NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #47

[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/womensrights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 41: mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/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/womensrights/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/womensrights/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/womensrights/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/womensrights/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
Thread 46: mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5381640-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-46 28 July 2025 to 29 July 2025

Oh gosh @Veryweirdsadtimes 💐for you, I'm so sorry

Is it strange that Upton's use of "weird" seems to be so much less controversial than Peggie's use of "weirdo"? I can't decide whether/why the "o" makes such a difference.

Summing up :

Claimant - A neo vagina is a dead end as were your arguments that men are women

Respondent - Nurse has narrow out dated vocabulary and shared bad jokes in a private chat.

Court system - thank you for spending around £500,000 to state the obvious

My experience was in the teaching sector, but even statutory training was a bit hit and miss, I recall.

At the other extreme, I had a senior manager who was castigated by a superior for using the expression "a chink of light".

I can tell you that schools were expected to have a Multicultural Policy at one time. At some point this century, they were replaced by a Diversity Policy.

I’m sorry for the loss of your father I’m glad he experienced compassionate nursing at end of life. So many people do not.

Wonder if they’re off to Benidorm

To be honest if like the panel I had just listened to the witnesses questions and responses and not followed on here then yesterday and today’s evidence was much clearer.

Yes the “jokes” were racist but SP didn’t try to do a hypocritical dreadfully sorry fudge, and so she came over as authentic - warts and all, this is me. That makes all of her testimony more credible. I can believe most parents whose child comes out as gay would not initially be doing cartwheels of joy, they would be concerned about bullying, homophobia and selfishly potentially no grandchildren. That doesn’t mean they don’t support and love their child.

LN did not come over well. FW provided very little.

What was interesting was Maggie Currer, NCs cross exam was masterful as she not only thoroughly debunked sex is complicated, she got MC to confirm DrU is very much a man, undermining his testimony. Additionally, there was the mike drop moment highlighting the class divide.

The Panel clearly took very detailed notes throughout and will have the full evidence bundle. I believe based on the evidence that they will find in SPs favour. If NHSF or DrU decide to appeal they will have to overcome their failings to do full disclosure which seriously hampered SPs case.

I don’t know if it’s the same in Scotland but Maya’s EAT required a second ET. Can you imagine doing this ET a second time!
autocorrect change

This is the way. Your son has got it down!

My own son is a far pickier eater than me. I will eat anything at all, except jelly which doesn't know whether it wants to be wet or dry. He has ARFID. I had to leave him with a family member for an overnight trip and told them one of the things he will eat was a tin of beans.

What I forgot to mention is that in order for him to eat the full tin of beans they needed to strain the bean sauce into its own bowl, and serve the beans dry.

He is significantly speech delayed so all he kept shouting was I WANT BEAN SOUP, so my family member in a panic started whipping up alsorts of liquefied bean concoctions and when I returned the next day it was like world war 3 had just happened in my house.

She said it was only resolved at 2am where he grabbed her hand, led him to the spoon drawer, chosen the right spoon, placed it in her hand, taken her by the wrist and used her spoon enhanced hand to submerge slightly into the beans until just the sauce had covered the spoon and he scream BEAN SOUP!!!! loud enough to wake the dead.

It made me realise just how rigorously trained he has us all that we think its so normal now that even I forgot to mention it.

What sort of people do you want in the NHS, do they have to pass some sort of purity test?

The Nursing and Midwifery council do actually insist all universities use a values based interview process when assessing applicants for nurse training. So not exactly a purity test but they are supposed to present a non judgemental attitude, etc. Obviously people slip through the net. They know what to say/not say .

Edit. Well I'm worse because I didnt notice that you noticed it was a joke and just explained it all over again.

Some of us are not minimising SPs racism and are shocked at the attempts to do so by many on here. That doesn't mean we are holier than thou/handmaidens/not genuine posters. Feel free to AS me.

For the record, I have no problem with dark humour following tragedies, that is a common thing to happen. SP's jokes were not dark humour. They were racist. As is her use of racist slurs. I still support her right to sss.

Now I am off to put my Gilead costume back on before heading off to Reddit to pray for your souls. See you all in September 😘 🙏 😇

Couscous is another one that seems both wet and dry. We both hate it.

Oddly giant couscous is ok.

Nah. She’ll surely nip in the back door of the DCA for supper and glass of dry white?

I got that about 2 minutes too late! Doh. Clearly I'm too incensed by this last minute turn of events to have a clear enough head for geometry humour. Humour I would normally appreciate.

Do you live in some kind of hermitic bubble on the sea floor? Dark jokes follow every tragedy, and have done so for a very long time (certainly preceding the internet).

Just open your browser search bar and type in 'sick jokes' followed by Tsunami, Madeleine McCann, Space Shuttle, Jimmy Savile, Pope, Columbine, 9/11, Jay Slater, Christopher Reeves, Fred West, etc. Or treat yourself to a compendium for reference: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seriously-Sick-Jokes/Rob-Manuel/9781569757093

I repeat that I do not particularly enjoy such humour myself, I think it's often tasteless and cringey, if not downright offensive. But it's ridiculous to act as if this inevitably signifies deeply prejudicial beliefs. It's just black humour - very common in emergency service personnel who have to face terrible things, and some studies indicate a correlation with higher intelligence.

Far too toxic for that. Teamwork has been kicked out of the building. Their chat groups will dissolve. Half the staff have already trawled through chat groups today deleting stuff like their lives depended upon it.

And no one is going to trust any of the mean girls who have pitched up at this ET. Irrespective of what SP may or may not have done/believes NHS Fife have shown themselves to have inept and shambolic management. The longer this goes on the higher the bill will be for NHS Fife (the taxpayer).

NC has fully flagged how senior doctors and nurses can’t tell the difference between male and female which makes the NHS look like a laughing stock.

All of this for one man (doctor) insisting he should be in the nurses changing room.

The world changed for me when I was informed couscous is a pasta, not a grain
😱

Gina G&T. Worst earworm from this thread yet, thanks nebulous username wielders.

I agree, I know the jokes you're talking about 😁, I tend towards gallows humour myself, it's not to everyone's taste and some times I hear one that bad even for me.

You'd have to be a pretty self-righteous person to insist that off colour jokes need to be banned from the world.

From the comments that I've read, they're trying to paint SP as someone who's beneath contempt, which is a contemptuous tactic, but reputational destruction is a go to move for lawyers. Lets hope the tribunal see through it.

It is sometimes quite hard to not be racist.

i grew up in the 60s in a very working class area in London. Racism was rife, as was tribalism and sexism. During my life Coloured, Black, Darkie, Brown and BAME have all been considered abusive and polite. The Black and White Minstral Show and many comedy shows were overtly racist, as were many other elements of mainstream media. Books were just as bad … Eynid Blyton anyone? I remember “no blacks, Irish or dogs” being in the windows of people renting rooms.

This was my formative years. It is idiocy to think that I didn’t internalise some of that, or that it doesn’t still impact me today. It is quite self-deluded to think otherwise.

i try very hard not to be racist and try to keep up to date and remain aware of what I say or do. I always try to treat people as equal humans. However, because I’m aware of my potential for racism, I sometimes turn myself inside out to not criticise someone, when if they were white I would just block them. That is still racism.

Anyone who thinks they are not susceptible to racism and doesn’t try very hard to counter it is probably unintentionally racist.

My view is that Sandy Peggie is a strong, determined, truthful woman, who is also not perfect and needs to be more aware of racism. However racism does not form the core of this tribunal and she has been deliberately abused by Dr Upton and the doctors and management of NHSF … she also needs to choose better/braver friends.

Agree with this. As someone who has followed this case and supported women's right to SSS, I feel let down that once again MN has shown that its feminism excludes BAME women. Because if you defend racism then you also exclude BAME women from feminism. That'll teach me to take an interest next time.

I'm out, so the sock puppet hunting can stop now.

I think at the end she was showing her own biases. She knows Fife are fucked but she goes hell for leather to defend Upton.

Yes, very strange. Maybe I'm just too surrounded with self-identifying weirdos (weirdoes?) but I have a hard time seeing that word as an insult at all, let alone a serious one.

Fwiw - don't TRAs have a track record of screaming that we should respect a rapist's pronouns? That 'human rights' all, as they see them, aren't conditional?

Well, if rights aren't conditional, if the right to SSS is a relevant thing, then SP sharing racist jokes or using racist language has no bearing on the remedies or the precedent this case sets.

The reality is, TRAs play by one set of rules when it suits their cause and ignore said rules when it does not.

My apologies for posting well beyond the half hour cut off (I had a headache, fell asleep and missed the entire afternoon! 🤦‍♀️) but wanted to thank Nauticant for the skillful, timely administration of these threads. You have done a great job.

Catch you all on this thread in September