Euan McColm: No sign NHS Fife is ready to stop digging the hole it has fallen into over gender ID

As Isla Bumba, equality and human rights officer at NHS Fife, gave evidence during the tribunal case of Sandie Peggie – the nurse suing after she was disciplined following her opposition to the presence of a trans-identifying male in the women’s changing room – she declared that if someone told her they were trans, she would believe them.

All very kind, I’m sure, but far from robust.

It certainly wasn’t strong enough for Peggie’s barrister, Naomi Cunningham, who asked if that someone could, perhaps, be lying.

Bumba conceded the possibility.

How, then, could she tell?

A sign, according to Bumba, would be if the person was not living as a woman.

This exasperating and wholly meaningless response compels us to ask the bizarrely controversial question: “What is a woman?”

Bumba may not be the person to ask.

Questioned by Cunningham, she would only “hazard a guess” that she was female. Exhausting.

That Bumba is willing to declare a trans-identifying male is a woman while claiming uncertainty about her own sex is painful to contemplate. This degree of mind-bendery cannot be reasoned with; it diminishes us to try.

Sandie Peggie’s claims of sexual discrimination and harassment against her employers, NHS Fife, and colleague, trans-identifying doctor, Beth Upton, are once again the focus of a hearing in Dundee. During a previous two-week session, back in February, we heard how the nurse of 30 years service had been suspended from her job in the aftermath of her complaint that Upton should not be in a women’s changing room.

What followed was a witch-hunt led by incompetent zealots, who immediately sided with Upton and treated Peggie as a dangerous bigot. She faced accusations of undermining patient safety while Upton was soothed by colleagues and supported by an organisation utterly in thrall to the idea that a man may become a woman simply by declaring this to be so.

On Tuesday evening, Peggie was informed that she had been cleared of all allegations – including those of endangering the safety of patients – that had been made by Upton.

This created the delicious farce of NHS Fife and Upton’s lawyer, Jane Russell KC, returning to a tribunal at which she has previously put numerous allegations about Peggie’s conduct to witnesses only hours after her one of her clients had conceded those allegations, made by her other client, had no merit.

The decision by NHS Fife to share a legal team with Upton was foolish. Now it appears reckless. How Russell is able to ensure advice given to either party doesn’t conflict with the other's best interests, I’m not at all certain.

NHS’s Fife’s statement confirming Peggie had been cleared included news that the investigating panel had “concluded that a facilitated reflective practice discussion would be appropriate”. The nurse should tell the health board to get stuffed. This is a pathetic know-your-place power play from a humiliated institution. Sandie Peggie needs no lecture about how she was right in the wrong way.

On Thursday, it was NHS Fife’s head of nursing Gillian Malone’s turn to humiliate herself.

Malone’s concern was not that Peggie had complained about Upton’s presence in a female-only space but the way in which she had done it.

The nurse had behaved in an “unacceptable” way.

“The female changing room,” said Malone “was not the right space to raise concerns.”

Is there a better space in which to raise concerns about the presence of biological males in female-only spaces than a female-only space containing a biological male?

During evidence, Malone denied there had been a concerted effort to prevent Peggie joining with colleagues who shared her disquiet about Upton’s use of the female changing room after it emerged the nurse had been warned by NHS Fife management to keep the matter to herself. This demand for silence was issued after Upton’s line manager, Dr Kate Searle, had emailed more than 20 consultants setting out – in the most sympathetic tone – Upton’s version of events.

There was one rule for the working-class nurse, another for the middle-class doctors.

So far, representatives of NHS Fife have spent three days humiliating themselves in defence of the indefensible. At times their willingness to debase themselves, morally and intellectually, has bordered on the masochistic.

There are eight more days of hearings to come, and I fully expect NHS Fife to continue digging the hole in which it finds itself trapped.

On Friday afternoon, while the last afternoon session of the tribunal was taking place, the health board released – without the knowledge of its KC – a rambling, self-pitying statement in order to “clarify its position on a number of related matters”.

Across more than 1,700 words, the board’s spokesperson addressed topics from the gender critical beliefs of Peggie’s lawyer to the reasons for its delay in complying with freedom of information requests.

Shortly after NHS Fife issued its statement, information commissioner David Hamilton reacted.

“The petulant tone of NHS Fife’s latest statement,” he said, “is quite remarkable but it is the contents that concern me most. They have now cast doubt upon the assurances they gave me regarding compliance with my Decision Notice. I will investigate further and, if the authority has not indeed fully complied with my decision, then I may report the matter to the Court of Session as a contempt of court.”

It takes an extraordinary level of incompetence, a gargantuan degree of ineptitude, to compose a statement in ones defence that leads to the possibility of contempt of court charges.

On Wednesday, First Minister John Swinney restated his faith in the board of NHS Fife. He can no longer credibly sustain that position.

It’s time for NHS Fife to be put into special measures before its leadership team does any more damage.