How Sandie Peggie’s union hung her out to dry

Sandie Peggie – the nurse who bravely stood up to NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton, the male, transgender-identifying colleague she was expected to undress in front of at work – has a new fight on her hands. This week, she began legal proceedings against her trade union, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), for refusing to protect her dignity and safety in the workplace. In other words, for failing to do its most important job.

As we now know, managers at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, rather than defending Peggie’s right to a single-sex space, accused her of bullying Upton. The basis for this claim rested on Peggie’s refusal, on Christmas Eve 2023, to take care of her period in the women’s changing area in front of him. Disregarding Peggie’s 30 years of unblemished service, NHS Fife suspended her from her post. Last week, an 18-month internal investigation cleared her of the accusations. (She is still battling NHS Fife and Upton in a separate employment tribunal in which she accuses them of sexual harassment and belief discrimination.)

It is great that Peggie has been cleared. But, as in so many similar workplace battles fought by women in recent years, the investigation is itself a punishment. The one group Peggie should have been able to rely upon for support at this time, the RCN, let her down. Peggie claims that rather than defending her, her union actually ‘contributed to her mistreatment’. As her lawyer, Margaret Gribbon, argues, the RCN has ‘repeatedly failed’ to ‘advocate for female members distressed because they are being deprived of genuine single-sex spaces to dress and undress at work’. Indeed, Gribbon adds, ‘had the RCN fulfilled the conventional role of a trade union, it is less likely that Sandie would have faced the ordeal of an 18-month disciplinary process and having to raise legal proceedings against Fife Health Board’.

Peggie’s case is not unique. Other trade unions also prioritise the demands of a tiny number of transgender activists over defending the rights of their female members. In 2023, a group of eight female nurses at the Darlington Memorial Hospital were forced to share changing facilities with a man called ‘Rose’. The nurses claimed he stared at them as they undressed, and on one occasion even asked one of them if she was ‘getting changed yet?’. Yet when they raised concerns, it was not ‘Rose’ who was disciplined, but the nurses who were chastised by NHS managers for not being ‘sufficiently inclusive’. Steve North, the president of Unison, which some of the Darlington nurses were members of, even referred to their campaign as ‘anti-trans bigotry’.

To add insult to injury, when the UK Supreme Court ruled in April that ‘woman’ means a biological female in the Equality Act, Unison’s response was to reaffirm ‘its commitment to the trans, gender-diverse and nonbinary communities’. And when Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal began, Unison’s Camden branch put forward a motion at the union’s national women’s conference asserting that ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’.

The University and College Union (UCU), which is supposed to defend academics, has been accused of silencing academic freedom by punishing those who dissent from gender-identity orthodoxy. As far back as 2021, feminist academics were complaining that ‘UCU leadership repeatedly failed to defend basic principles of academic freedom and protection from harassment’. In 2022, when lecturers at the University of Edinburgh attempted to show the gender-critical documentary, Adult Human Female, the UCU opposed the screening and condemned the university’s actions as ‘transphobic’, lending weight to protesters who attempted to block the screening.

This was hardly a surprise. After all, when gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock endured years of harassment and abuse at the University of Sussex, culminating in her resignation in 2021, the UCU did nothing to defend her right to academic freedom. Instead, the union’s Sussex branch issued statements in support of transgender students and lecturers – effectively sealing Stock’s fate.

Trade unions now seem far more interested in promoting a niche ideological agenda, shared by a minority of union leaders and activists, than in representing their members. As a result, brave women like Sandie Peggie are forced to fight alone – or, in the case of the Darlington nurses, set up their own union to defend women’s rights. As Bethany Hutchison, president of the new Darlington Nursing Union, says: ‘No union should ever put an ideological agenda – transgender equality or whatever it might be – above the need to secure reasonable conditions for NHS frontline workers.’ Indeed.

With traditional unions turning away from defending workers’ rights, it is hardly surprising that membership rates are plummeting. In 2024, only 22 per cent of UK employees were trade-union members – the lowest rate on record.

Increasingly irrelevant in the present, some union leaders are growing nostalgic for the past. This week, Unite, one of the UK’s leading unions, welcomed the Labour government’s announcement of a full public inquiry into the actions of the police at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire during the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Unfortunately, getting misty-eyed for a time when unions not only fought for workers’ rights, but had a deep-rooted connection to the working class as a whole, will do nothing to improve the conditions for workers in the present. Until unions start standing up for women, defending their rights to privacy and safety, and reclaiming their role as defending the interests of all workers, they deserve to become irrelevant.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/