TWIBS: Nurse Admits She’s Harasser at Tribunal
At Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal, she accidentally gives away the game and admits she’s the one doing the harassing.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Another Friday, another dishonest transphobe to talk about!
This time we’re taking a trip to good ol’ Scotland, ye wee bampots, to talk about a nurse, workplace harassment, and own goals.
In January of last year, Sandie Peggie was suspended from her work as a nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy for bullying her colleague, Dr. Beth Upton, a transgender doctor. The suspension was extended in February, and by March the health board gently suggested to Peggie that she simply return to work at a different hospital. Instead, Peggie has taken the health board and Dr. Upton to an employment tribunal to accuse them of “sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation.”
Dr. Upton was harassed by Peggie for using the women’s changing facilities at the hospital. She’s cited three separate occasions on which Dr. Upton supposedly made her feel “embarrassed and intimidated” by using the locker room. She confronted Dr. Upton and said that it was “inappropriate” for her to use the women’s facilities, prompting the doctor to file an official complaint against Peggie, expressing that she didn’t feel safe using the changing rooms when her colleague was present.
Before the tribunal began, Dr. Upton and the health board argued that the proceedings should take place in private to protect the identities of those involved, but Peggie successfully argued that the case should be heard publicly. She also received permission from a tribunal judge to refer to Dr. Upton as a man during the case, as long as it wasn’t done “offensively” or “gratuitously.”
How you might deny a woman her identity and comfort without being offensive or gratuitous, I could not begin to guess.
Of course, that isn’t the only time Peggie insisted that she didn’t want to “offend” anybody. As it turns out, Peggie is a very big Donald Trump fan, and her husband regularly goes onto social media to talk shit about trans women, a process which she describes as “banter.” She insists, rather dishonestly, that neither she nor her husband would want to “upset other people.”
Peggie was even said to have compared Dr. Upton’s presence in the locker room to the case of Isla Bryson, a rapist who claims to be a transgender woman and was initially remanded to a women’s prison after her arrest. This comparison makes it quite clear what Peggie’s true feelings about transgender women are, given that the two situations are entirely dissimilar.
Some very loud, transphobic women have weighed in on Peggie’s side, like JK Rowling, Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies, but they haven’t added anything of substance. No, who I’m most reminded of is my greatest arch-enemy, Riley Gaines, small time puddle splasher and professional transphobe. If you want to get caught up, just plug her name into the search bar on the front page and you’ll find out just how normal I am about her.
Specifically, though, I’m thinking about Gaines’ change of story on Lia Thomas’ participation at a swim competition, which started out somewhat polite and, over time, devolved into a story about nebulous feelings of discomfort, of being “disturbed” by… what, exactly? To start, it was Lia’s mere presence. Later on, Gaines fabricated a story about Lia exposing herself to other women.
It’s this sort of duplicitousness we must be aware of. It starts with mealymouthed insistence that nobody was meant to be “offended,” and once that doesn’t work, they start lying about what happened, trumping up the experience into this vile fantasy where they compare transgender women to rapists and suggest they’ve been sexually assaulted merely by sharing a room with them.
Don’t let people like Sandie Peggie mislead you. Pay attention to what they say when they aren’t in court, or the kind of company they keep, or the messages they promote. They’ll always tell you who they really are, if you let them.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
