Admission. We fell asleep many times trying to make sense of the Judgement in this case amounting to a monumental 312 pages. We gave up in despair. The Judgement is both rambling in nature and untidy in form and no wonder. The Tribunal obviously took the view that if one word was adequate to cover its deliberations they would multipy that by a factor of 100. Verbal diarrhoea, it's called, so that it is quite possible that the core of the legal arguments was lost somewhere amongst all that verbiage.
To cut a very long story short, it is obvious that the Tribunal took a rather unfavourable view of the Claimant, Nurse Sandie Peggie, while taking a much more favourable view of the Second Respondent, Dr Beth Upton. Basically, in upholding only Mrs Peggie's claim of harassment by NHS Fife Board - to which NHS Fife Board had no real defence - Mrs Peggie was successful only in the very minimum of her claim. All other claims by Mrs Peggie were dismissed so that we may not have heard the last of this case after all.
Our own view is that much of this bizarre case was utterly unsuited for arguing in Courts and Tribunals of Law as opposed to the application of sound, common sense at the very beginning of the problem and long before it became an issue. Frankly, politicians were seriously at fault in passing legislation that could possibly be interpreted in the manner of the circumstances here. But, when it comes to Trans issues, we don't expect politicians to show much grey matter, do we?
That abominable governmental policy, that man is the same as woman, is one that, in Scotland, has been applied with both vigour and vengeance by the Scottish Nationalist Government. NHS Fife Board is, of course, a quango of the Scottish Government so that that may explain a lot of what went abysmally wrong in this case for the NHS Fife Board. While something going wrong happens all the time, both for organisations and for individuals, the consequences in what happened to Mrs Peggie are verging on the criminal.
The only sanity we could find anywhere is the recent case of For Women Scotland Ltd where the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom gave, as always, a Judgement of superb intellectual lucidity which, sadly, appears to have been largely, if not entirely, ignored in Mrs Peggie's case. It has certainly been ignored widely by the Scottish Nationalist Government for the simple reason that the Supreme Court decision turns on its head the Nationalist Government's desperation since it came to power in 2007 to pursue its agenda that a man and a woman are the same.
Whatever way we approach it, we cannot agree with the Tribunal that the claims against Dr Upton should have been dismissed. It was Dr Upton, a trans woman, who triggered this problem in the first place by insisting on using a female-only changing facility when she was acutely aware of the problems her behaviour was causing. Her conduct could only have been deliberate and, thus, actionable.
As for the NHS Fife Board, it deserves utter condemnation for both its stupidity and its outrageous malevolence towards its employee, Mrs Peggie, for whom it had a legal duty of care. That malevolence, and Dr Upton's poor conduct, were glossed over by the Tribunal.
No woman should ever have to endure the indignity and humiliation suffered by Mrs Peggie in having to share a female-only changing room with a biological male in the course of her employment, an important factor that appears to have escaped the Tribunal altogether. Add NHS Fife Board's very obvious malice towards Mrs Peggie and Dr Upton's deliberately selfish behaviour and one is left to wonder if the Tribunal simply took a flakey in dismissing so much of Mrs Peggie's claim.
Finally, congratulations to Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland and principal architect of the Scottish Government's Trans policy, for this omnishambles. Her dreadful legacy is unravelling.
It's a mad, mad world.
