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.

It the tribunal evidence shows there was no policy and no HR guidance - simply a bit of google search which disregarded the 1992 Act and equalities legislation.

@Jellycatspyjamas @SlipperyLizard Yes I wonder to what extent lawyers get consulted at all on these matters.

I don’t work in the area of HR at all, but my impression has been that it’s ‘slipped the net’ and turned into something of a separate universe, which runs mostly according to its own ethics and guidelines.

While nominally it reflects the law, my impression is that in practice law is actually only paramount either when it comes to the helicopter view (don’t discriminate) or the worm’s eye view (how do we defend this particular case) – and that in reality the day-to-day is mostly codes, manuals and best practices. If that’s right, then I can imagine lawyers don’t actually get called on to check those things very much?

That could also explain why the response to the Supreme Court decision in FWS has been largely ‘we must wait for clarity from the forthcoming EHRC guidance’. To us it may seem axiomatic that the SC decision is the final word, but from within the HR universe it might just look like one of a number of possible sources, and not even necessarily the most important one either.

I agree @Underthecanopy a lot of the time these matters are left to HR departments, who have fully embraced the nonsense. See Isla Bumba etc - people totally unqualified for a role and navigating legal questions based on feelings of kindness and “I’m liaison”. But I’m not convinced that if legal advice had been sought, it would have been correct.

The risk of hurting the feelings of trans identifying men has always been seen as more dangerous than the risk of disregarding women’s rights to safety, privacy and dignity in single sex spaces.

@SlipperyLizard “The risk of hurting the feelings of trans identifying men has always been seen as more dangerous than the risk of disregarding women’s rights to safety, privacy and dignity in single sex spaces”

I’d say it’s more that, once asserting the latter became accepted as an example of the former, there was no way out other than to deny there was a conflict at all.

Ultimately this might be about where we strike the balance between prioritising the group or prioritising the individual. The more we as a society have moved towards the extreme end of prioritising the individual, the less we are able to articulate why any individual shouldn’t be able to get what they want. The more so if pre-judging anyone is the biggest taboo there is.

In that context a concrete example of harm (hurt feelings) is inevitably going to win out over an abstract example (infringing dignity) – especially in an area like HR the very purpose of which is protecting individuals.

Possibly because of 'be kind' socialisation. There is also the problem that girls and women have it hammered into their heads that men come first.

I reckon they feel obliged to demonstrate that they have no truck with the "weaker" women, that they have crossed over into the "correct" viewpoint and aren't going to cause any problems if a trans woman comes along.

The NHS is mainly staffed by women, so it's not a surprise that most of the people involved were women.

Men are employed in higher proportions at higher levels. High enough to throw their (female) juniors under the bus whwn there's an incident rather than taking the flak themselves.

Don't assume that men weren't involved simply because they're not being dragged into the tribunal. The head of HR and head of nursing are both men. I don't know the former's position on this but the latter did indeed stand with Upton, without proper investigation of the events or the legal position. He appears to have been instrumental in the suspension and to have joined the chorus of condemnation.

Sorry, Jamie Doyle is head of acute nursing rather than overall head of nursing.

Read his reaction here and see if you think Sandie would have done better to report the problem to him rather than her female line manager: www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/sandie-peggies-boss-wanted-report-35626027