At almost midnight on Christmas Eve in 2024 at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy a nurse did something both ordinary and extraordinarily brave.
Sandie Peggie found herself alone in the women’s changing room in the A&E department, with a male colleague: a junior doctor who declared himself a woman. She told him it wasn’t appropriate for him to be there.
The reason this was such a brave thing to do was that everyone who should have stood up for her rights, and the words to express them in, had recklessly given them away.
In Parliament on Tuesday another brave woman, Rosie Duffield MP, stood up and asked the Health Minister, Karin Smyth: “Does the minister believe that the NHS should expect biologically female nursing staff to get changed in front of their biologically male colleagues if they identify as being female?” She got the refreshing one-word answer: “No”.
But such clear, straightforward answers have been impossible to get from the institutions that should have been protecting those rights. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Government Equalities Office, civil-service mandarins, NHS senior managers, the NHS Confederation, the Royal College of Nursing and the General Medical Council are all afraid of saying simply that human beings can’t change sex.
They expect female frontline workers like Nurse Peggie to be “inclusive” of men who want to go on safari in the women’s changing rooms.
Previously Sandie Peggie had left the changing room in embarrassment when the male doctor was in there (later learning that he wrote these occasions down as microaggressions). She had asked her managers for support, but got nothing. But this time, when she heard his zipper go, she turned around and told him that he shouldn’t be there, that he was making her uncomfortable, and that he should respect her dignity.
He refused. He told her it was his right to be there. Later, he put in a complaint against her for upsetting him. She was suspended, and remains under investigation by their employer, NHS Fife hospital board.
But Sandie Peggie had more resourcefulness and more support than Dr Upton and the NHS bigwigs anticipated. She contacted Neale Hanvey, then MSP for the area. He put her in touch with my tiny organisation, Sex Matters, and we put her in touch with the lawyers who have represented her to bring a claim of harassment and discrimination against both NHS Fife and the male doctor.
At one point last week there were 1,000 people logged in online to watch the employment tribunal hearing in Dundee. Dr Upton insisted “I am not male” and claimed that the concept of binary sex is a “nebulous dog whistle”. He said that he considered himself to be “biologically female” on the basis that he identified as female and “is not a robot”.
It was hard to watch these nonsensical arguments being uttered so confidently in the brightly lit courtroom, with the NHS hierarchy taking his side, and harder still to imagine Sandie Peggie finding the courage to challenge them on her own in the middle of the night.
It is not just in the NHS, but across public services, schools, universities and employers, that women’s privacy and dignity has been given away as a kindness. Police forces insist that men who say they are women are women; those with a gender-recognition certificate (available for £5 and a bit of paperwork) are allowed to strip-search female detainees. Men charged with rape can ask judges to call them “she”, and some will comply. Newspapers obediently print the headline “Woman charged with rape”.
Enough is enough. Individual women should not have to keep bringing these cases one by one. The government should make clear that no means no: a man can change his name, grow his hair, wear a skirt, take hormones or have cosmetic surgery. It does not give him the right to use women’s spaces or to force people to pretend he is a woman.
The government is passing a new law to create a national framework for digital identity verification. This will enable anyone to have a government-backed app on their phone to prove facts about themselves, such as being over 18. Will the system be designed to take Dr Upton’s word that he is “not male” and turn it into a government-backed “fact” to be brandished next time a female nurse says no?
Or will the government, at almost midnight, find the courage that Sandie Peggie found to stand up to the bullies who tell women that they cannot have clear words or boundaries?
