Sandie Peggie: Employment Tribunal, associated legal claims, and related matters - thread #66

[nauticant]

TLDR version: Sandie Peggie vs Royal College of Nursing is currently being heard. The hearing started on Wednesday 23 September 2026 and is scheduled to end on Thursday 1 October 2026.

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 were of sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation. Dr Upton claimed 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 after a prolonged process judgment was handed down on 8 December 2025. That judgment is being appealed and an appeal hearing is expected to take place in 2027.

Additional legal claims have been raised. Sandie Peggie is taking action against the Royal College of Nursing, against three senior managers who were witnesses in the employment tribunal - Dr Kate Searle, Dr Maggie Currer and Esther Davidson, against Carol Potter, the chief executive of NHS Fife, for victimisation, against NHS Fife for discrimination, and against its director of people and culture David Miller for harassment. In addition, Sandie Peggie is being investigated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council over fitness to practice.
The past proceedings were live tweeted by www.x.com/tribunaltweets. Tribunal Tweets are likely to be providing coverage in current and future proceedings.

There's additional information on Tribunal Tweets' substack: www.tribunaltweets.substack.com/.

Links to previous threads #1 to #60 can be found in this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 61: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5472628-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-61 8 January 2026 to 3 August 2026

Thread 62: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5562302-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-62 3 August 2026 to 24 September 2026

Thread 63: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5581909-sandie-peggie-employment-tribunal-associated-legal-claims-and-related-matters-thread-63 24 September 2026 to 27 September 2026

Thread 64: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5583133-sandie-peggie-employment-tribunal-associated-legal-claims-and-related-matters-thread-64 27 September 2026 to 29 September 2026

Thread 65: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5583663-sandie-peggie-employment-tribunal-associated-legal-claims-and-related-matters-thread-65 29 September 2026 to 30 September 2026

The whole point about the pronoun question from NC was that what is good for the goose…., so the answer from PM was perfect for Sandies case.

Does anyone know who goes first with the submissions tomorrow? Hoping fervently that it is Naomi as I am out all afternoon.

Same. I used to work for a national charity and last time I looked at their website, first thing I saw was, 'Proud to be a trans inclusive employer'...

Sincerest thanks to Nauticant and all of our C and P's and contributors. I really appreciate being able to follow what's going on.

I think one of the useful thing this afternoon was admitting that there'd been no training for officers on Forestater and the 'new' protected characteristic. How were officers meant to identify discrimination if they didn't know GC was protected?
Did they provide training on other protected characteristics - you bet they did!

This whole stance from the RCN witnesses has left me as a nurse of 30 yrs gibbering and horrified, but the Eunuch identity responses stunned me into silence. i just can't comprehend what is driving this...

Even if the training had existed, I bet they never MADE people do it. Some training needs to be mandatory or there are consequences.

I kept being badgered by HR as departmental manager, as several of my senior profs wouldn't attend unconscious bias training. HR gave me a stick to beat them with though, and when I pointed out they wouldn't be able to sit on the recruitment panels for hiring post docs to their grants, but I would have to replace them, and also I was happy to attend with them (again) and let HR know, they soon fell into line.

I do wonder, just how widespread is an understanding of Forstater and what it means? Amongst the genpub, and amongst nurses and RCN members. It's easy to think, everyone knows that, in an MN milieu. But I guess by the time NC has finished, the genpub will be a bit better informed!

I agree in that the gen pub wasn't that interested in Phoenix, Stock et al, but the nurses have really brought it into the public domain. I'm sure most people know a health care professional of one type or another. I live next door to one, and the chats over the fence have been fun!

Our old friend "I Don't Know" seems helpful too.

And 'i can't recall

If only they had had some legal experts they could check with...

I want to know who wrote these policies, like the guidelines for trans patients one. I haven't finished catching up so sorry if that's covered later.

I also want to know if, after this experience, PM will give a bit more thought to what the alphabet acronyms she blindly signs off in support of actually mean.

ETA I wrote the below but then, looking again, I see that Sandie does have to prove she didn't get the support she was "entitled to expect". But isn't that the heart of the matter? Who decides what support that is, how should it be evidenced?

This is quite hard to hold on to, as a non-lawyer. I keep worrying about whether Sandie was really entitled to expect more and better support from RCN than she got. But perhaps it's enough that she clearly didn't get the level and kind of support that she wanted? Then, RCN argues that this is because she did connect with outside solicitors and/or because she didn't agree to a phone call, rather than being anything to do with her beliefs. If the situation is that they are obliged to prove that, rather than them just asserting it and it being Sandie's job to prove it isn't true, I would expect them to have come with statistics about how they treat members' contacts in general, in order to show that their treatment of Sandie was normal for them. We've heard nothing like that, only vague "I would never" from Fraser and "it's on a case by case basis but in general" from whoever it was.

I don't think they have to prove that they were even overtly or intentionally hostile to GC views, do they? They just need to demonstrate that there was a hostility to GC views that underpinned the failure to act.

The witnesses for SP IMHO, cast a strong reasonable suspicion that SP did not get appropriate legal support, because of her belief. So the burden of proof falls on to the RCN, to prove that there was some other reason that they approached her case the way they did, that was not discriminatory.

IMHO failed to prove that, and if anything the witness evidence from the RCN proved the opposite. That they did discriminate against her and others. Put simply they did all this investigating of the situation, and failed to recognise there was a man in the changing room. Who legally should not have been there. Everything flows from that.

what is concerning me is the 'you can't get any other legal advice' defence that RCN seem to have. all unions say this. they might defeat the claim on that point.

I can give examples about toilet deaths and sexual assault and rapes within hospitals, and how that’s related to design and who is permitted in that space. I don’t know what this section about complications says but I agree hospitals are particularly vulnerable in design in get right.

As I recall, Sandie Peggie and other nurses avoided another changing room due to its position.

The thing is, women know. We already know this. The women at the RCN know. Women are constantly changing are behaviour, what we do when that’s it’s almost an unconscious act.

Last night I watched a man, who should know better, explain that building individual toilet facilities (implying straight into a mixed sex area) could be a solution. He said for buildings the limitations were economic (they cost a lot), space (they take up more space) and longer queues (he didn’t mention this but you need 25% extra toilets because of the extra time within a compartment). He did NOT say anything about why these private, resistant to sound toilet compartments have limitations for the health and safety of users! It didn’t even occur to him to mention that it could be an inequality and risk.

Because of ‘inclusivity’ designs are changing. He said it’s something builders are doing now. These designs are worse for women, children and medically vulnerable people than single sex toilets within a single sex washroom.

We are making toilets less safe and less healthy for everyone by ‘inclusive’ private designs overiding the reasons single sex toilet designs were built as they are in the first place.

This case should be about health and safety.

To the RCN: Please do not increase spaces of individual privacy for all for ‘inclusion’. If you want I can discuss. It doesn’t work.

Today's article in the Times
https://www.thetimes.com/article/adf4c555-a741-40ce-99ba-dbd8dc00aa18?shareToken=33d7bc83c79b70209a6e97182b932e7f&ver=article

Hmmm. It seems to me that they made their discrimination clear at the starting gate. When SF assumed that SP was guilty of discrimination for asking DU to leave the CR without doing any research into that. Altho SC had not confirmed the law by that point, he could easily have found out that her view was protected after Forstater.

It would seem to me that if the bias had not been burned into the everyday thinking, he might have thought, on hearing SPs outline of what happened, that she might reasonably be able to question his presence in a space allocated as SS if RCN hadn’t taken a position that aligned with NHS position. Given that when SP consulted her MP the first thing he did was out her in touch with Sex Matters, the RCN could have done the similar ie contacted Sex Matters to find out if there was an opportunity to challenge the suspension. The Union can research in lots of ways but it did nothing.

I don’t think it can be seen as anything other than discriminatory to have done absolutely nothing to find out if the suspension could be challenged on any possible grounds. They accepted the principle of the suspension as if there was no question ie as if by mentioning men in women’s prisons as an illustration to get her point across she had, in effect, called DU a rapist. But they then did no research. Clearly that is an arguable take and one they could have helped SP challenge if they had been at all supportive in any real sense (other than, poor you, you’re suspended, what a shame).

GTs demands for information through phone calls from SP is the opposite of support given that she also made absolutely no effort to find out anything that might actually help SP.

They then placed her between a rock and a hard place: depend only on our legal assistance knowing we are doing a shit job of understanding the problems you are facing and after we have said we are only maybe willing to do this if you join up your claims and throw the while thing back into the ling grass, or get tae fuck.

I think there a layers of discrimination and anti-woman bias that have been clearly set out through NC‘s questions.

Don’t mean the panel will see that but that would only be because the judicial system has its own issues with capture.

That report's lacking the various very startling things PM said in her evidence but then I noted this:

Nick Forbes
Wednesday September 30 2026, 3.17pm, The Times

I was so cross I forgot to say the link to this case - Dr Upton also came up with the ‘inclusive’ solution of a private cubicle accessible to both sexes within a mixed sex changing room.

This is where ‘inclusive’ gets you in design.

We all end up individually segregated into private little mixed sex compartments.

Btw a couple of people have mentioned "the panel", but this time it is a judge sitting alone. Hard to read how she's been taking the evidence.

how long would it take for an outcome?

Just caught up. Wow. Unbelievable but not at the same time.

Trans has captured everything.

Interesting that the Labour Party Conference was fawning over the Trans branch earlier with Andrea Egan pledging her unwavering support to trans.

And in the other awful twist of the day that Alan Cummings will be the Patron of Translucent all announced by Steph(en) who delighted at the weekend about the Labour Women’s Conference being a flop. Can things get any worse? At this point they may as well just remove the vote from women.

https://translucent.org.uk

I put in "(Ms)" For that purpose where useful. She/Her is plain ridiculous ("she" Alone would be quite sufficient) and definitely coded jargon for BeKindness.