TWIBS: Sandie Peggie Even Worse Than We Thought
Suspended Scottish nurse involved in workplace tribunal over harassment of trans doctor is revealed to also be a racist.
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.
Welcome back to the Scottish transphobe power hour! Believe it or not, I’ve got an absolute monster of an update to a story I reported on way back in February: the employment tribunal held for Sandie Peggie, a former nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy who was suspended for bullying her colleague, Dr. Beth Upton, a transgender doctor. Refusing to simply work at another hospital or, you know, get over her bigoted nonsense, Peggie took Dr. Upton and Victoria Hospital to a tribunal for “sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation.”
Unbelievably, Peggie received explicit permission to misgender Dr. Upton during the proceedings, but it was made clear way back then that Peggie wasn’t exactly neutral when it came to the subject of trans women, as revealed by her and her husband’s behavior on social media.
The tribunal was paused for five months while an investigation into alleged misconduct on Peggie’s part was undertaken, which she was ultimately found innocent of, but now she’s being taken to task for a different kind of misconduct: being racist on WhatsApp!
Yes, poor former nurse Peggie, harassed and made to feel uncomfortable in her workplace, might just be a raging bigot. Surprise, surprise! Peggie and other nurses in a WhatsApp group chat (in case you needed more reasons to feel anxious around medical professionals), according to witness testimony, repeatedly used multiple slurs for Asians and South Asians, which I simply will not reprint here, even censored. The same witnesses claim she stated her desire to put bacon through the mail slot of a mosque being built in Kirkcaldy.
Labour leader and Muslim of Pakistani descent Anas Sarwar said, of the alleged hate speech, “If what’s been reported is correct, then it is unacceptable and it’s horrific and we should call it out as such.”
When questioned about this very bad behavior, Peggie admitted the “jokes” were “distasteful,” but defended them as simply dark humor. Perhaps, as she said of her and her husband’s transphobic jokes online back in February, it was simply banter. She also insisted that these slurs were simply “normal words” that she and her friends used growing up, and had the audacity to suggest that neither her Pakistani colleagues nor her Chinese neighbors have ever complained about her use of those words.
I have a hard time believing that Peggie actually says these slurs in front of or at people who aren’t other white women. If she does, in fact, do that, I feel very bad for the people who felt they had to grin and bear it as this buffoonish woman casually hit them with hate speech and acted like she’d done nothing wrong.
It becomes easy to imagine that the allegations of Peggie being the bully, the one who was actually making her workplace unpleasant for others, might be true.
So, what happens next? Well, the tribunal will convene again on September 1 for two days of oral summaries of the case, followed by an indeterminate period of discussion between the three-person panel who will, over the course of weeks or months, deliver a ruling on the case. If Peggie somehow manages to win despite being the least endearing plaintiff to ever take the stand outside of Nuremberg, she could be compensated for “injury to feelings” up to £60,700 or more. Should Peggie win, it’s likely that Victoria Hospital will be responsible for the damages, and unlikely that Dr. Upton will have to pay Peggie directly… though she won’t recoup any of the expenses the tribunal has incurred so far.
It’s unclear exactly how the panel will rule, particularly given the vile April ruling by the UK’s Supreme Court that declared transgender women don’t benefit from the same legal protections as cisgender women. Even if Peggie loses at the tribunal, she may be able to appeal her case all the way up to the Supreme Court, who clearly have no love for trans Britons.
Here’s hoping the case has a speedy resolution, and Sandie Peggie wisely decides to cut her losses and find another job instead of harassing Victoria Hospital and Dr. Upton.
Alyssa Steinsiek (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
