mickle
Member
". Naomi Cunningham’s closing argument in Peggie v NHS Fife and Dr Upton was not delivered with rhetorical flourish but with the precision of a scalpel. Having spent days cross-examining witnesses, exposing gaps in evidence, and dissecting contradictions, she now gathered the strands into a single conclusion: this was not a case about Sandie Peggie’s “manner,” nor about patient safety, but about the right of women to state biological truth in their own spaces.
Cunningham began with law, grounding the tribunal firmly in the Equality Act and the For Women Scotland judgments. Single-sex exceptions, she reminded the panel, exist only if “sex” is given its biological meaning. Remove that anchor and the statute collapses into incoherence. The respondents’ claim - that Article 8 rights entitled Upton to strip alongside female colleagues - was “ambitious tending to unrealistic.” Women’s privacy rights, she said, would be more likely upheld in Strasbourg than Upton’s asserted right to undress in their company.
From there she addressed the late-breaking argument that Peggie had harassed Upton by her “manner.” The case of Higgs v Farmor’s School shows belief can be manifested in objectionable ways, but the respondents had failed to show this applied here. Peggie’s supposed aggression, Cunningham argued, was nothing more than a woman frightened and angry to find a man in a room where no man should be. The board’s witnesses admitted Upton was physically larger and socially higher in the hospital hierarchy. Peggie’s refusal to capitulate - telling him calmly he was a man and did not belong there - was not harassment but the protected manifestation of her belief.
That, Cunningham pressed, was the heart of the matter. If Peggie could not say “you are a man” without career-ending consequence, then her belief was stripped of protection altogether. The relentless disputes over language - Upton objecting to every word, Russell interrupting even in court - were not pedantic diversions but the mechanism by which belief was suppressed.
She turned then to credibility. The respondents had ransacked Peggie’s social media history, unearthing a single off-colour joke in seven years, to smear her as racist. They dredged up peripheral witnesses at the last minute. Meanwhile, central figures like Jamie Doyle or Angela Sheppard were never called. Kate Searle’s emails, Maggie Currer’s muddled testimony, and Isla Bumba’s extraordinary claim that she could not say with certainty whether she herself was a woman - all revealed a service in thrall to ideology. The board, Cunningham suggested, had no consistent account of what it was investigating: patient-safety concerns appeared, disappeared, and reappeared according to strategic convenience.
Her closing cadence was deliberately unsentimental. “Even if Sandie Peggie were a racist - she is not - even racist women should not be forced to undress in front of a man.” That line, spare and unsparing, captured her point. Rights are not contingent on virtue. A woman’s dignity is not forfeited because colleagues dislike her politics.
In her final words Cunningham called the respondents’ conduct “a heresy hunt.” NHS Fife, she said, was “in the grip of a delusion” - the belief that men can be women, and that this fiction must be enforced at all costs. Delusions can only be maintained through bullying, and Peggie’s suspension, the prolonged investigation, the character assassination, were the punishments for her refusal to join in the pretence.
The tribunal, she urged, should see the pattern for what it was: not a safeguarding exercise, not a proportionate response, but the institutional enforcement of an ideological orthodoxy against a nurse whose only transgression was to insist that sex is real. "
Cunningham began with law, grounding the tribunal firmly in the Equality Act and the For Women Scotland judgments. Single-sex exceptions, she reminded the panel, exist only if “sex” is given its biological meaning. Remove that anchor and the statute collapses into incoherence. The respondents’ claim - that Article 8 rights entitled Upton to strip alongside female colleagues - was “ambitious tending to unrealistic.” Women’s privacy rights, she said, would be more likely upheld in Strasbourg than Upton’s asserted right to undress in their company.
From there she addressed the late-breaking argument that Peggie had harassed Upton by her “manner.” The case of Higgs v Farmor’s School shows belief can be manifested in objectionable ways, but the respondents had failed to show this applied here. Peggie’s supposed aggression, Cunningham argued, was nothing more than a woman frightened and angry to find a man in a room where no man should be. The board’s witnesses admitted Upton was physically larger and socially higher in the hospital hierarchy. Peggie’s refusal to capitulate - telling him calmly he was a man and did not belong there - was not harassment but the protected manifestation of her belief.
That, Cunningham pressed, was the heart of the matter. If Peggie could not say “you are a man” without career-ending consequence, then her belief was stripped of protection altogether. The relentless disputes over language - Upton objecting to every word, Russell interrupting even in court - were not pedantic diversions but the mechanism by which belief was suppressed.
She turned then to credibility. The respondents had ransacked Peggie’s social media history, unearthing a single off-colour joke in seven years, to smear her as racist. They dredged up peripheral witnesses at the last minute. Meanwhile, central figures like Jamie Doyle or Angela Sheppard were never called. Kate Searle’s emails, Maggie Currer’s muddled testimony, and Isla Bumba’s extraordinary claim that she could not say with certainty whether she herself was a woman - all revealed a service in thrall to ideology. The board, Cunningham suggested, had no consistent account of what it was investigating: patient-safety concerns appeared, disappeared, and reappeared according to strategic convenience.
Her closing cadence was deliberately unsentimental. “Even if Sandie Peggie were a racist - she is not - even racist women should not be forced to undress in front of a man.” That line, spare and unsparing, captured her point. Rights are not contingent on virtue. A woman’s dignity is not forfeited because colleagues dislike her politics.
In her final words Cunningham called the respondents’ conduct “a heresy hunt.” NHS Fife, she said, was “in the grip of a delusion” - the belief that men can be women, and that this fiction must be enforced at all costs. Delusions can only be maintained through bullying, and Peggie’s suspension, the prolonged investigation, the character assassination, were the punishments for her refusal to join in the pretence.
The tribunal, she urged, should see the pattern for what it was: not a safeguarding exercise, not a proportionate response, but the institutional enforcement of an ideological orthodoxy against a nurse whose only transgression was to insist that sex is real. "
