The Sandy Peggie tribunal proves we can't avoid difficult conversations

From a locker room in Fife to the Ladyboys of Bangkok

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I’ve always argued that “no debate” is a bad approach when it comes to trans rights - or anything else. If you tell people they’re not allowed to talk about something, you're not convincing them. You’re just pushing disagreement underground. You’re forcing silence, not consensus.

And if a topic can’t bear discussion - if people are shouted down before the first sentence - you have to ask: Why? What are we so afraid of hearing?

I get that “no debate” is usually offered with the best intentions. It’s meant to protect people. But it creates orthodoxy instead of understanding, and resentment instead of resolution. Especially in situations where class and power aren’t evenly distributed.

Which brings me to the Sandy Peggie tribunal

This case has filled a lot of newspaper columns over the last wee while:

“On behalf of everyone with columns to write during the bleak, newsless, summer recess may I once again put on record our thanks to NHS Fife for all they continue to do,” tweeted Alex Massie, who has been burning with righteous anger over this case - or “dystopian farce” as he likes to call it.

In summary, Sandy Peggie, a 50-year-old nurse with three decades of service, was working in a 1960s hospital building with no-frills changing rooms - judging by the photos, just a few lockers and no cubicles in sight. One winter’s night, near Christmas, while experiencing a menstrual flood, the kind you get around the menopause, she went to change her clothes in the staff locker room.

She was the only occupant until Dr Beth Upton, a 27-year-old junior doctor and a trans woman, walked in. Words were exchanged. The details are disputed, but Isla Bryson (the rapist who changed gender and was sent to a women’s prison) was mentioned.

Peggie told Upton she shouldn’t be there. Soon after, Peggie was suspended and accused of misconduct. In court, NHS Fife Equality Officer Isla Bumba argued Upton had a right to be there - she is living as a woman, and it is disrespectful to treat her as anything else. Bumba was widely mocked for saying she didn’t know for sure if she herself is a woman, as she has not had her chromosomes tested.

A generational aspect

My older friends tend to sympathise with Peggie. But my younger friends are more in line with Bumba.

One of my cool young associates, said something like: You were brought up with a much more binary understanding of gender. We don’t see gender like that anymore. It’s fluid. We’re not interested in what’s in someone’s pants. You see a woman - you don’t know if she’s trans or not. It doesn’t matter.

Gender bender

The Edinburgh Fringe is also starting this week and after this convo, I saw a bus going by with a huge poster of some gorgeous women in skimpy outfits. Underneath, it said: The Ladyboys of Bangkok. And I remembered hearing about someone’s granddad who was taken to see them, and later refused to believe they weren’t women. He just kept muttering into his pint, “Aye, well… still the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

This also reminds me of a long, and possibly scandalous, Fringe joke of which I can only remember the punchline - The Ladyboys of Banknock (a rough area of West Lothian).

It is true that gender isn’t always obvious. I know this because I once - unwittingly - won the prize for being the most convincing trans woman in a gay disco.

It was a basement bar, Nutbush City Limits on the turntable, bit of glitter. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked my name. I gave it, thinking - hoping - maybe they liked my dancing. Minutes later, I was called to the stage and handed a wrapped prize. It turned out to be a box of extra-strong condoms - my reward, apparently, for looking impressively natural.

Reader, I am not trans. I just have size nine feet and the bone structure of a Viking. The whole thing was mortifying, hilarious, and oddly illuminating.

Maybe our understanding of gender is evolving. But we need to discuss this. We can’t just bin all the old girls who don’t “get it”. Peggie had worked for NHS Fife with an unbroken record for 30 years. But the employment tribunal heard that while the area’s managers and consultants had been briefed that Upton would be using the women’s locker room, the nurses hadn’t. Sandy Peggie didn’t get to choose her locker room. Dr Upton, it seems, didn’t either. (Junior doctors in that hospital use the same locker room as the nurses.)

Could there not have been a conversation? An opportunity for those who were being asked to undress in that confined space to ask questions or even voice discomfort? Maybe explore other changing options for one or both of them?

Is class an issue?

There is a case for saying it shouldn’t matter what someone's biological sex is, if they are genuinely living as a woman - although I think we have to accept that there are some men who are trying to use opportunities created by the blurring of gender boundaries to their advantage (eg Isla Bryson).

But in this workplace scenario, things were being asked of Peggie that are not asked of most middle-class women. If I don’t want to go to the cool bar with toilets marked “This toilet has urinals” or “This toilet has cubicles” - I can go somewhere else. If I go to a posh health club, there are usually lots of private changing cubicles, separate showers, and a eucalyptus diffuser. It is not going to bother me if there is a trans woman in there - I probably would not even notice. I am not going to be alone there late at night either.

Peggie doesn’t have that degree of choice. She has a uniform, a locker, and a shift to finish. That’s where she changes. That’s where her spare trousers are.

And that’s where the argument that “she should’ve just dealt with it” starts to fall apart. Because when people don’t get to choose their environment, their reaction to it can’t always be neatly filed under “bigotry” or “bias.” Sometimes it’s just stress. Or discomfort. Or a lifetime of being made to do things that don’t feel safe. Peggie said she has a difficult history with men - it is my perception that some of the women who feel most strongly about this are also women who have been the victims of sexual assault.

The Benidorm holiday chat

The tribunal itself started out with all the usual procedural seriousness. But then, in an unexpected twist worthy of a daytime courtroom drama, NHS Fife introduced a private WhatsApp group chat between nurses who went on holiday to Benidorm together.

There were nasty racist jokes in there. I am not going to justify them, but I was horrified to see this presented in evidence. Many nurses wake up in a sweat thinking about being taken to court. How awful to have unsavoury remarks like this made public.

MP John Nicholson argued that class has nothing to do with this case. He tweeted: “This, of course, is hugely offensive to folk from a working-class background. Using racial slurs & obsessing about trans people is an active choice. And not a good one for a profession - nursing - dealing with a diverse population of patients.”

I dunno John: do consultants on holiday, drinking champagne in Chamonix, sometimes say things they wouldn’t like aired in a courtroom? I really struggle to imagine them suffering this kind of invasion of privacy. The General Medical Council would never allow it. The BMA would have fifty fits.

I bet - I know - there are people in my life who, in a private WhatsApp chat, might share jokes or opinions I’d find unpleasant, objectionable, or downright unacceptable. I don’t want to see those remarks. And I also recognise that these things don’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t make a good nurse. It’s a leap to say that because someone shared a racist joke in a private chat, they’d automatically be discriminatory toward, say, an Asian patient. People compartmentalise. They show different aspects of themselves in different settings. That’s human.

What does it really mean to be an inclusive employer? Surely it means having space for people with different values, backgrounds, and politics. Inclusion doesn’t just mean adding more voices - it means knowing how to deal with disagreement without pulling the pin and chucking it at a tribunal.

The Ladyboys are doing two shows a day during the Fringe

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