NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #57

[nauticant]

Judgment was handed down on 8 December 2025:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6936ce28a6fc97b81e57436a/S_Peggie_v_Fife_Health_Board__Dr_Upton.pdf

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 3 September to 1 October 2025
Thread 54: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5418690-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-54 28 September 2025 to 21 November 2025
Thread 55: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5447019-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-55 19 November 2025 to 8 December 2025
Thread 56: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5456749-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-56 8 December 2025 to 9 December 2025

That’s going to be a bit of a minefield! Peter Daly has tweeted that the allegations are so serious as to require ‘an urgent judicial response to maintain public trust in the law’

https://twitter.com/peter_daly/status/1998814950828175486?s=19

It's been reported in the press e.g. by the Telegraph here. However, this was before the quote fabrications emerged, I think - I don't know whether that may affect the plans. And we have never known when or where it was to be. I assume all will become clear in due course!

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/09/sandie-peggie-tribunal-supreme-court-transgender-ruling/

This judgement is a farce.
All it shows is that the law is made by and for rich men.
The Tribunal judge has bent over backwards to allow Dr Upton to get away with his predatory behaviour. Dr Upton used the female nurses changing room instead of the consultant's changing room. Why? Because he knew he could get away with sexually harrassing the lower classes.
It's a disgrace.

Well exactly.

And one thing that really bothers me about the 'you can complain to a manager' / Bananarama nonsense is that it assumes that someone in a state of undress in a changing room or on the loo should be being their professional presence and dealing with things as if in a meeting. You are not working in that situation.

If a man walks in on a woman changing and doesn't retreat in horror and embarrassment, she's in fight or flight panic. It's a scream blue murder until help arrives moment, not 'I have an objection to raise' at a later point when someone of the opposite sex has already helped themselves to a view of you in your underwear.

Typical witch hunt behaviours.

Trial by water.

Throw the witch into a body of water to determine guilt or innocence.

If the person sank and drowned, they were considered innocent because the "pure" water accepted them.

If the person floated, they were deemed guilty of witchcraft because the water had rejected them (as they were believed to have renounced their baptism), and they would then be executed by other means, such as burning or hanging.

@LordEmsworthsGirlfriend

I worked in a school where the single sex bathrooms were open to the corridors (and where staff and pupils shared).

I had an idiot headmaster who stopped to discuss something whilst I was standing drying my hands using the hot air machine. It took me all my restraint to stop myself from telling him to piss off.

The same arse alarmed one of my 15 yr old pupils by deciding to hold a conversation with her under similar circumstances.

She came running into my classroom in great distress. (She was a victim of an assault.) She hadn't even managed to get to the loo. I had to walk back with her and guard the entrance.

Employment tribunals are never ever, not ever like this.

This is something else entirely!

https://archive.ph/H6naB

https://archive.ph/2BZ3P

Judge Kemp: It was so much easier when tribunals were held behind closed doors and you didn't have thousands of critics on the internet, scrutinising and analysing your every word.

#Sad times

Dont understand courts have always been public

No one goes to them. This is a new era of live tweeting, watchers, media coverage.

Apologies, badly phrased. I was thinking of the fact that cases can now be followed live on the internet.

What the SC said in that section (I think) is simply that you can separate services by sex if it's a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim. That's not novel: it's in the text of Schedule 3.

What the Judge here seems to have taken from it is that this is a novel construction by the SC that PMOALA permits any other discrimination too:

In other words, he takes from it that because PMOLA means you can separate services by sex, PMOALA also means you can separate any other way you please instead: specifically he wrote "these words are consistent with an ability to decide what to do and the need to apply an objective test of justification to that decision, not that there is a mandated answer in the context of a single sex space."

To my understanding, there is a mandated answer in the context of a single sex space, and that single mandated answer is itself only permissible after the application of an objective test. There's no discretion to apply any other answer.

Also, I'm not sure why this is relevant because (I think the Judge got this bit right) Schedule 3 and the whole section on services doesn't apply anywhere in the Peggie case: these changing rooms are not a service provided to the public or a section of the public.

The Alex Massie piece that Peter Daly is commenting on is an absolute belter of an article which I assume The Times' lawyers will have cleared pre-publication.

could the judge have had an assistant to write part, if not all, of the judgement for him, and that assistant used AI. I don't know how much ET juddges do themselves although obviously he should have double checked.

There was no one else there to do it for him. He has to do it himself. No one else in the room was legally qualfiied to create a judgment but him. Thats why they sit and do extensive notes.

God I've love to get a hold of the stenographers copy of the tribunal....

Seperately - I now know why Dr Searle is a mad trans fans

https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2003/1045.html

In Croft v Royal Mail - respondent's doctor, Dr Searle (from 2003) maybe it runs in the family :-)

No I meant, did he give his notes to someone junior and say "sort that into a juddgement" or something....

That was the question @usernameinserthere answered. He has to write the judgement himself. He cannot give his notes to someone junior and get them to write the judgement. There is no-one junior he could give that task to.

A response underneath Michael Foran's comment on X reads:

(For those not familiar with professionally polite & restrained legalese, “extraordinarily serious and warrants careful attention” loosely translates as “FUUUUUUCCKKKK! I have NEVER seen anything this bad”)

Thanks for the archive link, that's a cracking article.

This is a great point. A mish mash really isn't pro trans either. I get why they're glad DU has, thus far, got away with outright lying to a tribunal. But this is not good for any run of the mill trans person looking for a job.

The leading judgment is Croft which quotes Bellinger -

Bellinger [2003] 2 AC 467

It is not surprising, therefore, that society through its laws decides what objective biological criteria should be applied when categorising a person as male or female. Individuals cannot choose for themselves whether they wish to be known or treated as male or female. Self-definition is not acceptable. That would make nonsense of the underlying biological basis of the distinction.

It beggars belief as to how we got from there to here.

And how these two idiots of 'judges' in the Kelly and Peggie cases can selectively cut and paste from the judgments - without understanding them.

Total muppetry....... fuelled by rage (and a large glass of wine!)