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

I wonder if they could put up big screens in public venues so we could watch it, like when it's the World Cup and people gather together to watch it.

Peggie's crime was clearly that she stated the emperor was naked. And in her changing room.

They’ll have to sort out the public access if they do send it back to court.

im not sure the system is ready for that

I suspect a lot of eligible EAT judges are currently obtaining doctors' notes. I wonder who'll be left?

From the TT extract I posted above I think NC acknowledged what was said in pleading, but argued that JR was putting a gloss on what was said.

Given what other locals have said about there having been three trans identifying men in the news for similar high profile reasons in or around Kirkaldy, I think it's quite possible that Sandie may not have recalled the full detail or may have confused different cases when giving the example to Upton in the CR. Equally she may have agreed to something in the pleadings without fully understanding what she was doing. It's not difficult to imagine that. I think I am quite sharp and well-informed but this case has made me fear ever needing to go to court myself because the whole process seems designed to trip people up.

Yes, thanks for posting that @NebulousSupportPostcard. So the agreed fact in the written statement - supported by both Peggie's and Upton's oral testimony - was that what she said was 'the situation/person/incident in prisons', not naming Bryson.

So her oral and written testimony are consistent.

It's also an agreed fact that by 'the person in prison' she meant Graham/Bryson (who had been all over the papers, so not surprising).

But it's not an agreed fact that she knew the details of the case or his crime. Given the coverage, it's perfectly credible that she was aware of the case from seeing newspaper headlines in shops; very few people these days actually buy a paper and read the full article to get the details.

Give the number of basic facts Kemp and other recent tribunal judges have claimed to be unaware of (men being larger than women, women being reluctant to take their clothes off around men, people not being able to change sex ...), I'd say it is overreach to claim that Peggie must have been aware of the details of the Bryson/Graham case.

It's not credible that he found it not credible for Peggie to know exactly what Graham's crime was, but perfectly credible for a trained senior nurse to not know her own sex.

If only we knew of an organisation with such a bigly screen and crucially had the 130plus page manual on how to erect and operate…

Regarding the problem with getting accurate information.

I research incidents to try and put into context what is happening to everyone in toilets. So I spend time looking at what is going on with people who don’t want to use toilets of their sex.

It is very frustrating and hard to get information about these groups because I cannot find any documented police or court incidents.

I know that council authorities haven’t documented complaints because TransLucent has been trying to find them:

TransLucent's Freedom of Information investigations across 382 public bodies, covering a period of over three years, found only four complaints about trans women using single-sex spaces, conclusively demonstrating that this widely publicised concern as part of the culture war against trans people is not supported by documented evidence from service providers.

Yet Stonewall (in 2018) says verbal abuse and intimidation occurs:

Trans people experience high levels of discrimination and poor treatment because of their gender identity and often change their behaviour because of it.
This ranges from verbal abuse and intimidation in the street and other public spaces like toilets, to being discriminated against in shops, cafés, restaurants, bars and nightclubs. Trans people also face discrimination when using public services and when looking for a house to rent or buy.

I have lots of articles pre and post Supreme Court about people who don’t want to use toilets for their sex and people getting angry at trans gender people. Yet, authorities have nothing documented from these angry people.

The most obvious answer is it’s a bit of everything: people don’t complain because what do they hope to achieve, that when googling they suddenly come across ‘hate incidents’ and what happens to others who have stuck their heads above the parapet, and if they do complain, the council doesn’t write it down for the same reasons.

No one from either side documents stuff so it difficult to research!

What is true with toilets, is that most of replies for the Document T consultation for toilets quoted the Stonewall document that quote came from above. The Stonewall letter write-in campaign skewed the results so much it appeared hardly anyone supported toilets for disabled people. In that Stonewall report the worst detail in an account for a toilet incident was a man was pushed out by two women after a shouting match.

In contrast to the proper factual documented cases of what happens in uk toilets when it reaches courts (deaths from medical conditions/drugs/self harm, and sexual assaults) this is very low on severity of incidents. We need to be looking at health and safety and how to promote that through design. This means the vast majority should be single sex spaces and within those spaces degrees of visibility that are not accepted (by legislation or building regs or standards) for mixed sex spaces.

I am looking at safety for all and completely private spaces within a mixed environment is worse for everyone at their most vulnerable. It is incidentally, what Upton was proposing for the changing room.

Is it possible to FOI fire brigades asking for incident reports where they have attended e.g. public or business toilets?

Being trapped behind a locked door is the number one call out for the fire brigade. Thousands of people have experienced being trapped in a toilet room or cubicle. I did do a FOI and unfortunately they don’t categorise the design of each toilet against outcome. This is the most important part for my research. When people collapse in toilets they can stop people getting in. They collapse so frequently against doors that in standards not only should public toilets be able to be opened from the outside but also an inward opening door should be able to have a mechanism to be able to be open outwards. The problem is many places don’t have these safety mechanisms, if they do they don't work properly (electronics go wrong on newer swankier designs) and crucially the toilet could be in the busiest of places but if you can’t see someone they can be in there for hours or days, so it’s retrieval not safeguarding. This last situation I know has happened after hospitals, offices and schools have realised too late so in those incidences the fire brigade won’t have been called. No one has a complete set of data as to what is happening.

If you can remember the rise and fall of the mixed sex, private standalone super-loo in the high street, the problems were the doors opened randomly, they got stuck, they opened after 15 minutes to prevent too much misuse (sex, drugs) but not so good if you are constipated, and boys learnt that if you kicked them a certain way from the outside, the door would open automatically. Presumably this is the type of gender neutral toilet The Good Law Project want for us all. The mixed sex, private design is the one Stonewall got people to write in about being the preferred choice.

Michael Foran..

https://x.com/i/status/2008179154244772068

To paraphrase Michael Foran (for anyone who can't read the article, I recommend it):

The Tribunal assumed that DU had a right to use the female changing room under Article 8 ECHR, and conducted a balancing exercise between that and SP's right to privacy.

However it didn't properly consider whether DU actually had that right, and had it conducted a proper analysis it could correctly only have come to the conclusion that for several reasons it was not open to a first level ET to decide that he did.

So in effect The Respondents , Fife Management, JR, The Judge etc were ‘mind readers’ of SP’s inner thoughts representing them as proof of SP’s hidden transphobic agenda ‘glossing’ her actual testimony into evidence and it not just a woman not wanting to get undressed with men…. Supernatural powers or what!

One of the many things that scare me about this judgment is that most ET judgements aren’t given anywhere near this level of scrutiny. In this tribunal reading the judgment and following the evidence has become an international pastime drawing in the collective wit and wisdom of Terfdom. In most normal cases I imagine the lawyers will have moved on and, unless their client is funding an appeal, might whinge about judicial idiocy but that’s it. Their unfortunate client will be aggrieved but won’t have MF pointing imaginary quotes out on Twix. How many equally idiotic judgements has Big Sond got away with?

Before this trial started someone on Mumsnet mentioned that he had ruled against the woman in a previous GC case (sorry can’t remember her name). Was that judgement just as idiotic? Has he simply got away with invented quotes for years? He was clearly foolish not to have realised the level of scrutiny he was about to be subjected to, but this sort of attention is unprecedented.

Courts routinely decide "wrong". We have a process for arbitrating disputes, an an appeal process too. We all (civil society) subscribe to that process, and we pretend it's infallible. But of course it isn't. Everyone knows "going to court" is high risk. If it always got the right result it wouldn't be risky at all.

I don't think this case is unusually bad, other than it has a lot of money behind it and a has generated a lot of interest.

Do you mean they are all routinely as bad as this? <boggles>

Gillian Philips case against her publisher?

Big Sond didn’t think being widowed and sacked mattered.

No, not all. But I'm sure more than an insignificant number.

The law is an ass, its just usually not on full display.

IIRC, the judgment ruled that she hadn't been unfairly dismissed because a contract between a writer and a publisher is not a contract of employment but a contract for supply of services. If that's true then it actually feels legitimate to me, however miserable poor GP's position was and however cowardly and cowed by the bluehairs the publisher was.

I can see why (in addition to the delay for marking season) Foran took a while to produce that analysis.

1. Applying this to the facts of this case, the Tribunal concluded at [965] that:
2. for the period 16 September 2023 to 13 April 2024 the grant of permission by the first respondent to the second respondent was not lawful under the 2010 Act, and as a result the claimant’s perception of harassment when the second respondent was in the changing room on two occasions within those dates was reasonable in the circumstances. Outwith those dates the grant of permission was lawful under the 2010 Act, as her perception of harassment was not reasonable in the circumstances.

This central point is so, to use the technical legal jargon, totally fucking nuts that it would take an awful lot of mental gymnastics to stretch to the judge's starting point and unpick the steps that led to it.

I've now (curses to my over-active imagination) got a visual of Big Sond with no pants on in the female staff changing room in Victoria Hospital.

I mean, he has metaphorically mooned us all.

I think i am correct to state that NC discouraged the tribunal from accepting an article 8 argument that Upton’s had some right to use female spaces.

it was one of the main points of Foran that the tribunal, nor any domestic court could for that matter could, second guess what the ECHR might rule on that particular matter, as no case law exists.

He also stated that the Tribunal cannot ignore the work place legislation about single sex provision, just because it is not within their jurisdiction.

Kemps finding of facts are neither here nor there, for what the legal challenges may be about which will per Foran be points of law.