From NHS nurse to feminist icon: Why Sandie Peggie stands for the women of Scotland
So-called progressive elites made a big mistake when they embarked on their ill-fated crusade to rob women of their rights
Despite the best efforts of Judge Sandy Kemp, whose confused and confusing employment tribunal judgment will surely, in years to come, be held up to law students as an example of how not to write a legal opinion, nurse Sandie Peggie emerged victorious this week.
She personally won the employment tribunal she had brought against her employer, NHS Fife. Her bosses were found to have harassed her from the moment she complained about having to share a female changing room with Dr Beth Upton, a biological man who ‘identified’ as a woman.
Her bosses did all in their power to break her, from suspending her from the job she had done with care and attention for 30 years, to preventing her from speaking publicly about her treatment. But their clumsy attempt to silence a woman who has spent her adult life caring for the sick and dying failed miserably. Instead, Peggie found her voice.
Biological reality
The losers, however, are every woman. Kemp’s ruling, based partly, it seems, on a patchwork of misquotes and misinterpretation of the law, suggests that women do not have a right to single-sex spaces, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling stating we do. Or at least that is how one government-funded body interprets Kemp’s dog’s dinner of a judgment.
The Equality Network, whose guiding philosophy is that a person’s sex is merely a feeling and not a biological reality, insists that Kemp’s judgment means that the “blanket exclusion of trans people from services and facilities that they need at work is likely to be unlawful in most cases”.
READ MORE: Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife: Why silencing of gender critical voices was root cause of problem
The highest legal authority in the land, the Supreme Court, ruled that provisions in the 2010 Equality Act allow for separate or single-sex services for women which exclude all biological men and that “applying a biological meaning of sex achieves that purpose”. But it seems Judge Kemp and the Equality Network know better, and once more a woman’s right to privacy and her unalienable right to assert her womanhood have been compromised by an elite bending over backwards to satisfy trans activists.
We have been here so many times in the last decade, it has become almost routine. First Ministers dismissed us as bigots. The present Prime Minister infamously asserted that some women have penises. Public bodies, from the prison service to the NHS, sacrificed women’s rights in favour of long-haired men wearing earrings.
Schools encouraged our children and grandchildren to believe they can change sex. And trade unions, as in the case of Peggie’s, refused to defend their women members – now the bedrock of the movement – preferring instead to stand up for men who wore womanhood as a costume.
The glint in her eye
But Scotland’s lanyard classes, smugly secure in their home offices, had not anticipated women like Peggie. The women who make this country work, who care for our sick and elderly, teach our children, women on the frontline of public services. They may have been shut out of the Teams meeting where decisions about their lives were made, but they were never going to stand by as their rights were sold for plaudits from Pink News.
Peggie represents every woman of a certain age. Across the UK, there are millions of us. Judge Kemp may not have recognised who she was, but we did. We recognised the ‘we do not care anymore’ glint in her eye as she contemplated a world that does its best to ignore women over 45. A world where the wants of a male-born doctor to preen himself in a women’s changing room are more important than the needs of a female nurse for privacy.
As former MSP Jenny Marra said to me after the press conference where Peggie announced she was going to appeal Judge Kemp’s decision, women are not making unreasonable demands. She said: “Sandie Peggie just wanted to get changed in a female changing room. We are not asking for the moon, just women’s privacy – the need for which has been recognised since time immemorial.”
Standing in front of Scotland’s media pack on Thursday, her voice strong, and her resolve rock solid, Peggie revealed that she had never heard the term ‘gender critical’ until she raised her complaint nearly two years ago. She listened as her lawyer, the indomitable Margaret Gribbon, invoked the menstrual flood that had led to Peggie seeking a safe, private place to clean herself during a night shift two years ago, only to be confronted by a man claiming the space as his right.
And she has had to contend with the publicity generated by her case while coping with the death of her much loved father. She ended her statement by saying that she knows he will be looking down on her, “proud that he, with mum, raised a daughter who did not and will not wheesht”.
Luxury beliefs
That is the mistake that our so-called progressive elite made a decade ago when they embarked on their ill-fated crusade to rob women of their rights. They didn’t give women like Peggie a single thought. They didn’t consider whether women would be angry that their reality had been reduced to a mere ‘feeling’, so eager were they to flaunt their luxury beliefs.
Around midnight on Christmas Eve 2023, Peggie entered the women’s changing rooms at her work a dedicated, hard-working nurse, known only to her friends, family and colleagues. On Thursday, she walked into a Dundee hotel, flanked by press minders and legal advisers, to a hero’s welcome from a group of women rights campaigners.
Whatever the outcome of her appeal, she has won her rightful place in the pantheon of feminist heroes. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when nurse Sandie Peggie stood up for herself, she stood up for all women.
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