A few days ago I was alerted to a new mental health campaign video for the NHS service Mind To Mind. ‘Life is full of ups and downs,’ the clip started. Cut to a middle-aged woman looking out of her window, a little fraught, but then resiliently donning a colourful bobble hat before leaving her house. ‘So we need to look after our heads,’ she smiled to the camera. This 60-second social media film was posted by NHS Fife on 4 February, urging people to take care of their mental health by connecting with others experiencing the same difficulties. I became aware of it thanks to X’s algorithm repeatedly catapulting it into my newsfeed after a swathe of women I follow responded to it with anger, mirth, and sometimes despair.
The NHS made Peggie’s insistence on all female nurses’ rights a Sandie Peggie problem
It wasn’t the message of the campaign that was causing anguish. As an unfortunate depressive, I largely agree with its premise. That is, after all, why I follow so many of the women who took issue with it being posted by NHS Fife that particular day. The timing was enormously ill-advised. NHS Fife is currently being represented in court by barrister Jane Russell KC in an ongoing employment tribunal brought by nurse Sandie Peggie against the trust and a Dr Beth Upton. Upton identifies as a trans woman. Peggie questioned Upton for using the ward’s female-only changing room and toilet facilities, insisting that as Upton is a male this was unacceptable – a stance that eventually led to Peggie’s suspension by NHS Fife in January 2024.
Like many women who have found themselves publicly thrust into the ‘gender wars’, while holding beliefs that have come to be known as ‘gender critical’ (or ‘evil’, depending on whom one speaks to), I can attest that nothing causes more mental distress than watching yet another woman be grilled in a courtroom over her failure to be suitably deferential to the mandates of gender identity ideology. Finding people who feel likewise, who know what it is like to be thrust up against this ideology and its consequences, is, at times, less ‘wanting to live in an echo chamber’ than an urgent psychological necessity.
For the fortunate newcomers to this issue: we are now well over a decade into the mainstreaming of a fraught legal, cultural, and political battle over whether human beings are sexually dimorphic and whether this matters at all times, sometimes, or at all in any circumstances. Whether someone’s ‘gender identity’ trumps their biological sex. Ultimately, whether women’s hitherto unquestioned right to single-sex spaces such as changing rooms and rape crisis services should be upended should a male identify as a woman, call himself a trans woman and desire access.
If you hold the view of a card-carrying, self-identifying ‘progressive’, then of course the ‘trans woman’ should have access as a matter of kindness and inclusion. If one cleaves to the gender-critical viewpoint, all of this has been experienced as a relentless, wholly regressive decade-long series of boundary violations against women. And the questioning of women such as Peggie in court for insisting on those boundaries, and the framing of those boundaries as unreasonable? That is likewise experienced as yet another attempted violation by women watching all of this.
Peggie had worked for NHS Fife for over thirty years when she was confronted by Upton’s appearance in a changing room that she had been using since 2012. Initially, Peggie attempted to have Upton recognise that his presence in a female-only space was not something she, nor several other colleagues – were happy with.
Given Upton’s insistence that he was a woman and had every right to be there, she then made her discomfort and embarrassment at having to undress with someone who she knows to be male known to senior management. Supposed compromises were sought – changing shift patterns, moving Peggie to another ward. But nothing that got to the heart of the matter: that this is a conflict of rights (arguably, a conflict of legal interpretation of rights), but with women’s rights on the basis of their sex being very much pushed aside.
Peggie’s discomfort with Upton in women’s spaces is caused not by him being trans, but by his maleness. While it is true that some women seem fine with acquiescing to the demands of males who identify as trans women, Peggie revealed that her stance is compounded by experiencing sexual violation from men in the past; also that, during one incident where she required the privacy of a female-only space in the changing room she and Upton were forced to share, she had been experiencing a very heavy period and needed the dignity of not having to deal with that in the presence of a man.
The long and short of it, however, is that this entire situation was avoidable. Peggie was ultimately suspended from duty by NHS Fife for having an issue with a male in a female changing room, which their policies allowed. Instead of doing the obvious thing of accommodating said male’s perceived needs elsewhere, they instead did something that many women caught up in the gender wars will be familiar with. They made Peggie’s insistence on all female nurses’ rights a Sandie Peggie problem instead of recognising the systemic issue: when gender identity ideology meets the real world, women tend to be harmed. This is the case whether or not they do as Peggie has and assert firm boundaries, or stay silent – as Peggie has stated other female colleagues had, despite their discomfort.
The case is ongoing and has been written about extensively this week, with Peggie’s photograph usually accompanying the story. Initially, Dr Upton and NHS Fife had attempted to conduct the case in private to avoid Upton facing public scrutiny. Thankfully, this was not allowed. Peggie summed this up when that judgement was reached by saying, ‘changing rooms are a place where we expect privacy. Courtrooms are not’.
I have an unfortunate amount of expertise in the psychological effects of being told to deny the reality of one’s own eyes, to push aside one’s own needs to prioritise male desire, and to be treated for doing so in a manner formerly reserved for kitten-killers. I fully understood as soon as I saw it why the outrage of women tuning in to Peggie’s case, or following the (excellent) citizen journalism of Tribunal Tweets online, was so vociferous in its condemnation of the questioning she has faced this week. ‘It’s the truth,’ she said, at one point, in response to Jane Russell KC’s insistence that referring to Upton as male would cause ‘immense distress’.
Offensive to some or not, where truth is the goal, it is vital to strip away all of the superfluous noise and word-salad and use plain language, no matter what ‘distress’ may be caused. Women are being denied their rights to privacy, dignity and safety in life and in law, because a minority of men demand it, and because a complicit or silent majority cheer it on, turn away, do not care enough, or are unaware.
Peggie’s case has broken through to the mainstream broadcast media this week in Scotland. Some of that reporting didn’t even make me want to gnaw my own thumbs off in frustration, which, for Scottish coverage of this issue is real progress. I almost felt like donning a jaunty bobble hat at one point. The cost to Peggie, however, has been far too high. But to echo Mind to Mind’s message in their social media campaign video – she really isn’t alone. I hope that is some comfort to her as the case progresses.
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