Picture the scene. It’s Christmas Eve, you’re a stressed nurse on a tough shift, and you get a sudden and heavy period. You’re worried it might have bled through to your scrubs. You dash to the women’s changing room to attend to yourself and there’s a man there. In the one zone of your workplace where you ought to enjoy the liberty and dignity to deal with your menstruation away from your male colleagues, a man is present. Then the real sucker punch: it isn’t him that gets into trouble for hauling his male ass into your changing area – it’s you. You’re branded a bigot, you’re accused of gross misconduct, and you’re suspended from your job. All for wanting that most elemental woman’s right: the right to menstruate in private.
This horrifying scenario, this nightmare that can only be called Kafkaesque, is what happened to Sandie Peggie. She’s been a nurse in Scotland for 30 years. She was working at the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy in Fife. And on 24 December 2023 she went to the changing area to take care of her period. Inside was Beth Upton, a male doctor who identifies as female. Ms Peggie said she felt ‘embarrassed and intimidated’. She asked Dr Upton to leave, on the basis that, as a man, he had no right to be there. He complained to hospital bosses, accusing Ms Peggie of ‘misgendering’ him. Nine days later, on 3 January 2024, Peggie was suspended. What a way to start a new year: booted from your job for the sin of expecting dignity.
Today it’s been confirmed that Ms Peggie has been cleared following an 18-month internal investigation by NHS Fife into her ‘misconduct’. This is great news. It’s a blow for reason and for women against the trans cult that poses such a devastating threat to both. And yet it might be wise to keep the champagne on ice. First, because Ms Peggie is still facing down NHS Fife and Dr Upton in a separate employment tribunal in which she accuses them of sexual harassment and belief discrimination. But more importantly because we need to ask ourselves how our society came to be so fully insane that a nurse can be shamed and tormented simply for understanding biology and believing in women’s rights.
Even as we celebrate Peggie’s vindication, we need to dig into how the hell this happened. Grapple with this horror: in the 25th year of the 21st century, following centuries of struggle for the right of women to vote, to work and to be the shapers of their own destinies, a nurse was banished for not wanting a bloke with her as she menstruated. The internal investigation considered four allegations of ‘gross misconduct’. Two were related to ‘patient-care failures’, one to her encounter with Dr Upton on that fateful day, and one to her ‘misgendering’ of him. Her lawyer says Peggie is ‘relieved and delighted’ that following NHS Fife’s cruel and absurd 18-month investigation of these jumped-up charges she has now been cleared.
It has been a lunatic and sexist spectacle – but it is only a measure of how lunatic and sexist the entire trans ideology is. Consider the allegation that Ms Peggie ‘misgendered’ Dr Upton. No she didn’t. She correctly gendered him. He might absurdly refer to himself as ‘biologically female’, but he’s a fella, like me. And just as I have no right to barge into any area where women are undressing or attending to their hygiene, nor does he. It is a testament to the Orwellian derangements of the trans cult, to its slippery and punishing doublespeak, that a woman can be penalised for correctly identifying a man as a man.
The case also provided a grim, chilling insight into transgenderism’s takeover of almost all of bourgeois society. That even the NHS has been converted to the neo-religious fervour that says you can have a schlong and be a woman is terrifying. If medical truth doesn’t hold here, where does it hold? Then there’s the ruthless reimagining of women who stand up for women’s rights as ‘bigots’. How fitting that Ms Peggie was accused of ‘gross misconduct’, for that is how those wings of polite society that have gulped the Kool-Aid of trans lunacy view all women who defend truth: as gross, as troublemakers, as bitches. The persecution of Sandie Peggie is proof of the creeping criminalisation of women’s liberty under the jackboot of wokeness.
The Peggie outrage proves beyond a sliver of doubt that the trans cult is the implacable foe of women’s rights. Under this regime of delusion and narcissism that elevates the feelings of men in dresses over the rights of women, women can’t even menstruate in peace. There is no area that is theirs, no moment that is male-free. They must agree to sacrifice every bit of their dignity to the end of flattering the hallucinatory identities of sad men. And if they refuse, they’ll be demonised, investigated, suspended. That NHS Fife has spent more than £200,000 of taxpayers’ money on this sick and sexist crusade against a fine public servant is shameful.
Ours is not exactly an age of heroes. But every now and then one emerges. And Sandie Peggie is one. She has stood her ground against the barbs of her colleagues and the kangaroo courts of her bosses and struck a brilliant blow for the rights of women at work. Now her tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Upton continues. She must win, for herself, for women, and for truth.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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