Peggie case: controversial opinion

[SecretNameforMN]

I realise I will probably be lambasted for this and be forced to change my username, but I am going to say it anyway because I genuinely believe it.

I've been a feminist for over 50 years; my entire adult life, in fact.

I am posting because I want to discover whether any other woman, even just ONE, agrees with me.

I have followed the Peggie case very closely and am struck my the fact that it is WOMEN who have taken sides with Upton and against Peggie, who coddled him and suspended her and are now beclowning themselves during their court testimony, as well as exposing their anti-female bias. AFAIK everyone who has given testimony against her is, sadly, female. It horrifies me of course to see women in power siding with men against other women.

I have come to suspect that this debacle would not be happening if all the people in power (those who enabled Upton to use the nurse's changing rooms and those who suspended and who have publicly turned against Sandie Peggie) had been male instead of female.

I suspect if all these positions had been held by males they would not have been driven by the social conditioning to "be kind" to a man who, having had no surgery and not even bothering to get a GRC was in effect just a cross-dresser. I suspect they would have worried about the optics of being men punishing a woman for not wanting to undress in front of someone they knew to be a heterosexual, genitally intact male. I suspect they would have checked the legal position more thoroughly, and, lastly, I don't think a married man with a senior position in the NHS would stand up in court and say he didn't know if he was male or female.

Please don't respond if you are just going to pile on an avalanche of vitriol onto me. I am not looking for that: I am just wanting to find out if there are any other women on here who suspect there may be even a modicum of possiblity that my suspicions may have good cause.

I’m not a woman but I do agree with you.

If I may add a controversial opinion of my own: it’s a cop out to say “social conditioning made us do it”.

Yes, but just like violence in men, social conditioning is not the only cause. There are deep-seated differences in trait distribution between men and women that have been evolved into us over hundreds of thousands of years.

Plenty of the harms of the trans issue come from male-typical and female-typical behaviour. The violence and entitlement of males and the social enforcement of females.

He would probably have had to abide by the guidance that would have been issued by HR, which itself would have been based on advice, presumably legal advice, that BU was entitled to use the room, on the basis that it was the changing room for women, ie anyone who identified as one.

I would love to know what lawyers have been advising about the Equality Act all this time.

Fife has notably not sent any men apart from Upton to give evidence on the substantive issues. (There will be a man from IT appearing in court, but that seems to be someone from Information Security to verify that the search and disclosure process was thorough.)

We've heard the names of senior male staff involved but they have put mainly women up to answer for the debacle.

I agree. Girls are having to put up with far too much in mixed sex schools and are increasingly unsafe. I believe there has been research showing that girls do better in single sex while boys do better in mixed sex so no prizes for guessing why we have mixed sex. I was lucky enough to go to a girls’ school and I thank my lucky stars I didn’t have to deal with the exposure to porn, assaults and general misogyny from young boys prevalent in schools today.

I think you’re spot on!

Indeed, it is interesting that this stereotype exists

Women cannot be immune from criticism just for being women

I suspect if all these positions had been held by males

Males like Dr Upton?

I agree OP, it’s depressing but true. Nothing like a determined handmaiden. Males struggle to win arguments on this as they can’t claim to understand a woman’s perspective of being alarmed at male presence in private spaces, but these women are fully captured and determined in their disgusting disregard for their fellow ACTUAL woman.

Of course not. However, you’re just spreading a mindless right-wing meme with little basis in fact. The stereotype doesn’t exist at all. Do you have some kind of evidence that it does?

Well, most TiMs support it and they are men. Judging on crowds there do seem to be a disproportionate number of young women - which is worrying.

I also was lucky enough to go to a girls' school, mostly staffed by women, too. I came out sure of my worth and have never acquired this idea that women are not 'people' to the extend I remember not understanding a Joanna Russ story about men arriving on a planet inhabited by only women and asking where 'all the people' were!
I would advocate for single sex schools for all children. Then girls get a proper education and no hassle from boys.

I think there is a special place in hell for women who support men like Upton over their female colleagues (and who beclown themselves pretending they don’t know what sex they are), but I think in Peggie’s case it is mostly reflective of more women than men working in the NHS.

I’m a lawyer and (apart from HR), there are more senior men than women. In every firm I’ve worked for since this bonkers ideology got a grip on the world, there has been a gay male TRA heading up the staff Pride network and championing the rights of their fellow men to trample over women’s rights. I have never seen a senior lesbian lawyer do similar (maybe partly because there are so few “out” senior women, but that’s a discussion for another day).

The tribunal case linked to above has been well summarised by Maya Forstater on Twitter, there were plenty of men in the civil service willing to enforce this nonsense.

x.com/mforstater/status/1947730180489023877?s=46&t=X1ma7_QJJ_PDVp-SdExAEg

In the civil service world, this is just an estimation, but actual trans people are a distinct minority of the TRA caucus. Not saying there aren't some who cause issues, but numerically they're quite thin on the ground.

I'd say the ideological enforcers are:

• gay men who run the LGBT+ networks
• parents of trans-identified children, who are extremely evangelical about the cause
• female handmaidens who run the "gender networks", which is the current rebrand for what used to be women's networks - in any case they march in lockstep with the LGBT+ networks

We might add senior leaders who are very anxious to champion inclusivity, but they tend to gravitate towards certain characteristics - sexual orientation, gender identity, to some extent race. (A colleague, a Jamaican woman, once told me she'd never felt so black as in her current job - not because of hostility, but because of white bosses trying to be inclusive in a really clunky way.)

I hate to be cynical, but I can't help noticing that rainbow lanyards and Black History Month are a lot cheaper than sorting out chronic issues around, let's say, age or disability. Sex doesn't get much of a look in, but perhaps female senior leaders feel that's been sorted.

Folks there is a much simpler explanation that requires no need to resort to gender stereotypes to explain. My understanding is that NHS Fife’s workforce is 88% female. That means of every 10 employees there, 8 are women. So of course almost everyone involved in this clusterfuck is female.

A question for you.

I'm assuming that over the last decade or so, battalions of lawyers have been giving advice on the Equality Act that due to the recent Supreme Court decision turned out to be wrong.

Or was there likely to have been correct advice that was ignored because it wasn't the advice people wanted to hear?

HR departments across the UK would have been advised on this? Or recieved guidance that was based on advice?

Respectfully, I disagree, OP. Woke mysoginy is so outrageous, stupid and clownish, that it makes us forget what the old-school mysoginy looks like.

I’ve cut from the OP to here. And I want to say I tend to agree. If all women had said ‘No’ collectively, we wouldn’t be here. The vast majority of women have been frustratingly silent, but, an alarming number have swallowed the #BeKind KoolAid. Not just the weird fawning of Kate Searle, but, an example:

I worked in NHS X-ray. You should avoid irradiating pregnant women, ‘nipples to knee’. Prior to this bollox, the question was: ‘(Women, 12-55)- Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?’. Please sign here, and I will countersign it. And scan it onto your record.

Then, post ‘all this’, it became ALL 12-55. So, small, alone female radiographers now had to, of a Saturday midnight, make a lairy, drunk 45 year old trucker called Steve sign a declaration that he wasn’t pregnant before his X-ray, countersigned by the radiographer. Maddening him and debasing her professional credentials.

But here’s the kicker. Our 26-38 yr old band 7 female managers would CHECK ON MONDAY THAT WE HAD COMPLIED. They’d fall over themselves to do so, emailing the miscreants to chide them for wrongthink. Abetted by a union that warned us to ‘uphold trans rights’.

It deeply pains me to know that large numbers of #BeKind TWAW are actually women.

Yes, men don’t have to ‘care’ about this, even unto the reality that many are quite happy to offload these ‘cissy’ men into the female estate. (Spell-checker fought me hard on that word!). In the same way as there are men quite happy to distance themselves from ‘lesser’ gay men. Or, in heavily patriarchal societies, will regard their Khelifs as girls as no boy is ‘like that’ (til sports scouts come sniffing around).

Note, no one is suggesting the men #BeKind, are they? But they don’t have to when enough women are rolling over.

TiM's are actually a small number of people.

Statistically it's female dominated. Not a landslide by any means, but more women than men are adherents of GI.

That really just sends the question back though - why is it that female dominated sectors have fallen so hard for GI?

A combination of female socialisation to ‘be kind’ and fawning as a means to try and reduce risk to themselves?

Or is it that male dominated sectors (eg banking) have completely fallen and women’s objections are just not heard at all?

I’m not an employment lawyer but I work in firms that do that type of law, for big (and small) employers.

I’m afraid almost all of them seem to have been getting the law wrong and essentially following “Stonewall law” when advising clients. That includes sports lawyers advising governing bodies on “inclusion” despite the obvious safety & fairness issues with men competing in women’s sports.

As you can see from the thread on a man trying to join the WI, and the response from the corporation of London re: swimming ponds, there are still many lawyers peddling nonsense in this area to clients. Whether that is because their clients have instructed them to come up with the best legal argument for including men (in the knowledge that they’ll likely lose in court, as their solicitor understands the impact of FWS), or whether the solicitors themselves really really think their interpretation of the law is correct and have told their clients they might win, is another question.

Why has this happened? Same as for the rest of society, institutional capture and a “be kind” culture, plus consequences for anyone who dares step out of line. Easier for an employment lawyer to peddle the accepted nonsense than stand up to the firm’s position.

you made absolutely no concession to being seen as female.

That does at least makes sense.

But then why support an ideology that insists that your gender identity is at the very core of your being and that you must remind people of it in every email communication?

Sometimes I think 'be kind' is used synonymously with 'know your place'.

Precisely.