Across the UK, NHS services are coming under increasing pressure. Hospital waiting lists are too long while A&E departments struggle with patient demand. Nevertheless, at an employment tribunal in Scotland this week, we have learned that health boards like NHS Fife can apparently afford to suspend a senior A&E nurse with 30 years’ experience and an unblemished record for months simply because she dared to question the presence of a transwoman doctor in the ladies changing room.
Sandie Peggie’s remonstration with Dr Beth Upton was described as a ‘bullying’ incident by the junior doctor. However that did not deter nurse Peggie, who lodged a claim against both Dr Upton and the health board for sexual harassment, harassment relating to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation.
The otherwise cash-strapped NHS doesn’t have to worry about funding its defence: it has the bottomless pit of taxpayers’ money to rely on. Senior Counsel has been instructed to represent both the NHS Trust and Dr Upton, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds of public cash and the many hours of lost NHS time. To make matters worse the whole thing is proceeding at a snail’s pace largely because the health service appear to have failed to fully comply with a court order for production of documents. NHS Fife has been forced by the sterling efforts of Ms Peggie’s barrister to produce more files as the case progresses, necessitating frequent stops and starts.
The NHS legal team also tried, without success, to have the whole thing heard in private. There has been huge public interest, and the proceedings have been widely reported in the papers, on radio and tv and in social media. Hundreds of observers joined a daily live stream of the proceedings until – for reasons that were unclear – most of them were kicked out and prevented from further access earlier this week. A side issue of this whole farrago is the failure of the courts to keep up with the digital age. Open justice should not be an inconvenience. It is a necessity and for that we need live streaming of cases where there is such sustained public interest.
Not since the case of Isla Bryson (the trans rapist who wanted to go to a woman’s prison) has the Scottish public seen such a stark example of the results of embedding gender identity ideology. The painstaking work of a small cabal of lobbyists has poisoned our institutions with a science-denying dogma designed to elevate the rights of biological men who claim they are women above all else. A noticeable feature of the case is the silence of nursing unions. Women’s rights are not high on the list of priorities of most trade unions these days.
Far from turning a blind eye to this, our political class have by and large waived it through. While this may have happened in Scotland on the SNP’s watch it should never be forgotten that at UK level gender creep happened under the Tories – though they have now seen the light. This malaise has infected all political parties.
And while court actions have been pivotal in raising awareness of the issues of gender ideology in practice, the courts themselves have not been immune to the dogma of gender identity cultists. Lawyers for NHS Fife and Dr Upton wanted the judge to make an order preventing Peggie from referring to the junior doctor as a man because they claimed it was unlawful harassment. The judge refused, ruling that each side should ‘be in a position to argue the case in the manner that they see fit’ but warned that pronoun use could be classed as harassment if used ‘gratuitously and offensively on a repeated basis’. Peggie’s lawyers argued that it would have been impossible to prove her case clearly while referring to Upton as ‘she’.
That the public have had enough was evidenced by a YouGov poll this week which shows that a growing majority are becoming more sceptical about the requests of the trans activist lobby. This result follows the bravery of women like Sandie Peggie who have dared to challenge the results of policies which have often misrepresented the law.
Legal regulations governing workplace health, safety and welfare provide that separate changing rooms should be provided for men and women. The case is being dealt with under the Equality Act in which ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are unambiguously sex-based terms – although a Supreme Court judgment on whether the obtaining of a gender recognition certificate modifies the meaning of ‘sex’ is currently pending. However, laws which once guaranteed single sex spaces will be meaningless if the meaning of ‘sex’ can be changed at will.
For justice to be done in our society when these kinds of disputes occur, both the eliciting of evidence and the application of the law depends on a shared societal understanding of how language is ordinarily used. This case illustrates how this shared understanding has been deliberately undermined. The Peggie case has been adjourned until July.
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