The NHS’s cruel witch-hunt of a gender-critical nurse

Nurse Sandie Peggie is facing a witch-hunt by her employer because, like the majority of the British public, she believes that magic words can’t change a person’s sex.

In an extraordinary show of contempt for common sense and the taxpayer, the NHS Fife health board has summoned Peggie to a disciplinary hearing to make her answer charges of harassment. This is while an employment tribunal centred on the same allegations is still ongoing. The outcome of the NHS’s inquisition could lead to the nurse, who had an unblemished 30-year career, being fired.

As covered on spiked and elsewhere, Peggie’s career was upended when she objected to a male, trans-identifying doctor, Beth Upton, using the women’s changing rooms at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. In what her lawyer described as a case of ‘DARVO’ (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), NHS Fife accused Peggie of harassment, rather than the man who kept returning to the women’s changing rooms. Peggie was suspended after summoning up the courage to tell him to undress elsewhere. She is now suing NHS Fife for discrimination and harassment.

While the employment tribunal rumbles on, NHS Fife has decided to forge ahead with an internal investigation into Peggie. This is based on allegations from Upton that she compromised patient safety by not working ‘effectively’ with him. Peggie’s legal team accuse Upton of outright inventing the two supposed incidents of patient endangerment, citing the fact that they weren’t raised until months after they were alleged to have happened. Peggie, for her part, insists they never did.

What Peggie has never denied is referring to Dr Upton as a man – because, inconveniently for the ideologues running NHS Fife, he is one. What she does deny are more dramatic allegations that she ‘cornered’ or ‘harangued’ Upton, her much larger male colleague.

Law lecturer Michael Foran has described NHS Fife’s threat to sack Peggie as ‘shocking’, telling the Telegraph that it is a ‘flagrant breach of natural justice and of Ms Peggie’s right to procedural fairness’ for NHS Fife to prejudge any disciplinary process. The health board surely can’t get away with claiming that the disciplinary process against Peggie will be fair and impartial, after it has already accused her of harassment in open court. It has effectively placed her on the ducking stool.

NHS Fife’s absurd crusade will likely only serve to increase the damages Peggie could be entitled to. Her solicitor, Margaret Gribbon, has already launched further legal action against the health board for its reckless decision to proceed with the internal investigation.

When it comes to the tribunal, Peggie’s employer seems to have gone out of its way to frustrate justice. It has refused to disclose key documents, attempted to have the hearing held in private and even denied freedom-of-information requests on how much public money has been wasted fighting Peggie’s case. When MSP Tess White pressed NHS Fife for answers, the brainiacs on the board responded that it would be ‘inappropriate to comment during the employment tribunal’. Yet it is apparently not inappropriate to drag Peggie through an internal hearing while that same tribunal is ongoing?

Scotland was birthplace to some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, but was also the site of some of Europe’s most infamous witch-hunts and burnings. According to the witches’ trial trail advertised by Fife Coast and Countryside Trust, many of the women targeted were outsiders, including ‘independent thinkers who questioned authority and divine things’. Sometimes, it feels like very little has changed.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.