Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton, following Employment Tribunal judgment - thread #59

[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.

Following handing down of the judgment on 8 December 2025, on 11 December 2025, it was announced by Sandie Peggie and her legal team that they would be pursuing an appeal.

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
Thread 58: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5458443-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-58 11 December 2025 to 12 December 2025

Yes, and he wasn’t treated horribly by hordes of ungrateful bigoted wimmins

Agreed

We have two grown women who have had to overcome so much sexism in their professional lives to sit on that panel. It comes at a cost.

They know what over confident, well testosteroned young men look and sound like.

Yes I couldn’t get to the details

Thank you @Fifearenumpties (and @TotallyGripped)

I promise that my concerns around the tribunal members are mostly out of fear of wrong guesses causing terrible harm in such a high profile case, where the Scotland Employment Tribunals do not publish full names of non-salaried non-legally qualified tribunal members.

But I have been squirreling nonetheless and what you said led me to information from the last (2019) recruitment round for lay members in Eng, Wales and Scotland, so I feel better informed about the process (if still afraid of the potential for harm from mistaken id).

And, for avoidance of doubt, I am sitting on my own squirrely keyboard hands, not throwing shade at anyone else!.

I think this is probably the Swedish study:

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885#pone-0016885-t002

That is pretty off. Their cock up, the legal establishment should indemnify.

Yes but my point was it is pretty easy to dismiss the guff built from errors of law so they won’t not be dealing with it.

ie because the error is the root of the problem they don’t need to tangle with the weed, just the root.

Kemp went beyond the parameters of what was being heard - he shouldn’t have ignored working regs and FWS in order to build his own novel test. They don’t need to retry anything because his manufactured guff is wholly irrelevant. He can’t retrofit a novel test to find something lawful when that retrofitting didn’t apply.

I know lots of folk think it is such a mess that it will have to be retried but that doesn’t make any logical sense to me. The EAT can reject Kemp’s findings easily based on errors of law and so there would be absolutely no logical reason to do that.

(They could of course agree with the outcome but get to it differently using the law correctly but I think the Kemp ruling is so tortured because that is impossible).

So my best guess is that the EAT will agree all the errors of law but will not find it ‘perverse’ (meaning it was so unreasonable that it flew in the face of reason given the evidence) although I do agree that I think BC and NC will argue that.

However, I don’t think the EAT would find that to be the case if they can easily rule on errors of law, which it seems to me they can.

These are really useful discussions because the more I consider the judgment the more it seems that it isn’t based on the evidence. It is based on assumptions and then an attempt to locate a legal argument to uphold the assumptions. The EAT can arrive at a judgment without having to re hear evidence because they won’t need the evidence to make a ruling. They can rule that the reasoning is guff based on errors of law, rather than a misunderstanding of the evidence.

If the EAT might overturn the judgment and find in SPs favour on all points, it would not be in their client’s interest to get it chucked back to ET and there is always a risk that another ET panel would find Upton credible again. Outlandish though that may seem.

There was a joint recruitment round for ET panel members in 2019 for Eng & Wales as well as Scotland. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ET-Non-Legal-Members-Candidate-Information-Pack.pdf (There is another round currently taking place)

Please will someone kindly tell me I am not going mad and confirm the judgment listing has definitely changed to include Dr Upton? Or break news of my madness to me very gently.

Thank you for the ironical goblins. This idea brings me great joy. Bet they were also merrily banging the pots and pans as they sang; Big Sond must snore like a steam train to have slept through it.

Hard agree that it's horrifically unjust for both parties at this stage.

They'd probably need a CLO for the Employment Tribunals Scotland to indemnify - but imagine the uproar if all the insurance costs were hiked exponentially because of one stupid judgment in Dundee! They'd all end up bringing lawsuits against each other in a spectacular way and then Netflix would jump in with another "This is based on a TRUE STORY" series, and Scotland would have to be closed down for a while until the storm passed over.

The EAT can reject Kemp’s findings easily based on errors of law and so there would be absolutely no logical reason to do that.

The problem is that they'll be examining errors on law based on significant misrepresentations of findings of fact. They'll be restricted in questioning the facts. An appeal will be founded on unreliable and shifting sands. It just won't work. But I don't know what the solution would need to be.

There's a tweet from Fair Play For Women on the Swedish study as well:

https://twitter.com/fairplaywomen/status/2000185091230998943?s=19

The ‘Swedish study” looked at crime rates of trans people. This was a mixed group of TW and TM and showed little difference to non-trans. But when only TW are compared to female controls it’s very clear who commits the violent crime. fairplayforwomen.com/criminality/

I love your insights Largesso but I say this - not actually having read the whole 312 pages - and say the goose is so cooked I can’t even tell if was a bird originally.

Selective editing of FWS.
Erasure of trans identified women entirely.
Hallucinated quotes.
Looking at facts and coming to the entirely opposite conclusion a la Swedish study.
Slagging of Maya Forstater saying who does she think she is - then getting the quote fro
her case so wrong it’s retweeted by all of Twitter.
You call Not All Gays - Not For Gays as if that’s a slip of the tongue

Naomi has every word transcribed. She will be ticking off each ‘fact’ against the evidence.

This mess is so on fire there is no way to separate the facts from the findings. It’s all lit. 🔥

Findings of fact- I can see that it’s possible to cut past his/her actions by saying he shouldn’t have been there so Banarama isn’t (aren’t?) relevant, she was entitled to say whatever she liked. But the behaviour of NHS staff, whether they’d read certain emails, might affect how bid a hole Fife are in. That’s all a matter of fact relevant to damages (on which they were all believed, of course) Maybe they could do a deal on that with Sandie, carving the case up so that the court give a proper judgment on the main and important points and the parties compromise the rest, on the basis that no one wants to go through it all a gain. Then we would get the best of all worlds, an application of FWS to workspaces and a less stressful outcome, Unfortunately I’m not confident that these EAT judges are capable of doing it.

And just think, at the same time this is going on there's a push for more cases to be held without juries. And THIS is the quality of judge who would be in charge....

You aren't going mad.

I've just checked my downloads. The file name seems to have changed.

ETA you'll need to click the image. I'm assuming this is what you meant?

I cannot see how any appeal can be conducted in an orderly way if it challenges decisions made by a legal tribunal if the whole context is that the tribunal's findings of fact on which it made those decisions just can't be relied upon.

This judgment is poisoned at the source. So much points to the solution being to scrub everything and start completely from scratch. At that point I'd be wondering if there might be a judicial review about whether ETs are actually capable of reliably deciding cases of gender critical vs gender identity.

Well on way down the rabbit hole I found all the feelings of Scottish judges from 2024.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206118/1/Published_Scotland_2024_JAS.pdf

They’ll be a darn sight more depressed once Sandy and his merry band of two bring the entire Employment Tribunal process into disrepute.

The truly horrific thing we all need to really pause and consider is -

• if Sandy had exhausted all her money 💰 she wouldn’t have any means to appeal.

Jane Russell and Fife delayed, dodgy discovery, ran the clock down. No ordinary claimant could withstand that.

And now Kemp, Brown & Russell cook up a crock of crap. Call it a judgment and tell Sandy that’s that.

If she didn’t have a backer this story would have a very different ending.

Foran stated there might be some other mechanism to remove this judgement but he did not elaborate

as for lack of accountability, times have changed as demonstrated by social media which is calling this into account

I thought the Darlington nurses was going to mammoth, so made myself scarce for that one too.

@ickky I was worried but I’ve got so much out of the threads that you and @nauticant have hosted that I thought it was time to step up and take a turn to share the load. Thankfully we’re only half way through thread 8 with evidence finished. In fact I went on holiday worried that the thread would fill up while I was away but everyone was very restrained. Despite the evidence and the witnesses there just didn’t appear to be the same drama so a relatively steady posting rate apart from the day Rose gave evidence when it got a bit busy.

I did warm to the way the judge managed proceedings and his football and party analogies, so I hope his judgement is a good one.

Bit odd, eh?

@ProfessorThreeWordHarpy

Thank you for doing them. I was prepared to do both, but thank god for you and Nauti.

It was a bit like this gif, to see who would reach for the gun first. 😂

The file size has changed too. The newer version is smaller.
Can anyone do a comparison of the content?

So we have this link with 'another':

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Peggie-v-Fife-Health-Board-and-another.pdf

And this link with 'Upton':

https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions/s-peggie-v-fife-health-board-and-dr-b-upton-4104864-slash-2024

Which goes to:

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