NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #46

[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. (Considerable understatement.)

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: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 41: 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: 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
Thread 43: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379979-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-43 25 July 2025 to 27 July 2025
Thread 44: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5380196-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-44 25 July 2025 to 28 July 2025
Thread 45: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5381518-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-45 28 July 2025 to 28 July 2025

I have been thinking about this overnight as well.

As others have said, it may be that there will be a NMC referral for those racist comments.

We know Sandie has a rich backer for this case. I don’t know how necessary it is to have good representation at misconduct hearings, but I should think it helps. It would be very difficult/unwise, I would have thought, to been seen to help her defend herself here.

But how much has Sandie been persuaded to take this case? Hopefully it is entirely her own idea, and she went into it fully aware of what might happen and happy to go through with it. But we also need to recognise that Sex Matters, and others (quite rightly) do want to take these cases. JKR has set up a fighting fund to take them. Just as the GLP also wants to strategically litigate from the other angle.

It all gets so messy. I am clear that all women deserve single sex spaces. I hate to see so many people destroyed in the process.

This is an excellent post. I think many people commenting here are so upset at the group chat revealed yesterday, because they expect a higher level of behaviour from medical professionals. You can expect that with their interactions with patients but they’re people the same as anyone else, some of them will be racists, wife beaters, child abusers, horrible people in general. Having medical qualifications doesn’t make them better human beings than anyone else, it just means that they have skills that the majority of us don’t have and are the people we turn to when we are ill, and many of them are truly compassionate people, but many of them aren’t.

I think we need to stop idealising the medical profession, they do an important, necessary job, and during Covid they were truly inspirational, but they have human frailties the same as the rest of us and we would do well to remember that.

Even after that evidence yesterday, I totally stand by SP, it’s unpleasant that she holds those views but it isn’t a disappointment to me as such because I don’t know her, she isn’t my friend and never will be, but she deserves fair treatment and justice the same as anyone else.

Please stop trying to character assassinate on something which isn't relevant to the case.

Im not doing this at all. The tribunal yesterday covered this, which has also been the main discussion on these threads and the main headline on all news outlets.

it’s baffling how many grown adults can convince themselves that someone joining a conversation and having a different view that them on the very conversation at hand is “irrelevant”, “trolling” and causing “chaos”. Not everyone has to agree with you.

Also, please remember troll hunting is not permissible on this site.

Interruptaron incoming.

Ignore the troll, don’t feed it

I agree with @DuchessofReality that it is disturbing to see so many people destroyed in the process.

This has been a total shit show. All these people who have their reputations completely destroyed publicly. Now granted people like KS and IB were spectacularly stupid and captured to say such fucking dumb things like they don't know their own sex and LN was the classic case of FAFO when clearly motivated by envy and dislike etc, but the case was simple. Should women have the right to SSS.

The fallout from that question (and Fife protecting one entitled man) has been nuclear. Scorched earth. I feel slightly sick.

The only good thing to come out of yesterday is to see the self righteous, holier than thou ‘justice’ warrior LN being called out and taken to task by NC for ‘just joking innit’ about trans and drag queens, laughing at racist jokes as well as disclosing highly confidential patient information.

What a hypocrite.

You just can’t make it up.

It does get messy, but the sunlight and judicial rulings and precedents are important. It wouldn't be necessary if people would just comply with the law and accept reality and women's rights, but they won't, so here we are. I could weep for all the talent, skill, money and time we have lost and continue to lose fighting for women's rights on something so basic and obvious but here we are.

Those jokes were obviously incredibly wrong, but they found an appreciative audience and nobody who accepted them in the chat or laughed at them is above Sandie in that sense. Perhaps we can ask ourselves why a man's wish to undress among non consenting women is upheld more there than anti-racism. And as people keep saying, the jokes don't mean she isn't entitled to a SS CR. That's a right for all women, and men too. We don't save women's rights for women who pass a purity test. She'd have a right to a single sex space if she were in prison. It's not relevant to the case and it looks like mere punishment for fighting and a deterrent for any other woman who wants a SSS.

This is very well expressed

I expect that SP was warned by her legal team that this case could get very nasty for her. But she came into it with nothing to lose. The whole experience has quite possibly changed her as a person. I hope that she has done a lot of self-reflection.

LN will not have had that warning or experience. Her act of petty spite has blown up in her face. She will not have prepared for this. So I do feel a little sorry for her as I do for all fools who fall victim to their own folly.

NHSF HR are probably now busy writing lots of memos and posters. I expect that a lot of informal WhatsApp groups have disappeared overnight.

I’d be interested in when those rumours were circulated from the chat, there’s a good chance they only started once SP was suspended and blood was in the water. I rather suspect it’s not been muttered about for the last 30 years.

Also you don’t need to be a paragon of virtue to claim your rights under the law. It sort of reminds me of Anas Sarwar during the whole Isla Bryson debacle. He said, wildly paraphrasing here, law is blind and everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law, even if they are “at it”. So if he said he’s a woman then it’s women’s prison regardless of crimes subject to a risk assessment of course.

I’m not really buying SP is wildly bigoted based on a forwarded sheet of jokes from a few years ago. That said it shouldn’t matter if she was the grand wizard of the local kkk branch. It doesn’t matter if “no one else minds”. Under the law SP has a right to a single sex space to get changed in.

Its entirely possible to be disappointed in Sandie and also think that Lindsay is a right nasty bitch. I've known many like her - sticking the knife in to advance their own careers or whatnot.
I'm sure more will come out today. As a PP said, the claimant's legal team are much more organised and effective.

I think it's inconceivable that others in that group didn't share similar views, maybe they were a bit more careful what they posted in the group chat but I expect there'd be plenty of cause to raise eyebrows and suck cheeks if we were to examine the full seven years worth. And that's just what's in the group chat, not the real life conversations. They are all tarred with the same brush imo.

I knew Sandie and I were unlikely to have been great pals, great handbag game or not. I also know that there are many people who wouldn’t want to be pals with me, too.

Many of us here share commonalities- jam making, Terry Pratchet, reading choices- but in fact may have huge differences.

That doesn’t mean we don’t all have the right to think all sorts of stuff others wouldn’t like. Even the right to think that transwomen are women in every way that matters.

I asked my adult sons about the contents of their chat groups, what unsavoury stuff would someone come across if they were in SPs position, and how they needed to challenge anything similar. One of them suggested that mine would have ‘blah blah … something … trans’ in. I pointed out WORIADS and I am allowed to say people can’t change sex 🤣

I hope today is more productive than yesterday. I feel all yesterday achieved was highlighting that good nurses can behave badly.

Did SP share an image with the “jokes” on our type them out herself? I think this does make a difference, typing them out takes time and thought while simply sharing an image is very different.

As is “I have these values and if that makes me a racist…” or “I found these funny and if that makes me a racist…”

Straight after a disaster people do share bleak dark jokes. It is partly a coping mechanism and to make sense of the suffering.

If there was nothing else in 7 years I am not sure this makes SP and out and out racist and BAD PERSON. Just someone normal who stepped over the line. As we all do on different topics occasionally. Look at Franky Boyle’s jokes on Down Syndrome- lots of people laughed but looked at in the cold light of day they are distasteful.

editing for spelling.

Who is and isn't allowed to talk to SP about how to approach her recall examination today?

The racist "joke" sharing was back in 2020. I wonder whether she might say - and it might be true - that she's changed her views since then. Her response on the thread to Lindsey seemed mature, as NP was careful to point out. It's easy to imagine that this process itself, focusing on clashes of rights and making it clear that simply classifying people as good or bad doesn't work (you yourself might unexpectedly get classified as bad, even!) may have helped her grow away from knee-jerk prejudiced, eg racist, views. IOW she may have been telling the straight truth when she said on stand, 5 years after the racist "joke" sharing, that she didn't share her husband's views.

So now it's not just, don't write an email you wouldn't want to be cross examined on in court, it's don't send any WhatsApp messages too...?

Shared an image rather than typed up / created herself.

It was always don’t put anything in writing e.g. Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Texts, WhatsApp that you wouldn’t want read out in court.

Just look at Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, the proposed new Chair for EHRC who was asked about donations to Allison Bailey.

I say this to my kids it’s best to consider anything you put on the internet will come back to bite you. In general don’t put snything up thst you wouldn’t like your employer to read.

I’m finding it so hard to keep up with everything.

If I was in a group chat and I saw a racial comment I would challenge it. If I saw repeated racist comments I’d leave the group and have nothing to do with it. Anybody who was in that group chat for years and went on holiday together must share/condone racism.
I am sure most people are the same.

Yup. Am I the only one to have set all my chats to disappearing after yesterday? Can't do much about past foolishness, but can certainly try and limit any potential future damage. I don't particularly think I have anything to hide, but who knows what out-of-context messages would look like to a hostile audience.

Write like everyone is watching....

And go Sandie. You are flawed and human, and strong and tenacious and setting an important legal precedent. Purity (whatever that means) has no place in this argument.

what out-of-context messages

What context would make the racist jokes about the victims in the Pakistan floods not horrifically racist?

Most of us I think could read the clues from long ago that SP held some racist views.

In some ways this is not as bad as I’d imagined as the evidence of sharing terrible stuff, and I won’t even go so far as to label them jokes, is, to say the least, infrequent.

I get why people who had vested their interests in her not holding some racist views are so upset, however. There has been such a ground swell of support for GC from the ET so far that to lose that feels like someone has stabbed you.

It will take time to recover from that wound but we will and I hope the submissions and, ultimately what is set out in the judgement, will help do that.

Let’s not forget that NHSF flattered LN to the point where she felt righteous in order to exploit her in the interests of steering public opinion. They did not care about any risk to her and that risk was huge.

It is inevitable that she will be reported formally for breaking patient confidentiality and that will mean that end of her nursing career.

It is also clear from the evidence that LN held similarly racist views to SP and was also happy to joke with the group around lots of other territory. It is notable that SP did not join in on the LGBTQ stuff or the ‘transphobic’ (in speech marks because this term has been vacated of meaning) stuff.

I don’t think LN went into this thinking she was a human sacrifice but that’s what she was.

There is lots and lots of learning going on in this tribunal. I still very much support SP in this cause as I always knew she held some views which I would heartily disapprove of but I also believe strongly in a pluralist democratic society and if those views didn’t influence her work as a nurse then that is a good thing overall. all the evidence shows she did not let these views influence how she treated patients and colleagues.

So the sharing of racist stuff on a private chat group don’t mean the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that her reason for not wanting DU in f cr was bigotry. Far from it.

Lets pick ourselves up and listen to what she has to says about it and move forward with the SSS cause. Don’t let your hurt in the moment derail you. It doesn’t need to be all in on SPs character.

I agree. The case should hinge on whether SP has a right to a single-sex changing room that includes females and excludes males. That's it.

However, there have been plenty of posts sharing irrelevant info about Upton (including Upton's parents) and wanting to paint Upton as a baddie. And conversely, wanting to paint Peggie as a working class, salt of the earth Fifer.

I was reading the thread as the nurse yesterday was giving her testimony, and there were multiple posters saying 'This is hearsay' / 'I don't believe it' when it was very clear the nurse was saying she directly heard SP say racist, abhorrent things, and there are time-stamped texts of SP sharing racist jokes.

SP holds appalling views. That doesn't change my opinion on whether a space is 'single sex' if it includes male and female people. However, it's fair to reflect that this thread also has dipped into black and white thinking about Peggie (as a person) vs Upton (as a person), as opposed to the simple merits of the case.