There’s a single question at the heart of the legal case rocking Scotland at the moment. Should a female nurse be expected to share a changing room at work with a male colleague? Should she be okay undressing in front of him, and being exposed to him in a state of undress? Both common sense and the law produce the same answer: no. It’s a violation of her dignity, privacy and safety. It’s also unlawful: single-sex facilities at work must be reserved for men or women only.
Yet NHS Fife has in recent days been trying to defend its unwritten policy of allowing some male employees to use female changing rooms. The legal case has been brought by a nurse, Sandie Peggie, who objected to her manager when it became clear a male doctor who identifies as female, Dr Beth Upton, was using the female changing room. She got nowhere despite raising it on more than one occasion.
A few months later, she found herself urgently needing to use the changing room after heavy menopausal bleeding; Upton was also in there and she says she told him she felt embarrassed and intimidated, and raised her past experience of sexual assault to explain her need for single-sex facilities.
Upton put in a formal complaint, which led to Peggie being suspended from her job and subject to a disciplinary investigation that has dragged on for over a year.
It’s bad enough that NHS Fife decided a male doctor’s demand for everyone around him to validate his identity – to the extent female nurses must tolerate a man in their changing room – should trump those nurses’ legal rights. But their subsequent conduct shows just how little they care about the rights of the many women who don’t agree men should be able to self-identify into women’s spaces and sports.
The true extent of the witch hunt senior NHS doctors and clinical managers waged against Peggie has emerged in the tribunal hearings. Despite the fact workplace investigations are strictly confidential, Upton’s manager emailed a group of consultants condemning Peggie’s actions before an investigation had even started. Some senior colleagues even suggested she could be reported to the police.
Just before the tribunal resumed in July, NHS Fife announced it was dropping misconduct allegations against Peggie because of a lack of evidence. Despite that, NHS Fife has continued its witch hunt through the hearings. It’s produced witnesses to make vague and unsubstantiated assertions she is homophobic (Sandie’s lesbian daughter says this is completely untrue).
[H]ow on earth is her privately sharing offensive jokes, or like of Trump, relevant to her right to use a single-sex changing room? It isn’t, and it doesn’t have any bearing at all on the legal case. But by conducting a public character assassination, NHS Fife is trying to distract us from its own shocking behaviour.
Ultimately, this is a state-funded institution issuing a chilling warning to any other whistleblowers who want to hold the NHS accountable for unlawful behaviour. Come for us, and we’ll publicly destroy your reputation through any means possible. It smacks of an arrogant culture where bosses frighten their employees into staying silent about wrongdoing. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
Source: NHS bosses must be held accountable for witch-burning over female spaces