Well, well, well. It transpires that NHS Fife – the health board caught up in the Sandie Peggie trans tribunal case – has now U-turned on its toilet policy. After the nurse took NHS Fife to a tribunal over her suspension for complaining about having to share a changing room with a transwoman, it turns out that the health board has now instructed its staff to use facilities that align with their biological sex – not their stated gender. How times change, eh?
The health board has said that both bathrooms and changing rooms should be used by those ‘whose sex at birth corresponds with the facility’. The move followed an impact assessment on the use of single-sex spaces after the country’s equality watchdog ordered NHS Fife to take to ‘corrective actions’. Some have pointed out that the decision is long overdue, not least because the NHS board spent months – and hundreds of thousands of pounds – defending itself in the Peggie employment tribunal.
In January 2024, nurse Peggie was suspended after her complaints about sharing a changing space with transgender medic Dr Beth Upton. Peggie then lodged a complaint of sexual harassment or harassment related to a protected belief under the 2010 Equality Act while earlier this year Dr Upton had made an allegation of bullying and harassment against the nurse. Shortly after the tribunal began, Supreme Court judges unanimously backed the biological definition of a woman.
While the board tried to argue that it was the nurse’s behaviour rather than her beliefs that had warranted her suspension – but in July, Peggie was cleared by the NHS of all four gross misconduct allegations against her. Meanwhile NHS Fife came under more scrutiny over its rather opaque responses to Freedom of Information requests regarding its expenditure on the case. The staggering £250,000 figure was only revealed after Scotland’s information commissioner intervened, ruling the health board had failed to comply with the FOI requests. So much for transparency, eh?
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