Update from Maya
I am writing this on my way home from Scotland after spending Thursday afternoon with Sandie Peggie and her family, and then the evening at an event in Dundee for her supporters and press organised by Women Won’t Wheesht.
You’ll probably already have heard a lot about the judgment in Sandie’s employment-tribunal case, which came out on Monday. As we wrote when we first read it, we are pleased that her claim of harassment against NHS Fife was successful, and that the hospital trust was criticised for its terrible handling of the complaint that a trans-identifying male doctor, Beth Upton, made against her. But we think the tribunal got the law wrong on single-sex facilities at work. It is ridiculous and unworkable to suggest that a woman finding herself unexpectedly or unwantedly in a “female” changing room with a man must consider questions of human rights or the protected characteristics in the 2010 Equality Act. The way employers should protect everyone’s rights, in particular those of women and of trans-identifying men, is to set and enforce clear rules about whether spaces are single sex or mixed sex.
On Thursday morning I joined Helen Joyce and Fiona McAnena from my hotel room to record our weekly podcast, which is mostly about the judgment. You can listen to us as we unpick some of its many problematic aspects.
At the event that evening, Sandie and her solicitor Margaret Gribbon announced that she is appealing her judgment and that Ben Cooper KC has joined her legal team. As I said to her, she is in the best of hands. Ben represented Sex Matters in our intervention in the For Women Scotland hearing in the Supreme Court last November, and also represented me in my employment appeal tribunal appeal hearing in 2021.
Sandie’s legal battle is about to reach the two-year mark. It all started at midnight on New Year’s Eve in 2023, when she found herself in a small changing room with Upton, a doctor in the same hospital where she worked as a nurse. She expressed her discomfort at a trans-identifying man being present, he complained and she was suspended and put through hell.
I know personally how hard it is to see through a long-running case like this, and I passed on the best wishes of everyone involved in Sex Matters: our staff, board members and volunteers, and all our supporters too. When Sandie stood up for herself and asserted her boundaries, she was doing so for women and girls all over the country.
Over the past few days, as people have read the 312-page judgment carefully, they have found that not only is it wrong in law and expressed in ideological language, but also that it includes several made-up and garbled quotations from other judgments. One of the first to be spotted was attributed to the judgment in my own appeal. I tweeted about it, and Judge Kemp issued a hasty (and insufficient) correction. The press picked that up and found more. There is a good round-up of these and other errors in the judgment in RollOnFriday, a website and news service for legal professionals.
These errors and misquotations are really serious. When you bring a claim to the employment tribunal, it’s as if your life is on hold. You have to find funding, and you and your family are under immense strain. It costs a lot of money to hire a legal team, and they work so hard to organise and present accurate and telling legal arguments. You naturally expect that the courts will hear and judge your case with integrity and impartiality. When what is delivered after all that work and heartache is instead flawed factually and legally, with errors as gross as invented quotations, it’s an insult.
Maya Forstater
The Peggie judgment disregards women’s privacy and dignity
The judgment in Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife and Dr Upton was published on Monday. Peggie won her claim of harassment, but the judgment was a muddle: paying lip service to the Supreme Court judgment but misquoting and then ignoring it. This is our initial analysis; on Thursday, Peggie announced that she will appeal.
In the news
Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco for The Herald, among many others, reported Maya’s first comments in response to the judgment. She said that Sex Matters was pleased that Peggie had won her claim of harassment against NHS Fife, and that the hospital trust was criticised for its terrible handling of the complaint against her, but that overall, we were disappointed with the tribunal’s attempt to reach a spurious balance between a woman’s right to undress with privacy and dignity, and the right of an employee with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment not to be discriminated against. Maya was interviewed on GB News and Helen on LBC following the judgment.
Later in the week, Justin Bowie for The Courier broke the news that the judgment had been amended to remove a bogus quote from the Forstater appeal judgment. Maya said that such gross errors reinforced the growing impression that the Peggie judgment was unsound. This was reported on BBC Radio 4’s Six O’Clock News, among other broadcast reports, and Maya was interviewed live at Peggie’s press conference by Tony McGuire for GB News.
Maya told Jacob Freedland and Simon Johnson for The Telegraph that a second bogus quote attributed to the Lee v Ashers Baking ruling might be an AI summary of general legal principles.
In other news, Sex Matters did several TV interviews on the planned puberty-blocker trial and the launch of legal action in an attempt to halt it. Helen and Maya were interviewed on TalkTV, and Fiona was interviewed on GB News.
Geraldine Scott for The Times reported that the number of people applying for gender-recognition certificates has reached a record high in the past 12 months. Fiona said that the first generation of young people who were taught about gender identity in school and university are adults now, and that the huge rise in applications from people aged 18 to 35 suggests that promoting gender identity makes more people question whether they might be trans.
Fiona was quoted on the news broken by Tim Sigsworth for the Sunday Telegraph that men have been banned from female competitions by Table Tennis England. She was also quoted by Daniel Martin for The Telegraph on the news that Sharron Davies has been made a Tory peer, describing her as a wonderful role model and a powerful voice advocating for women and girls in sport.
Helen was interviewed by Mark Dolan for TalkTV on new research by the Women’s Rights Network on the harms done by mixed-sex changing areas to women’s safety, privacy and dignity,
Health and safety publication IOSH Magazine covered the news that Sex Matters is calling for the HSE to publish a statement that access to single-sex facilities at work must be based on sex, not gender self-ID.
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