Why is the NHS spending hundreds of thousands of pounds attacking women?

Telegraph

12 hours ago

On Wednesday, the Sandie Peggie tribunal resumes. This is the case of the nurse who said no.
Peggie, a nurse with three decades of experience at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, found herself having to share a changing room with a biological male: the transgender doctor Beth Upton.
She had gone into a hospital changing room after experiencing heavy menstrual bleeding, saw Upton there, and felt so uncomfortable that she spoke up. Exactly what Peggie said is disputed, but it's claimed she told Upton that ' a man couldn't be in the changing room '.
This happened in December 2023. Upton had begun transitioning in 2022 but claimed to be both 'distressed' and 'afraid'. If you've ever been physically assaulted or intimidated, you'll know what it's like to truly feel that way. But Peggie is small – and Upton is certainly not.
Nonetheless, Peggie was suspended by her managers and faced a disciplinary hearing. Somehow, in these cases, it's always the woman who says no who ends up being portrayed as threatening and bullying. The gender cult demands unquestioning acceptance of the idea that trans people are always victims.
After some months, Peggie was allowed to return to work, but only with restrictions. NHS Fife refused to guarantee that the changing room would be reserved for biological women.
In May 2024, Peggie decided to take her case to an employment tribunal, claiming she had been subjected to sexual harassment, belief discrimination and victimisation by both NHS Fife and Dr Upton.
NHS Fife wanted to keep this quiet. Understandably. They sought to keep Upton anonymous and have the upcoming hearing held in private. Neither of these things is happening, which is just as well, because what's being exposed is a muddle of mismanagement and deep stupidity.
The board of NHS Fife also did not want to disclose how much this has all cost, but they have been forced to: £220,000 so far. Another 11 days of hearings could push costs up towards £1 million. The taxpayer, remember, is paying for both Upton's and NHS Fife's defence.
The board itself is now under scrutiny: even an SNP politician, Carol Potter, is breaking ranks on the gender dogma and saying heads should roll. Lest we forget, the SNP was the party whose (unsuccessful) fight with the campaign group For Women Scotland led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that 'sex' as defined in the Equality Act means 'sex at birth'.
This is the level of madness we have reached – where individual women take on public bodies that seem to have no conception of women's rights. A nurse wanting to change in a single-sex space is something most people would see as reasonable, not because they are 'transphobic,' but because until recently there was some respect for female privacy.
At the heart of this case is a story about class and male entitlement, albeit dressed up in medical garb. Peggie is upending the medical hierarchy as a nurse standing up to a doctor. She is doing so in a place where trans mania peaked under Nicola Sturgeon. Trans mania dictated that she should, as women are always told to do, simply put up with it.
Whenever women have said there is sometimes a conflict between trans rights and women's rights, many in power have repeatedly told us this is not the case.
We have been patronised with the phrase 'rights are not a pie' – ie, rights are not a finite resource, and that adding rights to one group doesn't mean taking away from another. Yet sometimes rights are a pie, and in terms of physical space this is self-evident.
We can solve these problems by having men's, women's and gender-neutral changing rooms. This would actually give someone like Upton a choice of two spaces to change in (men's and gender neutral), and protect the rights of women to be in a single-sex environment. This was a right women assumed was ours until the past few years.
A current row over the Ladies Pond at Hampstead in London also brings this issue into sharp focus and illustrates how public bodies still believe they can ignore the Supreme Court ruling that, in legal terms, sex means biological sex at birth. This means self-identifying as a woman does not permit men to invade women's spaces.
There are three ponds at Hampstead: Men's, Women's and Mixed. But men who identify as women have been using the women's pond. The City of London Corporation does not think it has to comply with providing a single-sex facility for women as, until it has sought legal advice after a complaint brought by campaign group Sex Matters, its policy remains that anyone who thinks they are a woman can use the pool. Quite clearly some women won't care about this, but some do. What is incredible is that this in effect means giving men access to all three ponds. Isn't two enough?
Currently, we are in a situation where many of our institutions are so immersed in gender ideology that they cannot respond to the actual needs of women. Or, indeed, correctly and swiftly interpret the law.
This immersion, though, was never organic – it did not come from a place of wanting fairness for everyone. If it did, I would support it.
The truth is that it has been imposed from on high as a response to intense lobbying and acquiescence to activist demands.
One can see this particularly in the case of the BBC, whose top brass started taking meetings with Stonewall activists in 2012. Everyone was sold on the idea of trans rights being the new civil rights and a symbol of being cutting edge.
This is how the full-scale abandonment of both women's rights and any notion of safeguarding has been enacted by supposedly progressive institutions – in the name of some non-specific idea of modernity. It has been appalling.
And where do we end up? With public money being spent to fight a working-class nurse who doesn't want to get undressed in front of a man? How is this right?