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

There is more than one EAT judge. We don't know who will hear it yet.

Oh, I thought it had been announced. Okay, fingers crossed for a sane one, then.

Job opportunities in broadening the scope of the sexing business beyond poultry?

A career as a Sexer
A Sexer distinguishes the sex of chicks and other hatchlings. Sexers have a very important role in poultry production – they work is highly specialised and sought-after, taking a lot of experience to become skilled. To find out the sex of young birds, care needs to be taken to ensure that birds are not stressed or harmed. Instrument or machine sexing has almost disappeared, as manual sexing is more accurate.
Hundreds of thousands of chicks and hatchlings are born daily, and producers need to know the sex of those chicks to know what role they will have in the industry. Males need to be separated from females, so first the gender of the birds must be identified. If the birds have been bred and hatched to produce eggs for the food chain, only the female birds will be required. Birds bred for meat will also sometimes be sexed depending on company requirements.
Sexer - Lantra

I'm expecting a lot to happen today and tomorrow, I can only imagine there's been a lot of frank discussions over the weekend!

If I was to describe Big Sond's facial expression today, I would lean towards 'like a burst sofa'.

That's really useful! Thank you! Addresses my concerns about potential for the witnesses to adapt given their experience of giving evidence the first time.

Surely (and I know I have thought this many times before about different aspects of the insanity - and been proven wrong) a
judge couldn’t find that belief in biological sex was not WORIADS post-FWS / Supreme Court. Otherwise she/he would be saying that the SC judges’ ruling wasn’t WORIADS. Which would cause some problems…. surely????

Going by Kemp's judgements, a judge can find whatever the fuck he/she/ze wants, regardless of precedent, higher courts, or indeed material reality.

I've been refreshing my memory on Maya's case which went up to EAT and back down again and whether that casts any light on what may happen.

She lost at the initial ET in November 2019 but that was a preliminary hearing on the law and didn't involve witness evidence on the facts. Counsel were Ben Cooper for Maya and Olivia Dobbie for CGD. She appealed that to the EAT in April 2021 who found in her favour and created the WORIADS precedent. Jane Russell represented CGD at that hearing. With that finding on the law the case went back to the ET in March 2022 for a full merits hearing on the facts. Olivia Dobbie took over again for CGD.

I don't think much can be drawn from that. Other than Ben Cooper and Jane Russell have had a significant meeting before in the EAT and she lost.

Genderism starts from the premise that the definition of 'woman' also includes 'man'.

If this absurd and oxymoronic statement is permitted to be given even the smallest drop of credence, then it fucks absolutely everything up subsequently.

The assertion itself fucks everything.

'Yes includes no'
'Black includes white'

If you are trying in any way to create a system or logic that includes a complete and obvious and deliberate contradiction in terms like this, then as someone stated upthread, you're not even wrong.

This is 'queer theory' in action.

It's almost clever. It's including a premise that destabilises, undermines, and twists everything that anyone believes.

It's like a linguistic nuclear bomb.

They’d have to find him first

'Transwomen are women'

'Not-women are women'

'Everything not-woman is woman'

'2 + 2 = 0'

For me, taking a big view, I don't have the biggest problem with declaring 'there's no difference between men and women, in fact let's just call everybody people and that's that'.

Okay that's a consistent point of view and it stands up. One can agree or disagree.

What gets completely fucky is the idea that we keep 'men' and 'women' as categories that are apparently important, but it's opt-in. Nobody knows who is what because it's all self-determined based on feelings.

Either man and woman are meaningful words, or they're not.

Gender ideology is complete queer cakeism, proper through the looking glass self-contradictory nonsense.

The decision that GC beliefs are WORIADS was made in an EAT, so it is persuasive but not binding on future EATs and not binding at all on the higher courts. The SC decision in FWS didn't touch on that directly, although I agree that it could be argued that it did indirectly. However, there is little doubt that the SC would find that GC beliefs are WORIADS, so it would be surprising (and very appealable) if any court were to decide otherwise.

The reason the ET felt able to go against the SC in this case is that the SC's judgement was solely about the meaning of "man" and "woman" in the Equality Act. It did not directly address the provision of changing rooms in the workplace. This theoretically gave the ET scope to make a finding that did not breach the SC's interpretation of the EA, which is clearly what they have tried to do. However, rejecting the SC's reasoning in FWS is tantamount to saying that the SC got it wrong, which is not acceptable.

Having seen this done, the sexer grabs a chick and decides within a split second which crate to throw the chick in. The males go along a conveyor belt to be gassed (hopefully) before macerated.

It always flabbergasts me that vets get caught up in gender ideology. I can only think that to do their job you must believe that humans are completely different to all other animal species.

As a biologist, I see us as another animal. The male behaviour of territory marking with urine is very common in male mammals including humans.

It always flabbergasts me that vets get caught up in gender ideology.

It's even more astonishing that medical doctors are caught up in it and have to contort their language to try to accommodate it. So Beth Upton becomes a She but will still have a male response to (say) heart disease, will never get a uterine condition, but might get testicular cancer, but is still female, apparently. To me Searle and Co came across as every bit as stupid as Bumba.

If there's do over, there will presumably be transcript bundles as well. Bundles galore! Official Bundle Wrangler could be a job in and of its own right.

The way you put that makes it rather akin to a scenario of the Wild West. Sort of cowboy judges. Kinda rogue, and doing whatever they want. Making any sort of sh1t up. Not tethered by the law, factual accounts of other cases, or even the Supreme Court.

It is a bit of a circles of hell scenario when women looking for justice find themselves in kangaroo courts who seem to shill for creepy men, and have contempt for the equal rights of women as a discrete class of people (half the bloody human species).

Strikes me that Kemp fellow doesn’t seem to think women deserve any more respect than a broomstick with a mop on top, and a skirt tied to it. That would be a very ‘feminine’ look too. Sure, put a bit of lippy on anything, and he seems to be stating a woman is no more than that.

Except an actual woman. Then they can only use ‘cis’ woman.

It's nearly, 11, and nary a correction - what a waste of a morning!
I've just thought of those clocks that plays a different birdsong every hour - what about one that strikes the hour with another correction to the original judgement?😃

I dont know how to do compare versions @ArabellaSaurus but have archived all versions on archive.org and archive.ph in case of future need.

During several cases over the last year or so, we have all breathed sighs of relief when things come to court. Courts have seemed to be the place where performatively professed belief in the impossible have met, not only material reality but a determinative legal reality that preserves the existence of women's rights.

What is really shocking about this case is the suspicion, not only that judges and panels may be so corrupted by ideology that they will fail to perceive material and legal reality, but also (and worse) that the law may not be determinative at all - that it leaves space for perverse interpretations that begin with a desired outcome and retrofit the law.

It reminds me of when Trump first started pissing all over US governmental and political conventions. We had all naively thought that, thanks to its written constitution, the US was radically more protected from malign political actors than we are here in the UK (with our fragmented partly unwritten constitution).

But, no. The reality seems to be that we are, when it comes down to it, dependent on the scruples and integrity of individuals, operating in a system of rules that under-determine the outcomes.

What is the thinking about this, in the philosophy of law? Is there a kind of governing fiction that, ultimately, once all the relevant precedents, case law, etc are taken into account, there is a 'correct' (even uniquely correct) judgement to be made? Or does it acknowledge a residual under-determination that can only be resolved by wise-and-scrupulous/arrogant-and-partial judicial discretion?

Very unlikely to be Maya’s judge despite the fact he now sits on the EAT as he is not Scottish. The legal system is separate in Scotland and England.

I don’t. The political establishment want Kemp’s ruling and won’t care how he reached it. Also the Scottish justice minister is hardly credible - lying to the Scottish parliament to try and avoid a grooming gangs inquiry.

It looks like the Kemp made his mind up before reviewing the evidence and then cobbled together whatever he could to let Upton off the hook and re-instate the confusion that allowed men with a fetish to invade women only spaces.
He's destroyed his own reputation in the process.