NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #43

[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 had been intended to be 28 July with 2 days of submissions from counsel meaning that the hearing was to have ended on 30 July. However, it became apparent as the hearing progressed that this schedule wouldn't be followed.

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 #40 can be found in this thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 41: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379334-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-41 24 July 2025 to 25 July 2025
Thread 42: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379820-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-42 25 July 2025 to 25 July 2025

I’m very impressed with all the jam makers. I don’t make jam but I used to have a good friend who did, and she would gift me jars. Then I confessed to her that I didn’t believe women had penises and she doesn’t even talk to me anymore, let alone bring me baked goods and homemade jam. Sad times. I am distraught.

The only acceptable cream for a scone is clotted cream, which is quite far down the road to butter! Counts as butter to me and goes before the jam (even though I am from Cornwall thus committing County heresy)

I tend to agree with this. Trying to spread clotted cream on top of jam is a hiding to nothing.

Generally jam then cream. I do not understand those who do butter and jam and cream. Bleugh.

I am so, so sorry.

Had a Pimms Royale in hand, which can be my only excuse.

I shall crawl away and chastise myself.

I sometimes make jam but mainly make mixed fruit compôte and freeze it for later.

My main hobby is collecting bits and pieces from gardens and fields (and mole hills, they're always worth investigating) and identifying them. I can waste hours doing that. I pick up ceramic shards, buttons, marbles, bits of soapstone pencil, pipe stems and bowls, shoe segs, fossils and whatnot. You can learn a surprising amount about the history of land use by what you find in the soil and gardens in particular will slowly tell you a story.

Jam always comes before cream imo. It balances better as you have the sweet and flavourful thing in between two things that are less sweet and more texture than flavour.

I'm hopelessly behind on this thread but was looking for my next read and started on Small Gods which I'm enjoying a lot. My first Terry Pratchett after I did not finish one that my pre teen boyfriend gave me (when I was also a pre teen lol).

Oh yes and my most important point that I forgot to add...I am not in the UK and where I live, like most countries I believe, we don't get clotted cream. I've been out for afternoon tea a few times and they serve the scones with whipped cream 🤢😭😭

Never made it myself but apparently quite easy to make clotted cream -

https://www.smeguk.com/news/recipes/homemade-clotted-cream.html

(I know that doesn't help if you're out for afternoon tea)

Obviously clotted cream is best, but if that weren't available I wonder whether a full fat creme fraiche would work, or would it be too sour?

I'm sure he does believe he's a woman. He believes there's newer betterer understanding of what a woman is that's far more significant and meaningful than boring old body sex and that since people with boring old body sex are far too boring and dull to understand it they just need to get with the program, take it on trust and do as they are told.

He thinks if he can trap women who object by changing meanings of words and pretending not to know what the old meaning were anymore so that anything they say gets twisted, that somehow means the actual reality about which they were talking about is no longer real.

It convinces people, for a while, because most people start by assuming good intent. But the longer it goes on the stronger the back-of-mind feeling that this isn't right gets. Eventually everyone peaks.

All anyone needs to remember is that is even if the word "woman" really isn't specifically female, plenty of people still are, so even if TW are ultimately successful in distorting the meaning of the word Woman to include their non-female selves they still aren't creating a justification to treat them as female, they are just creating a vancy in language and culture for new words and new rights and new protections for the people who are.

I expect that after NC suggested requisitioning it, DU saw the benefit in volunteering it but controlling the investigative process and manipulating the evidence. It seems to be his MO in all things so would come naturally. A bonus would be his wife having some (apparently limited) expertise.

Different but still nice. But I like sour, and have been known to use thick soured cream.

wow you lot are gabby

the bar is set high but I'll do my best

Pratchett - I made the mistake of reading his first book first, and it was pretty awful and put me off for years, but then somehow I came across the witches and from then on was well stuck in. He used so much stuff sourced from other writers, current affairs, fairy stories, urban legends, other people's lazy clichés and produced rich, finny, subversive, thoughtful characters. Cherry is a case in point, starting from Tolkien's statement that all dwarves are bearded and that outsiders cannot tell the men from the women and that that's how they intend to keep it (which is why I long ago decided Gimli in LotR is female).

But the last time I read Pratchett was 10 years ago, sitting with my father while he was dying. That was 10 years ago - soon I'll be able to go back and have a marathon re-read.

Other things I re-read include but are not limited to: Jane Austen, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Wind in the Willows, E F Benson, P G Wodehouse, John Buchan, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Nancy Mitford, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Angela Thirkell, Patricia Wentworth, all the girls' school stories, the Katy books, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sara Paretsky, Janet Evanovitch, Rowling/Galbraith.

Current favourites, Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow mysteries (next one due at the end of August).

and I cook and sew and knit and garden and botanise and do historical and archaeological stuff and pander to whims of cats and lounge around watching DVDs of American cop shows (currently NCIS, last up Castle).

but I DON'T DO HENS. My mother was a hen fancier. Never no more.

Yes cream is basically butter and needs to go on first - I only like a dab of jam anyway or sometimes I just have them with cream and no jam! I needed to get that off my chest.

While we are wrapping up this thread and anticipating moving to the next one, may I point out this interesting sentence from DU's phone notes as quoted in the Times article?

"Elspeth tells me she is sorry and that I am not a difficult person. Not [sic] am I being difficult."

Smoking gun... he asked if he's being difficult because he know's he is being difficult. That's why he had to ask "am I the difficult one?". It's the "Am I the baddie" moment.

I tried this and just ended up with a pan of warm double cream. You have to use a specific type of cream for it that has not gone through some form of heat treating or pasteurization and, like clotted cream itself, it's nigh on impossible to find here 😭

I think marscapone is the best substitute but I rarely make scones as it reminds me too much what I am missing.

And boring old body sex has an asymmetrical impact.

If you are male your role in reproduction is so limited that you may never know if you have any offspring. Your sex has much more impact on intangible concepts like status and sexual attraction, so you may conclude that gender is more important than sex.

I love Ridcully (reminds me a bit of my dad and his mates) and I love Granny but I didn't like them being written into being old flames. It felt a bit cheap/fan service, like when Spike and Buffy got together. Shipping is fun for fans but shouldn't drive the author.

If I have a criticism of later Pratchett, it is that the books started to feel like when spin off shows roll in characters from the original show into unrelated plots to please fans. "Is that? Is that? Whoa, it's Fonzie!!!" and the plot gets pulled into a different shape to accomodate the existing lore, like a cannonball on the rubber sheet of narrative bending the stories towards it.

Absolutely this. Furthermore, if the Supreme Court had ruled in favour of the Scottish government, NHS Fife would still have been guilty of breaking the law because Upton didn’t have a GRC.

The picture of a scone in the link above is wrong. You halve a scone and put a thick layer of clotted cream and jam on each half. That way you get more cream and jam per scone, and you can eat it without dislocating your jaw or getting cream down your cleavage as it spurts out.
Clotted cream is basically butter, so goes on first. In the sad eventuality of having only whipped cream, it goes on second, and you pretty much have a dessert rather than afternoon tea.
Strawberry jam is the correct jam for scones with raspberry as an acceptable substitute.
I am in my seventies and by dint of age and wisdom, always right.

If you live in a land without clotted cream, whipped cream on top of your butter and jam (unrepentant) is fine. But if your gluten-free scone (a Good Thing) turns up ten minutes later than all the other scones (less Good) and the allegedly 'nice' ladies you met for tea have scoffed all the cream already that is SAD TIMES.

Ellen MacKenzie.

I always think of her as Macavity.

I think his mental decline really started to show in the final few books. They read like a poor imitation of his best work - feeble storylines, little character development, a lack of the joyful sense of the ridiculous that permeated all his earlier work, and a lack of a deep moral dimension too.
I hope he didn’t have a full appreciation of this.

@DeanElderberry my Danish friend thought I was absolutely bananaboats when I begged to be allowed to feed the chickens when we visited her family farm. She said it was like getting excited about taking the bins out.

😨😨😨