Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton, following Employment Tribunal judgment - thread #60

[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
Thread 59: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5459115-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-59 12 December 2025 to 17 December 2025

A fairly recent thread where her PE writing is mentioned.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5364310-helen-lewis-in-the-atlantic-gender-medecine-and-the-suicide-lie

Kemp said Sandra Peggie was proselytising when she said that Dr Upton was a man and shouldn't be in the changing room both of which are facts not beliefs. Can the judge's opinion be challenged?
If a witness says black is white and a judge states that the witness is credible , can that be challenged?

The argument that Sandie was proselytising rests on the tribunal's interpretation of the law. If the EAT rules that the tribunal got the law wrong and that Upton should not have been in the changing room, that finding falls away.

If a witness says black is white and the tribunal finds that witness credible, it can only be challenged if the tribunal's view is so far adrift as to be classed as irrational.

And Russell Somebody - Else 😂

Brillant 😂

You'd think someone would have shown Paul Merton that clip at some point, to edge him out of his arrogant habit of interrupting other panellists with his crap random attempts at surrealism. Particularly those panellists (aka women) who are too socially aware and considerate to defensively talk over him when he talks over them .

The woman's expression every time she is interrupted is brilliant, politely turning her head in a listening direction while her eyes register frustration and bafflement at the boys' club shittiness of what is happening to her.

I don’t understand how Sandie telling DU “you are a man and shouldn’t be in here” is proselytising but DU insisting “I am a woman and should be in here” in the same situation is not.

I agree, but from the tribunal's perspective this is because they believed Upton had a right to be there, so he was expressing a fact whilst she was expressing an opinion.

Surrealism in practice.

Yes. And illustrates the absolute absurdity of a position the government and the NHS have created.

Another possibility re Kemp: he is struggling very hard with the cognitive dissonance of trying to pretend to believe the gov/NHS position is not absurd, and that comes out in sublimatrd rage, which he directs at Sandy Peggie/women who state the simple facts.

We've all seen this mamy times.

I guess it depends who his authority figures are - the Supreme Court, or the government/NHS. I dont mean so much in a legal cotext as in a psychological one.

Not read the judgement yet, still, but could the judge be saying SP was proselytising when she went on the girls holiday and when she was in the cafeteria with her backstabbing friends and they say she called DU "it"?

That entire scenario painted by the witnesses made out that SP was trying to get them on side.

What it came across to me as though was a woman who had enough of being respectful towards someone who had already crossed her boundaries and tried to exert control over her.

No, that is definitely not what the judge was saying. The comment about proselytising had nothing to do with anything she said to her friends. He quite specifically referred to her behaviour in challenging Upton about his presence in the women's changing room as proselytising.

The judge quoted cases in which proselytising was a sackable offence, which sounded to me like he was hinting to SP that she was lucky she wasn't sacked purely on the basis of the incident in the CR.

He clearly thought that although SP was entitled to her GC beliefs, no-one is entitled to express those beliefs in a confrontative or objectionable manner, and he felt that SP had overstepped that mark, with [alleged] references to a trans rapist prisoner.

He could have left it at that, why did he bring up the concept of 'proselytising' at all? Any stigma to beat a dogma?

Potentially, the most exciting thing about January is finding out what grounds NC and BC will be appealing upon...

I have it in my head that NC did complain about bias during the hearing and made it abundantly clear that if the judgement didn't go her way an appeal was inevitable.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that arguably THE most important, or at least interesting, tribunal case of 2025 ended up with the learned judge lampooning himself.

Kemp found for claimant on this point (harassment as to protected belief), so he was possibly trying to appeal-proof this finding, by pointing to the precedents establishing that proselytism can be objectionable manifestation, in order to then dismiss them because he has determined that it wasn't objectionable in this case. (Ignoring the precedents altogether might make the EAT think he'd not taken them into account.)

Whether or not Upton was proselytising is irrelevant, because he hadn't made a claim of harassment as to protected belief.

The TRA view since Forstater is that its legal to have GC beliefs, but not legal to express them, particularly in the workplace.

But trans ideology can be thought, expressed via presentation and promoted via policies. The TRA position is that GC policies are illegal. But i dont think the judgment says this?

Its similar to religion, anyone can believe/not believe, policies can talk about religious needs, but workers shouldn't get into debates about the truth of religion in the work place.

The problem with that comparison is that the trans ideology policies are in direct opposition to the rights for sex segregated spaces, in a way that can be avoided with religion. But should that discussion be held between two colleagues?

I suspect Kemp is a graduate of the Kate Searle school of “I’m a kind person”. He is probably astonished at the furore over his wise and kindly judgement.

The thing that annoys me about this is that no one knows how Sandie did express her views to Upton. It was established that he and Searle cooked up the story about Bryson. It was also established that whatever Sandie said, Upton would have taken offence.

I watched part of an episode of Naked Attraction the other day as I was channel hopping because there was a young woman self described I think as non binary/trans man. I think early 20s. Choice of 2 women and 2 men. Chose a man (who then appeared in a skirt on the date). When she appeared naked she obviously had a completely female body. And behaved in quite a "girlie" way. The presenter said that's a lovely body you have young man. MAN?????How on earth have we got to this?

The mind boggles.
Although not more than usual, sadly

I'm teetering on the brink of 'to be fair to Big Sondie....' but here goes:

It appears from the judgement that SP's team acknowledged that when SP mentioned women's prisons, she was referring to the Bryson case:

630..There was an admitted fact that “C referred to the “women’s prison incident”, that is the Isla Bryson/Adam Graham case.” It is taken from the claimant’s pleadings, at paragraph 13 of the Response Table which the admitted fact cross references. [my emphasis]

So when it came to deciding what happened in the CR, the judge relied on this admission to decide that although SP was entitled to her GC beliefs, she was not allowed to express them in an offensive way, and referring to a trans rapist was deemed 'offensive'.

I agree that anything she said along the lines of 'You should not be in here' would be offensive to DrU. Would phrasing it differently - e.g. not referring to trans IDing men in women's prisons - have been considered by that judge as an acceptable expression of her beliefs? who knows.

And when SP said she wasn't referring to Bryson, the judge simply didn't believe her:
630 ...The second aspect was her evidence that when referring to “the prisons incident” during the Christmas Eve incident she was not aware that that involved a rapist, as a broad summary of her evidence. ..
that evidence seeking to distance herself from the remark which related to a rapist was we considered not credible.

This was one of the examples given by the judge for doubting SP's overall credibility. Obviously, from our point of view, we're shouting 'AND WHAT ABOUT DrU CLAIMING TO BE A BIOLOGICAL WOMAN?!' at the screen, but 'in fairness to Big Sond', he saw some things in SP's evidence that caused him to doubt it, e.g. the reference to Bryson was admitted by her team, but then denied by SP in giving her evidence.

That programme is Grooming TV.

This is a red herring argument and doesn't merit anything other than immediate dismissal.

How a woman reacts to a predatory male in a threatening situation is instinct plus personality minus the level of social grooming she has been subjected to over the course of her life.

Why should Sandie have had to put up with a man invading her space at all?
Not that long ago everyone in society would have been telling Dr Upton where to go in no uncertain terms.

I mostly agree with you completely ,ILoveLaLaLand, but in the context of the tribunal, it appears that SP's team acknowledged that she made reference to Isla Bryson when telling DrU he didn't belong in the women's CR.

The judge thought that bringing up a double rapist was an offensive way of proclaiming your protected beliefs. We don't, I can see why it would be seen as OTT.

The judge noted that SP denied in her evidence that she was referring to Bryson, but it had already been admitted by her team that she did, so the judge didn't believe her. I can see his point- her own team say she referred to Bryson, and SP giving evidence says she didn't. Awkward.

The judgment is a mess, no doubt about that, but along the way we've tried to recognise the bits that are just indefensible, and the bits where there may be a legal reason for the judge reaching the conclusions he did.

630..There was an admitted fact that “C referred to the “women’s prison incident”, that is the Isla Bryson/Adam Graham case.” It is taken from the claimant’s pleadings, at paragraph 13 of the Response Table which the admitted fact cross references.

Who qualified the “women’s prison incident” with "that is the Isla Bryson/Adam Graham case."? Was it in the admitted facts or was it added by way of explanation when Big Sond wrote the judgment.