NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #54

[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 was 29 July 2025. It resumed again over 1 to 2 September for closing submissions.

The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton gave evidence from Thursday 6 February to Wednesday 12 February 2025. Sandie Peggie returned to give more evidence on 29 July 2025.

Access to view the second part of the hearing remotely was obtainable by sending an email request to: [email protected].

The hearing was 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 #50 can be found in this thread: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 51: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5402652-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-51 1 September 2025 to 2 September 2025
Thread 52: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5403218-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-52 2 September 2025 to 4 September 2025
Thread 53: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5404208-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-53 from 3 September

If JR thinks asking a question about someone who already knows Upton is male, and then later asking a question about someone who doesn't immediately realise this fact is a 'volte face' the poor woman must be permanently dizzy.

The following 2 points presented without comment.

"List of issues. In permitting R2 to use the female changing room did R1 treat C less favourably than it did treat or would have treated a male user of that room" [My emphasis.]

"Whilst it is acknowledged that the respondent did not undertake a consultation exercise or Equality Impact Assessment [...] it is difficult to see how this could be the subject of criticism."

Someone needed to proofread JR's final submission (my emphasis):

94. Dr Kate Searle, who was asked about chromosomes on 23 July/pm, said that there were more possibilities for chromosomal combinations than simply cross-examination and XY:

Arf! 😂

I've found a good smattering of typos, but that is definitely the best. I assume she has it set as a shortcut.

It does seem that the Rs team seem to have been sloppy in a number of ways.

I feel as though contributors to this board could have done a better job, as devil's advocates. Maybe JR is too close to her subject matter.

It's rather ironic, in the light of the article, that when it comes to gender identity, it's gender-critical women who have been making the logical, reasoned arguments that stand up in a court of law, and men who merely claim to be women who have been shutting down debate, screaming about hurt feelings and performing fragility while behaving like hooligans.

You are not wrong there.

Yeah I am not convinced by that article. I have to have a brood about it and decide exactly why. But we could start with how the writer seems to denigrate “the great feminisation” throughout and then seems to be saying “I am not like that myself” at the end.

If the ET decision is made but then appealed, would the public be made aware of the decision in the interim or only after appeal?

The tribunal's decision will be available to the public as soon as it is made. See, for example, Maya Forstater's case where the tribunal decided that GC beliefs were not WORIADS. This ruling was made public in December 2019. She then appealed and the original ruling was overturned in June 2021.

Thank you. I read an article that suggested otherwise but thought it didn’t seem right.

As a man, I have two major reservations, which together to me make it largely invalid.

I do not think that what the author describes as masculine attributes are either innate to men, necessary for men or even in any way desirable for men. She is writing from the point of via of a deeply militarist society in the USA (main role of men is to prepare for war??) and this bias is immediately apparent.

Secondly, "cancel culture" is not in any credible way a female invention. Take, for example, the whole history of the Abrahamic religions (the Spanish Inquisition was a female institution?), and J Edgar Hoover and 30 years of suppression of any support for communism and all allied ideas in America.

There are indeed some major cultural clashes in America (but not, I notice, in their aggressive foreign policy which is bipartisan) but the "feminisation" theory does not hold water; especially as it seems to be her implication that women are responsible for transgenderism among other things.

So I'm not convinced either.

It came across as verging on misogynistic to me. I felt it wouldn't take much tweaking to turn it into a MRA rant about why women shouldn't be in the workplace/in leadership positions/in politics blah blah blah. I've seen other articles comparing, say, typically "masculine" and "feminine" leadership styles which managed to do it in a way that sees strengths in both.
And there are some women who are very much Women Are Like That but I'm Not That Sort. I suspect nowadays some of them end up identifying as men, or non-binary, or queer.

I’m not really sure that cancel culture is specifically a female thing anyway. I’m in my 20s and grew up with social media, in the gay male community I’d say cancel culture is rife…and clearly there aren’t many women influencing things there. Sure, maybe certain personality traits might lead someone to be more susceptible to engaging with cancel culture. I’m not convinced that it’s strictly a thing associated with women though. If anything, there’s many women throughout history who have turned a blind eye to things people get “cancelled” over and engage in self preservation behaviour. And throughout history, there’s been many men who get on their soapbox for one reason or another.

I am a bad person. I sniggered when I read on trans reddit that it wasn't fair that we had Naomi and they had Jolyon Maugham. I was left wondering if they thought we ought to take turns...

The difference in quality in the various submissions is quite something.

I'm sorry, what? Genuinely. Is JR actually arguing that the good comparator for C, who is female, is a Schrödinger legitimate male user of the female CR? Help me out here!

Yes, I have noticed quite a few self-styled “anti-woke” writers recently who seem to both hate the gender ideology thing, but seem to easily fall into GI-style “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”-type stereotyping. Only they blame women and especially feminists for everything wrong with the modern world. Groundbreaking stuff - you can tell they don’t have personal experience of the 70s-80s!

The typos don't matter, as long as they don't use any exclamation marks. Everyone knows an exclamation mark immediately invalidates the whole thing!

!!!!!!!

The XX error must mean JR is being PAID and is therefore as biased as Jim Borthwick! (!!!!)

Thank you. I was struggling to articulate why my gut disagreed with the writing. You have reminded me of the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. Neither of which were feminine. They were though, to some people, a threat to male power and dominance.

Older women pointing out inconvenient truths have always been punished, but in the many discussions of how we ended up here, we should also remember male disgust at men who didn’t fit in. They didn’t want “cissy”men in their toilets so were happy for them to go in the ladies.

So called woke activities, of the - prostrate yourself on the alter of our sacred beliefs or suffer the consequences - type, are male behaviours to me. The tiers of superiority, in the church or the Freemasons, where people progress to the next level of exclusivity and access, don’t on the whole appeal to women. Not being pure enough in your beliefs is a luxury that women can rarely afford, because we have to get shit done. That said, I think our instincts to collaborate and protect each other can on occasions be our undoing as well as our strength. We want to - genuinely - be kind to others and this trait can be manipulated.

You have amazing determination ploughing on through it all , though I am worried that your brain will be fried at the end if you try to unravel all the errors. But should there be an action for negligence brought by Fife, your analysis will be very useful to them. Prepare invoice

I’m really enjoying reading everyone’s take on this. @CarefulN0w, I think you have summarised my weird discomfort with it well. I liked being challenged to think hard about why so many women seem to go along so unthinkingly with #bekind - myself included quite a number of years ago, until I peaked - but there was something “but not me, because I’m different from all the other girls” about the author that didn’t sit well with me.

I think (with some generous application of extrapolation from other parts of the document) she means a comparator of a man in the men's changing room and a transman being allowed in. But what she says is indeed the nonsense of a man (other than the TW) in the women's room.