Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton, following Employment Tribunal judgment - thread #58

[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), 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 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.

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 2025 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
Thread 57: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5457132-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-57 9 December 2025 to 11 December 2025

The problem with the whole 'nurse of unblemished 30 year career' is that had Upton or his flying monkeys made other complaints about Sandie previously / over a longer period of time then there would have been a 'history' of totally made up 'complaints'. And a misogynist judge (I'm sure we can think of some, that are actually so incredibly removed from reality that they don't know men pose a risk to women in a general statistical sense) would take that as evidence the complaints were credible.

The judgement, with it's requirement for women to complain then take the harassment that results if they want basic women's rights, is basically a 'how to' guide for abusers in the workplace.

Any woman who looks like she's about to complain or might have opinions or boundaries or might not enthusiastically strip off in front of any bloke who wants to force her to, they now know to lay a paper trail and a trap and they know they'll mostly be enthusiastically egged on by the lanyard classes and the shitty misogynistic NHS policies that the NHS audit revealed. Most women won't be able to afford a court case and basically they're screwed.

Sorry, my eàrlier post meant to quote you

And also the HCA who didn’t want to be named (but was) who gave evidence supporting Sandie’s account of one of the patient safety allegations.

I put a crisp note in a Thank you card addressed to her at the A&E. I hope she opened it at coffee in front of some of those “friends”.

That’s the one. Only she seemed to be able to cut through some of the waffle and highlight that if other doctors had patients safety concerns and done nothing about them, then they were at fault.

re Isla Bryson, I seem to recall a point during the hearings that (was it perhaps?) Jane Russell inadvertently called Isla Bumba, Isla Bryson.

And Sandie was lucky that Myles (Miles?) wasn't captured. She did her job properly. It must have actually been quite frightening to do her job properly given the enthusiastic witch hunting behaviour of other members of staff.

While I share your FFS! reaction to men allegedly becoming women, the point is that it is actually the law of the land: the Gender Recognition Act 2004 legislates for a man being legally a woman. So the tribunal/panel/judge have to accept that DrU claiming to be a woman is legally 'a thing'.

Worse still Furthermore, a man can insist he is a woman even if he is only on the path to 'transitioning' e.g. simply by changing his name and appearance to what the judge carefully referred to as ' generally regarded as feminine in style'. DrU who does not have a GRC can still claim the PC of gender reassignment.

So we all think it's completely daft, but 'in fairness to the judge' [how many times have I written that, and how many times have other posters produced quotes from the judgement to prove me wrong] he has to go along with the concept of men being women, because the law has been daft enough to do so.

That is an excerpt from JR's submissions, not from the judgement. But no, I have not seen DLA briefings quoted in a judgement.

For what it is worth, I think the argument that there is no hierarchy of rights is being misused. In general it is true that there is no hierarchy. But in a single sex space, the rights of people of that biological sex clearly take precedence over the rights of anyone who is not of that biological sex.

I can't be 100% confident, but it was the EAT that got Forstater right. I would expect the EAT judges to be better lawyers than an ET judge. But I cannot rule out the possibility that Sandie will have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get justice.

But I thought even a GRC was just an agreement between the individual and the state, not an obligation on anyone else. Good for the state pension and marriage (so they can be classed as their preferred gender on the marriage certificate) but not actually binding in any other circumstances? Is that wrong?

That makes sense to me as a non-lawyer. Surely the reasons for the single-sex space need to be considered? They exist to allow for privacy, dignity and safety of females (and privacy and dignity of males) which would be violated if the SSS did not exist and they were forced to use mixed-sex spaces.

For some women lack of SSS means they cannot access employment in that setting (due to religion, PTSD or other reasons). The religion point must apply to some men too - i.e. they need SSS to be able to access employment in that setting.

That is the part that is catching my attention in a whole blizzard of wtafs.

The whole point and context of needing the statement that there is no hierarchy of rights in the EqA is to try and posit that a man with a gender identity has as much right to be in a women's single sex space as a woman does.

The SCJ quite clearly does not agree. And after a lot of wangling and invented gatekeeping, neither does Big Sond himself, as he's then clear that if the woman complains, the man must be immediately removed and separate provision must be sorted out.

I'm wading into waters too deep for me to be definitive about, but you may well be right about the limits of the GRC, but the Equality Act 2010 extends protection on a much vaguer basis:

7Gender reassignment
(1)A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

'other attributes of sex' appears to include wearing earrings, makeup and calling yourself Beth, and hey presto! anybody denying that you are a woman falls foul of the EA2010.

That article is about aversion therapy for homosexuals in the 1960s & 1970s. That it mentions gender identity is total bollox as nobody had even thought of having a gender identity in the 1960s.

More than 250 people were subjected to painful electric shocks, designed to change their sexuality and gender identity, in NHS hospitals between 1965 and 1973, the BBC has discovered.

same, remembering also that appeal from the EAT is to the inner house of the court of session who decided FWS wrongly

I often say ‘inclusive’ toilets are worse for everyone but least worst for healthy men.

They are the absolute opposite of inclusive.

Interesting article here from roll on Friday. Also one of the comments points out that American spelling is used in some places. If true, that is another indicator that AI has been used.

https://x.com/journalismseen/status/1999421604321984928?s=46&t=AjtjSItRj-kgZwRzL-pdyQ

Actually I suppose SSS are for safety of men too, in the context of your work showing that cubicles with gaps are safer for everyone rather than fully enclosed single occupant toilets.

Yes, all protected categories have established rights and protections that are as valid and as 'equal' as each other, but each protected category also has integrity in its own right and cannot be usurped.

This is why it was absolutely fundamental that the SC ruling clarified that the protected category of 'Sex' had a biological implication and meaning. The protected category of 'Gender Recognition' was never meant to usurp or over-rule the protections given to the category of 'Sex'.

The SC panel were thorough in their assessment and testing which then led to the unavoidable conclusion that the equalities act could not function as it was intended if 'Sex' was taken, in effect, to be the same as 'gender identity' or even as the strange construction that is 'legal sex'.

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/sandie-peggie-judge-accused-packing-verdict-dodgy-quotes

Roll on Friday direct link.

Trevor McDonald pointed out that in the Act, if the word woman had applied to TW, there would have been no need to make GI a PC. The fact that it did protect GI was proof that the word woman had to mean a born female, because otherwise it would not have made this distinction.

I agree with a lot of the analysis of politics on this thread. I remember the BBC interviewing someone before the Brexit referendum and they said they were going to vote Leave because it couldn't possibly make things any worse. I suspect many Reform voters think the same. Of course, things can always get worse and I think a Reform government would be a disaster.

General elections in both the UK and the US are generally won from the political centre. There are always those on the left of the Labour party and the right of the Tories trying to argue against that and pull them away from the centre, and they often succeed to some extent when the party is out of power, but they generally only win when they move back sufficiently to the centre.

The problem in the US is that both parties have vacated the centre. The GOP has become an authoritarian party of the far right, and the Democrats are becoming increasingly a party of the far left (at least in American terms, where the political centre is significantly further right than it is in the UK). It is good that recent elections show huge swings away from the GOP, but a lot depends on whether the elections in 2028 are actually free and fair.

In the UK, Corbyn took the Labour party to the extreme left, and his unexpected near-success against May gave many on that wing of the party a belief that the extreme left could win. I think Starmer's instincts are centrist and he is trying to occupy that ground, but this is difficult when so many of his MPs and activists are trying to pull the party to the left.

I think Badenoch is similarly trying to pull the Tories towards the centre. Unlike some of her MPs and many of her party's members, she is not in favour of a merger with Reform (which I doubt will happen - Farage has a long history of not working well with others and has said his aim is to destroy the Tory party). Given Labour's dire performance, it is good to see that the Tories poll ratings have started to pick up in the polls, although the Greens are catching them fast (and we know what they think about gender issues). My view currently is that, unless Labour's ratings improve, the Tories are the best hope of stopping Reform at the next election.

However, that's enough about politics from me. Back to the law!

After FWS there were a number posts on social media, including KCs, making the 'hierarchy' claim, and a those in the GC camp saying that, in spite of the SC ruling, it was essential to repeal the GRA and remove Gender reassignment and transitioning as a PC from the EA.

Both positions seemed a bit cranky to me given the clarity (so I thought) of the SC ruling - it seemed perfectly possible, e.g. to prohibit people from getting fired because they are perceived as being trans while simultaneously excluding them from opposite sex single sex spaces and services.

After the Peggie judgment, however, I can see the point GCs were making that so long as those remain in place there will be perpetual attempts to recast excluding men from women's spaces and services as transphobic discrimination.

Somebody on X (mrsSkys) has been playing about with Microsoft Copilot Chat (which is available for the Judiciary to use) and found it made a very similar misquote of Lee v Ashers Baking Co

I wonder how the panel members are feeling?

Really behind on this thread, but really needed to pause and re-read this a few times.
Thank you.
I do so appreciate when someone spells out the big picture in clear terms like this:

And yet here were are in a multi-year process, with untold millions spent trying to roll back something that should never have stood in the first place if people were doing their jobs. Think how different this could have been if one extremely rich and tenacious author hadn't decided to make this cause a major part of her legacy at unfathomable personal cost. And did so at point which, in retrospect, was very nearly the last possible moment at which this could be turned back.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldjudgmt/jd030410/bellin-1.htm
The original (link above) uses recognised. The Peggie judgement uses recognized (see screenshot). Several other instances throughout.