Some things are plain common sense. Female employees should not be expected to share changing rooms with male colleagues. They shouldn’t be socially shamed into undressing around them, or being in spaces where male colleagues get undressed in front of them.
There is a host of principles and evidence around women’s privacy, dignity and safety to be marshalled in support of this – the charity Sex Matters lays them out – but most people don’t need to read accounts of how uncomfortable mixed-sex changing facilities make some women feel, or statistics showing that voyeurism and exposure are two of the most common male sex crimes, to understand how wrong this would be.
But not managers at NHS Fife, it would seem. Despite the law of the land enshrining that commonsense insight – that employers are obliged to provide separate changing facilities for their male and female employees – female staff working for this Scottish health board have been expected to share changing rooms with a male doctor who identifies as female. One nurse, Sandie Peggie, has brought an employment tribunal claim for harassment, sex discrimination and victimisation against the board, following her suspension after she raised concerns.
Peggie shared her account of what happened with the tribunal last week. She initially talked to her line manager on a couple of occasions, including after Dr Beth Upton, the male doctor in question, walked into the room while she was partially undressed. Her manager said she passed on the nurse’s concerns but didn’t get anywhere; Peggie said that if she were put in that position again, she would need to address it with Upton. This is what happened a few months later, when she found herself needing to use the changing room after heavy menstrual bleeding.
Peggie says she told Upton she felt embarrassed and intimidated; but the doctor claimed as much right to be there as she did. Peggie says she raised her previous experiences of sexual assault to try to engender understanding, and mentioned a recent case when a male prisoner had been put in a female prison. She described how she was “shaking with distress”. After this encounter, Upton put in a formal complaint, and Peggie was suspended for bullying and harassment.
The facts of what happened will be ruled on by the employment tribunal, which is midway through the hearing. But enough has emerged to be certain that NHS Fife has treated this nurse, who has a 30-year track record, appallingly. The board’s expectation that she should tolerate mixed-sex changing facilities is clearly unlawful, and it put a survivor of sexual assault in a traumatic situation.
A senior consultant sent an email to the whole department giving a one-sided account of what happened, to Peggie’s detriment, a few days afterwards. It transpired that Upton – who clearly took strong offence at two previous incidents when Peggie left the changing room after entering to find the doctor there – later made other potentially career-ending allegations in relation to Peggie and patient safety, which her lawyer has suggested, together with the complaint of bullying, are unfounded.
Astonishingly, NHS Fife has failed to comply with a judicial order to disclose all the relevant documents to the tribunal, including some that pertain to when the complaints about patient safety were raised and how they were investigated. Peggie’s lawyers also suspect – based on the incomplete documentation they have seen – that NHS Fife abandoned an original investigation and started a new one, but has not disclosed this to the court. NHS Fife denies this, which will be subject to scrutiny this week. This is highly suggestive of a public body that has conducted itself inappropriately, and may well have prejudged the outcome of a high-stakes complaint.
There is no circumstance in which it could have been appropriate for NHS Fife to put Peggie in this position. The attempted justification is that everyone must adopt the minority belief system that someone’s sex is not a scientific fact but a matter of their gender identity, or some sort of gendered soul. As a personal worldview, that’s someone’s own business, but it is wrong – and, in a work context, unprofessional – to try to force it on others in relation to single-sex spaces, services and sports. That is true whether the fact someone identifies as trans is the product of gender dysphoria – feelings of distress about their sex – or, as it is for some men, a cross-dressing sexual paraphilia.
It is worrying that in evidence last week Upton did not seem to understand why a female colleague might not want to share changing facilities, and appeared to experience this as a personal affront. But the doctor is unlikely to be alone in that. The greatest responsibility lies with Peggie’s employer, who, instead of making separate accommodations for Upton, expected female colleagues to ignore the fact he is male.
Given the bravery required to take a legal case, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. A group of nurses in Darlington are also suing their trust as a result of having to share facilities with a male colleague. In a Sheffield hospital, female staff worried about sharing a changing room with one of their male colleagues were told, incorrectly, that the colleague in question had a right to be there. Outside the NHS, there have been many cases where employers have unlawfully elevated a male desire to be treated as female above women’s established workplace rights.
The idea that a man who identifies as female is literally a woman, and must without fail be treated as such, has become a cherished principle for some progressives. Politicians and women’s rights activists speaking against this have been excommunicated from the left. Slowly, but surely, this is starting to change in the UK: take health secretary Wes Streeting’s admirably principled defence of the Darlington nurses, for example.
Not before time. There is a cautionary tale from across the Atlantic, where Democrats’ stubborn and unpopular defence of men’s rights to self-identify into women’s sport has dropped the unlikeliest of moral victories into President Donald Trump’s lap, allowing a man accused of serious sexual assault to somehow position himself as a defender of women’s rights. Abandoning basic common sense for unpopular policies that put women at risk does not go well for the left.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
