Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton, following Employment Tribunal judgment - thread #61

[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 #60 can be found in this thread: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 60: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5461133-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-60 16 December 2025 to 8 January 2026

Still doesn't explain the American spelling when Kemp used the British spelling in other judgments.

I honestly believe that any man who enters a women only space is doing it to get a sexual kick out of forcing his presence on women. I think all such men are peeping Toms or flashers and capable of worse down the line, if they are allowed to continue to indulge their sexual fetish in the public sphere.

How many women are aroused by putting on a pair of jeans in the morning?
Zero.

These men "get off" on humiliation and for them, being a woman is a constant form of humiliation. The whole thing is profoundly misogynistic.

I think it's very possible the 'judicial colleague' (makes mental note to save that as a username) used AI. Because the statement deliberately doesn't address that.

Judge Kemp should have double-checked though and gone to the primary source. That's incompetence on his part, which again the statement doesn't address.

I am not convinced that the judicial colleague is another judge. I think it may be a tribunal employee that is a researcher or an admin/clerking type role. It's a huge job to make a statement like that, he will have had admin assistance and probably not just from whoever typed it up.

Good points well made @Ancestress

It's often interesting to look at what they didn't say...

Agree.

Some men who call themselves trans are perfectly able to manage without using women's spaces. The ones who do are by definition deliberately transgressing women's boundaries.

If an assistant used AI, then Kemp used it, sheer nonsense if they tried to distinguish the two. In some of the the responses to Wings' letter, there have been reports that Kemp has been seen by peers as a strict and intelligent judge, leaving Wings commentators baffled. I am more inclined to think that his reputation could be a consequence of the tendency I've noticed amongst men to make judgements about people based entirely on what they say about themselves.

I very much doubt it was a tribunal employee. A judge would not refer to a clerk as a "judicial colleague". That term would usually mean another judge who serves in the same courts, so another employment tribunal judge.

So this response means we nowndoubt all ET judges equally as potentially willing to use fabricated quotes from hallucinated case law. Well done, the judiciary.

The more I think about it the more concerned I am that in this response the accusation of AI use seems to be considered more problematic than the alternative explanation which is such extreme misogyny / anti-woman bias that multiple quotes were fabricated.

Susan Walker should hang her head in shame in allowing this blatant attack on women's rights to go completely unchallenged (luckily we have Ben and Naomi on the case). I hope a lawyer raises a complaint about Susan Walker regarding her lack of transparency and rigor in investigating judicial misconduct.

The whole ET system in Scotland clearly needs to go and be rebuilt. A complete waste of money if they're allowed to just make things up and do what they want.

It's not throwing people under the bus to say you aren't following the law.

Can we get that straight please?

Doing something unlawful is well simply unlawful.

In this case and others, it could have been resolved quite easily. Various parties chose not to.

I doubt that the non-AI explanation involves anyone fabricating quotes (ie deliberately inventing them). My guess that it is one of two scenarios: The colleague used AI as a convenient way to come up with info illustrating what s/he thought the law to be; or, the colleague was in some other way extremely casual in his/her quotations within an email.
This might have been because the colleague was (naively?) assuming that his/her email wouldn't be taken as gospel and simply dropped into the judgement - they imagined that Kemp would have the level of conscientiousness required to do the necessary research himself in order to get the info correct.

Susan Walker should hang her head in shame in allowing this blatant attack on women's rights to go completely unchallenged

Walker was not able to investigate the outcome of the tribunal - that is a matter for appeal. That is why the complaint was drawn narrowly around the made up quotes because it doesn’t matter whether the made up quotes were used to support Peggie’s position or, as is the case, undermine it. Using made up quotes to support any judgement is fraud.

The murkier this gets, the more I suspect political interference. In this and the Kelly tribunal. Both have mangled the FWS ruling. Scot Gov is still wrangling over men in women's prisons and clearly don't want single sex spaces for women.

I think the whole mess stinks of corruption.

Agree. So now, to those of us TWSOHers paying attention, we're getting the message that we can't trust any judges, we can't trust the supervisory process that should be overseeing this, we can't trust any investigations into judicial process not to kick the can down the road, we can't trust any level of the system to exhibit at least some integrity and sense of honesty and duty.

Fortunately for the judiciary and the rest of it, TRSOH media are entirely complicit in sweeping everything under the carpet. And all the TRSOHers are entirely complicit in 🙈🙉🙊 because the Righteous ends justify Any means, don't they?

So now, to those of us TWSOHers paying attention, we're getting the message that we can't trust any judges, we can't trust the supervisory process that should be overseeing this, we can't trust any investigations into judicial process not to kick the can down the road, we can't trust any level of the system to exhibit at least some integrity and sense of honesty and duty.

Well said. TRSOHers don't seem to see the wider picture though. People see this and wonder why they bother following the law. They note what things they can get away with and perhaps feel a little bit like idiots when they do the right thing. They feel totally let down by systems that are meant to protect and help them but do the opposite (the NHS, the judiciary) - that can lead to dangerous times.

@Ancestress have you ever read the Bridge of Birds?

Just to be clear, Kemp getting the law wrong is not classed as misconduct. Even if he was biased (and I think there is a decent argument that he was), that is not classed as misconduct. These are matters to be sorted out on appeal. The only thing that could possibly be classed as misconduct is the inclusion of hallucinated quotes. However, I'm sure the outcome of the case would have been the same even if you removed those quotes.,

Thinking about what may have happened, it could be a murky mixture. Consider, for example, that you are a very senior employment tribunal judge, and you get a lot of emails from your judicial colleagues asking you to comment on various things. Maybe you have an assistant who drafts your replies, and then you cast an eye over the draft and say "sure, looks good, send". The assistant uses AI, you don't spot the fact, fabricated quotes go out under your name - even if you'd never dream of using AI for your own judgements, even if you're sufficiently behind the times that you don't realise it's possible for apparently coherent text with quotes to have been produced using AI.

I am sure the outcome would have been the same as the quotes seem to have been made up to support a predetermined judgement rather than the judgement being based on them as authorities of law.

Quoted from the tax tribunal I linked earlier in the thread, which quotes a High Court case:

The High Court in the case of Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank[2025] EWHC 1383 has also considered the use of AI and made the following remarks:

4.Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology. It can be a useful tool in litigation, both civil and criminal. It is used for example to assist in the management of large disclosure exercises in the Business and Property Courts. A recent report into disclosure in cases of fraud before the criminal courts has recommended the creation of a cross-agency protocol covering the ethical and appropriate use of artificial intelligence in the analysis and disclosure of investigative material. Artificial intelligence is likely to have a continuing and important role in the conduct of litigation in the future.

5.This comes with an important proviso however. Artificial intelligence is a tool that carries with it risks as well as opportunities. Its use must take place therefore with an appropriate degree of oversight, and within a regulatory framework that ensures compliance with well-established professional and ethical standards if public confidence in the administration of justice is to be maintained. As Dias J said when referring the case of Al-Haroun to this court, the administration of justice depends upon the court being able to rely without question on the integrity of those who appear before it and on their professionalism in only making submissions which can properly be supported.

6.In the context of legal research, the risks of using artificial intelligence are now well known. Freely available generative artificial intelligence tools, trained on a large language model such as ChatGPT are not capable of conducting reliable legal research. Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect. The responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue. They may cite sources that do not exist. They may purport to quote passages from a genuine source that do not appear in that source.

7.Those who use artificial intelligence to conduct legal research notwithstanding these risks have a professional duty therefore to check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources, before using it in the course of their professional work (to advise clients or before a court, for example). Authoritative sources include the Government’s database of legislation, the National Archives database of court judgments, the official Law Reports published by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales and the databases of reputable legal publishers.

8.This duty rests on lawyers who use artificial intelligence to conduct research themselves or rely on the work of others who have done so. This is no different from the responsibility of a lawyer who relies on the work of a trainee solicitor or a pupil barrister for example, or on information obtained from an internet search.

9.We would go further however. There are serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused. In those circumstances, practical and effective measures must now be taken by those within the legal profession with individual leadership responsibilities (such as heads of chambers and managing partners) and by those with the responsibility for regulating the provision of legal services. Those measures must ensure that every individual currently providing legal services within this jurisdiction (whenever and wherever they were qualified to do so) understands and complies with their professional and ethical obligations and their duties to the court if using artificial intelligence. For the future, in Hamid hearings such as these, the profession can expect the court to inquire whether those leadership responsibilities have been fulfilled.

(My bold).

Lots of consideration of implications for the justice system if naughty lawyers misuse AI.

But where and and how can we consider the implications of naughty judges misusing AI?

A judge wouldn’t normally refer to a clerk as a “judicial colleague” no, but this isn’t a normal situation. This is a case of (the President of) the ET deliberately trying to move blame from Kemp in an oblique and vague manner. She doesn’t say specifically how the mistake occurred and why there was this communication. I wouldn’t be surprised if she used the literal meaning of ‘judicial colleague’ here to cover wider ground and include admin colleagues. She couldn’t outright blame a clerk or someone with a supporting role by using their job description. ‘Judicial colleague’ sounds grander and perhaps in her mind less likely to receive challenge than ‘colleague’.

By using that term she’s now put suspicion on other judges but I doubt that was the intention; if she’d thought it through, that response automatically invites further questioning and I’m damn sure they don’t want that.

I think it was a badly conceived and written response made to quickly dismiss a matter and hide the details.

Kudos btw to Ewan Kennedy for lodging the complaint in the first place.

Unfortunately, yes.

Could Peggie sue the judge? Could there be a joint action from those misrepresented and arguably smeared by the judgment?

Are people from ETs previously overseen by Kemp now carefully looking at his judgments? Or in fact any ETs, given Walker apparently considers hallucinated quotes and made up references ticketyboo?

How much of this can we FOI?