With a stroke of the pen, President Trump has declared the beginning of the end of the great gender delusion. In his inauguration speech last month, Trump stated that the US now recognises just two sexes, male and female. The 47th President has put a stop to gender surgery for children and banned males from competing in female sport. He has called time on the use of “preferred pronouns” in email signatures, a practice that has served to propagate the lie that gender is a “spectrum,” chosen not given.
Sadly, here on the other side of the Atlantic, gender ideology is still firmly embedded in British institutions. An astonishing Employment Tribunal taking place in Fife in Scotland this week is evidence of just how deeply the madness is entrenched.
The trial concerns the case of Mrs Sandie Peggie, an A&E nurse at Fife hospital, who objected to sharing the female staff changing room with a male trans-identified colleague, Dr Beth Upton. Fife NHS Board gave Upton permission to use the female changing room but Peggie felt deeply uncomfortable about this and tried to avoid using the changing room at the same time as Upton.
However, on one occasion Peggie had no other option—she was menstruating heavily, a sensitive detail revealed in court—so remained in the changing room and decided to speak to Upton about why the doctor’s presence made her so uncomfortable.
Following the discussion, Upton made a complaint of ‘bullying’ to hospital authorities. As a result Sandy Peggie, a well-respected nurse of 30 years standing, was suspended from duties and subjected to disciplinary proceedings. In the ongoing Employment Tribunal, Peggie is making a claim against the Trust that it is she who is the victim of discrimination and harassment, not Upton.
Fife NHS Board petitioned the Judge to conduct the hearing in private and tried to force Peggie’s legal team to use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to Upton throughout the trial. Fortunately, the Board was unsuccessful on both counts, and the public can now follow the tribunal through media reporting and the excellent ‘Tribunal Tweets’ account.
The trial is due to last into next week, but court proceedings have already revealed the shocking extent to which educated adults appear to be willing to lie openly to themselves and each other. Firstly, Peggie’s legal team presented a document referring to Dr Upton’s gender at the time of his original registration. The NHS’s legal team accused Peggie’s barrister of ‘deadnaming’ Upton, something that would apparently cause the doctor extreme distress.
There are so many concerning aspects of the case, one worrying feature is the extent to which those in managerial roles gave more weight to a biological man in a senior position than they did to the dignity of a more junior woman forced to get undressed in the same area. HR officials seem to have preferred to pander to Upton’s assertion that Peggie’s comments made Upton feel ‘unsafe’ rather than to uphold common decency.
But what strikes me most about these cases—and sadly this is not the first of its kind and neither will it be the last—is the apparent inability of educated, articulate people to understand why women need single sex facilities, and why putting on a dress does not transform a man into a woman. Let’s go back to some basic biology. There are two sexes of humans as there are for all mammals, male and female. In fact, it’s the only category difference that really matters; skin colour, religion, height etc. are all irrelevant when it comes to biology.
Women are, on average, physically weaker than men and therefore cannot defend themselves if attacked. Of course, this is not to say that all men or even a significant number of men would choose to assault a woman if they had the chance, but we know from other countries and periods of history where there has been lawlessness, that without strong legal, moral and social safeguards, sexual violence abounds. The only way that civilization has developed to protect women from potentially predatory males is to build structures that limit the opportunities for men to gain access to vulnerable women and impose severe consequences on those who break the rules. These structures are of course legal-we need the threat of custodial sentences to those who would harm women.
Sandie Peggie arriving in court for her tribunal
PA
But social consequences for bad behaviour are also vital—we can’t have a policeman on the door of every toilet changing room, but if men who try to gain access to women’s spaces are subject to severe social consequences and good men uphold these conventions, it is much harder for those who mean harm to flout the rules. When we erode those social conventions—by celebrating rather than stigmatizing men who want to watch women get undressed—we erode centuries of protections for women and girls.
Women are highly evolved to feel fear and discomfort in the presence of men they don’t trust in places where they are vulnerable or defenceless. That is not a judgement on any particular man, it is a survival instinct. To ask a woman to suppress that strong instinct in order to protect a man from having hurty feelings is frankly barbaric.
I understand why this is not easy for all men to grasp. Decent men know that it is wrong and indeed reprehensible for men to try to gain access to women’s spaces. Polling shows that men also feel uncomfortable at the idea of sharing their own single sex spaces with women. But it’s difficult for men to fully comprehend the fear women feel in that situation. That’s no judgement on men, just a fact of evolution.
But what I cannot understand is how some women will defend the ‘rights’ of men to use female toilets, changing rooms and even prison cells. There are only two possible explanations. Either these women don’t believe a word of what they’re saying but, for reasons of virtue signaling and gaining status they go along with it. Often these women are highly educated, young and wealthy and therefore unlikely to be personally affected by the presence of men in women’s prisons or female hospital wards.
Or, women who defend gender ideology are genuinely brainwashed into believing that a man who wears lipstick somehow magically becomes female. Elon Musk has called this the woke ‘mind virus’ and, like a pathogen, gender ideology does seem to have ‘infected’ many. We know human beings can be highly susceptible to falsehoods even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. History is littered with examples of people who have been enticed to do and believe terrible things under the influence of different ideologies.
In an era that prides itself on gender equality, it is shocking that rights and protections that have taken decades for women to win are now being undermined so blatantly. Anyone with an ounce of common sense reading the tribunal court transcripts will be shocked at the way that Peggie has been forced to defend the truth about biological sex as if it is an extreme, irrational and contemptible religious belief.
Gender ideology must be defeated. I still hope that the ripples of the Trump effect will eventually reach our shores. But until then, brave women like Sandie Peggie will need all the support they can get.
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