it cannot be other than a mental health issue.

The GMC issue is he waited however long before raising his concerns. He potentially put other people at risk.

He's created a wee hole for himself

Where can I find this?

Which is surely why he needs to be investigated? Either he trumped it up to smear Sandie and destroy her career, or he truly believed she was a danger to patients yet didn't report it in a timely manner. Doesn't this need to be looked at?

Yes, but "peaking" is active, and that is what many of us have done. We have peaked.

😲

https://x.com/alasdair_clark/status/1946913643141968331?s=46

“EXCLUSIVE: NHS Fife chief faces internal revolt over 'disastrous' handling of Sandie Peggie case

• Insiders call on chief executive Carol Potter to resign
• Health board reveals it agreed controversial statement with legal representatives”

The board authorised the statement(s).

🤦🏻‍♀️

I have nothing 🤷🏻‍♀️

Amazing. Not in a good way 😬

[Devil's advocate]
I imagine a possible defence could be "It felt like she left surprisingly quickly every time I arrived. But at first I thought she was just in a rush, or it was coincidence, so I didn't mention it and waited to see if it seemed to be a pattern."

Also, with all the publicity, people's interest may be piqued and then they may move on the being peaked

Look further up the quote chain you used. GargoylesOfBeelsebub included an archive link to the article you want.

Let's see if I am allowed to upload it. FWIW I typed Fife Hospital phase 3 into the Fife planning portal (and scrolled through to Ground Floor plans)

Has anyone managed to archive the new Courier article about the internal staff pressure on the CEO to resign? I can't manage to do it - just getting a 'not found' notification.

@ThatCyanCat Who else would report it? His clinical supervisor could - oh, wait that was Kate Searle. She has a lot of questions to answer and I have an important commitment the day she gives evidence, There will probably be at least one whole thread to read! People did complain and were told they had no agency.

@MyAmpleSheep it will be very early in TT's substack, maybe first day. I could be wrong - at the time I think Naomi was focused on there being two investigations and Fife having disclosed at least some of what they did send late. So she may just have been after proof of 2 investigations and the non existent risk assessment. Anyway she certainly caught big fish.

I found the emails from KS just indescribably awful and almost unbelievable. I have some HR background, and ime the most junior HR officers know about the need to keep an open mind in any employee dispute and be careful what is put in writing.

So: employers need both to be fair and impartial, and be seen to be fair and impartial.

The kindest thing to be said about KS is that maybe as her expertise was in medicine rather than management best practice she did not understand the implications of sending those emails. But as a manager of people she really should have known. Or had the humility to understand what she didn't know and seek expert advice before doing anything.

Speaking of experts: where was HR in all this? Did they give any sound advice and if so was it ignored? Gruesome as KS email was, the situation may have been salvageable if somebody responsible & knowledgeable had taken control early on; but it seems there was no such person or if there were, nobody was heeding them.

The utter incompetence (or corruption?) of the whole of NHSF management has been laid bare by this case.

Yes, and its the GMC who'll investigate, nothing to do with Sandie.

Its like a Laurel n Hardy cartoon, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into.

Presumably one of the grounds for Sandie taking Fife to tribunal is that they didn't follow due process in suspending her so when the disclosure from Fife didn't have paperwork that showed them diligently following procure NC could infer that either a) they didn't follow procedure because procedure should involve recording who said what, what happened when etc or b) they didn't follow procedure but did have a record of what steps they did take and haven't submitted them because they know they show they abandoned any attempt to follow protocol because they were all screaming burn the witch. I suppose an option c) is possible that they did dot all the i's and cross all the t's but have accidentally forgotten to show their working. Naomi took a punt on a or b being most likely but probably didn't in her wildest dream image quite how quickly any attempt at due process was dropped in favour of yelling witch.