\n Ms Peggie was suspended by NHS Fife after a confrontation with Dr Beth Upton, a biological male who identifies as a woman, in a female changing room at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, on Christmas Eve 2023<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \n In December last year, a separate tribunal upheld four of her harassment claims against the health board, but dismissed her other claims<\/a>, including all those against Dr Upton. She is appealing.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n Giving evidence on the opening day of the seven-day hearing, Ms Peggie said that when she first spoke to RCN representative Stuart Fraser in January 2024, he told her to treat her suspension “as an extended holiday”.\n<\/p>\n \n “After speaking with Stuart I got the impression he wasn’t taking it as seriously as I was, or considering anything legal,” she said.\n<\/p>\n \n “I felt like he thought I was being disciplined because I had done something wrong.”\n<\/p>\n \n Mr Fraser’s note of the call records Ms Peggie telling Dr Upton the situation was “the same as when they put a man in a female prison”. She accepted in evidence that this was a reference to the Isla Bryson, a biological male who was found guilty of raping one woman in Clydebank in 2016 and another in Glasgow in 2019.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n The note records that he “discussed with the member the potential that this could be seen as discriminatory and is most likely what has caused the suspension”. It ends: “Advised will open case.”\n<\/p>\n \n “I don’t think he was being judgmental, I just don’t think he was giving me good advice,” Ms Peggie said. She described him as “non-committal”.\n<\/p>\n \n The RCN says it emailed her in January 2024 to confirm a case file had been opened. The letter said that if the union believed a tribunal claim was needed, it would refer her to RCN legal services to assess its prospects and whether it met a “minimum value threshold”.\n<\/p>\n \n Ms Peggie said she had no recollection of receiving it.\n<\/p>\n \n A note by Ms Gribbon of a call with Norman Provan, Associate director at RCN in February 2024 records her telling him there was “an industrial strategic role for the trade union to perform here notwithstanding the fact that legal support is not being provided”. She wrote that he “seems sympathetic to my client’s plight”.\n<\/p>\n \n Ms Peggie said that after a suspension review meeting in March 2024, where NHS Fife<\/a> offered to lift her suspension if she moved department, Mr Fraser also asked whether she would move.\n<\/p>\n \n “I felt like he was pushing for me to change to another department as well,” she said. “Not supported. I feel like people were taking the doctor’s side rather than mine.”\n<\/p>\n \n The tribunal heard that Mr Fraser was copied into a letter Ms Gribbon sent to NHS Fife in May 2024, disclosing that Ms Peggie had been sexually assaulted by her GP as a teenager. The letter said: “One of the reasons my client is so uncomfortable about having to share a changing room with males is because on or about 1998, when she was aged 17, she was sexually assaulted on several occasions by her GP.”\n<\/p>\n \n It said she had never told anyone about the assaults until around 20 years later, and had not disclosed them to the health board or her union earlier “because it is one which causes her distress”.\n<\/p>\n \n In an August 2025 letter to RCN senior officer Gillian Tait, Ms Peggie accused the union of having “neglected so far to take any or any effective steps to defend the rights of its female members to single-sex spaces and facilities”.\n<\/p>\n \n She wrote that colleagues were “still being told not to discuss my case”, and that many were unhappy but “afraid to raise the matter with management”.\n<\/p>\n \n She asked the union to demand assurances from the health board that staff could raise concerns about female-only spaces without facing disciplinary action. She also asked it to send the letter to every RCN member employed by NHS Fife “so that we know that you are now taking steps to defend our rights”.\n<\/p>\n \n \n The tribunal also saw an email in which Mr Provan set out why the union would not back a second claim against NHS Fife, over the health board’s handling of a new allegation that Ms Peggie had misgendered Dr Upton.\n<\/p>\n \n Writing in January 2025, he said the issue was “inextricably linked” to her existing tribunal, and that rescheduling that hearing “feels like a logical action to ensure all linked elements of Sandie’s case are heard together”.\n<\/p>\n \n He added that the RCN’s legal offer “does not extend to covering issues on which a member has received legal advice from another party”, and that it was “not within my discretion” to go further.\n<\/p>\n \n The email was forwarded to Ms Peggie by Mr Fraser, but she told the tribunal it had gone to her junk folder and she did not find it until August last year.\n<\/p>\n \n During her evidence session, Ms Peggie was asked why no colleagues had given evidence in support of her. She said: “I think possibly it was fear. They had seen the way I had been treated at the hospital by senior staff members.”\n<\/p>\n \n Under cross-examination, David Hay KC, for the RCN, pointed to an email describing her case as of “significant strategic importance” to Sex Matters, which funded the initial legal work. He suggested this was the campaign group’s strategy rather than hers, and Ms Peggie agreed.\n<\/p>\n \n She said she came to understand the term “gender critical” around the time she spoke to Sex Matters chief executive Maya Forstater in early 2024. “Being a sex realist was more or less the same as being gender critical,” she said.\n<\/p>\n \n Mr Hay put it to her that she had never told Mr Fraser she wanted legal help, despite repeated contact.\n<\/p>\n \n “By that time I was taking advice from Margaret Gribbon and I trusted her more than the RCN because they hadn’t given me legal advice,” she said. “I believe it should have been offered.”\n<\/p>\n \n She accepted that the first time she told the union in writing that it had failed her “from the outset” was in March 2025, after it refused to back the second claim.\n<\/p>\n \n She also accepted that Ms Tait had contacted her on at least 11 occasions between June and December 2025, having earlier told the tribunal it was “two or three times just to check in”. She had declined Ms Tait’s offers to meet or speak on the phone.\n<\/p>\n \n Shown emails from Ms Tait pressing NHS Fife for clarity on single-sex facilities after the Supreme Court ruling, Ms Peggie conceded it “wasn’t right” to say the union had not pushed the board at all.\n<\/p>\n \n Re-examined by her counsel Naomi Cunningham, Ms Peggie said her first call with Mr Fraser lasted about 10 minutes, not the 40 minutes the RCN suggested. She said that where his note recorded her referring to Dr Upton as “she”, she would have said “he”.\n<\/p>\n \n Neale Hanvey, a former nurse and the ex-Alba<\/a> MP for Kirkcaldy<\/a> and Cowdenbeath<\/a>, told the tribunal that Ms Peggie and her mother had been “really quite distressed” when they met him.\n<\/p>\n \n He said he had put her in touch with Sex Matters and For Women Scotland to “supplement what I felt were the deficiencies in the RCN’s approach”.\n<\/p>\n \n He said his case files on Ms Peggie had been passed to then Alba Holyrood<\/a> leader Ash Regan<\/a>‘s office, but were never picked up, and he was unable to get them back.\n<\/p>\n \n The hearing, before employment judge Melanie Sangster, continues. Witnesses on Thursday include former RCN Scotland policy officer Lisa Mackenzie, and Jenny Wilmot and Pauline Fox, two RCN members bringing their own belief discrimination claims against the union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She has been on half pay since July 1. That is due to end on January 1, 2027.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-780634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Sandie Peggie arrives with partner Darren Peggie for an employment tribunal against the Royal College of Nursing (Image: Jeff J Mitchell\/Getty Images)\n<\/p>\n