Peggie v NHS Fife: More casualties to come

Dr Claire Methven O'Brien is a commissioner on the Scottish Human Rights Commission. She is writing in a personal capacity.

In 2022, Labour supported the ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill (GRR Bill). This week, the Scottish Labour leadership sought to exculpate its involvement. Asked to comment on nurse Sandie Peggie’s ongoing case against NHS Fife, Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie would have acted differently, they suggested, if they had been better informed about the consequences of the bill for women’s single-sex spaces.

For the campaigners who opposed the legislation – who analysed, reasoned, lobbied and beseeched Labour, along with the SNP, to see what was blindingly obvious for years – this deathbed conversion by a party trailing in the polls is being greeted with the cold disdain it deserves.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament has jumped willingly onto the gender bonfire for a second time. Unsatisfied with the self-inflicted damage to its standing resulting from the original GRR debacle, the presiding officer this week rebuffed attempts by MSPs to discuss the wider issues raised by the Peggie case in the chamber – even when the rest of the country is doing so.

Disbelief and outrage are mounting. Why bother with elections, a parliament, or the other institutions it supports if the outcome is an ideologically-captured monoculture that not only inhabits an alternative reality but in amoeba-like fashion engulfs then suffocates every trace of challenge or democratic dissent?

The view that Nurse Peggie has been on the sharp end of the Scottish Government’s failure to acknowledge, let alone discharge their duties to women is widespread. Unfortunately, however, rot in the body politic does not stop at the doors of St Andrews House, nor indeed those of Holyrood or NHS Fife.

Requiring women – or for that matter men – to expose their naked bodies before members of the opposite sex as a condition of accessing employment, education, other public or private commercial services is without shadow of a doubt a breach of privacy, dignity, decency and human rights. No putative right of individuals asserting transgender identities negates this, whatever lobbyists may claim. Where, then, is the guidance from Scotland’s statutory advisory bodies that explains this?

In October 2022, as a new member of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, and concerned at their contents, I requested that the organisation’s previous submissions to parliament on the GRR Bill be reviewed. I was outvoted and a decision was made to postpone publication of minutes reflecting this until after the GRR was enacted. Before debate closed on the bill, I wrote to Holyrood’s Equalities Committee to alert them. No member answered. The response my intervention did secure was to have complaints made against me by staff and fellow commissioners.

Deflection, muzzling, smearing opponents, policing language to stifle debate and the quiet binning of inconvenient legal truths: this tactical array, seen first on GRR, has been replicated in Scotland over and over as the gender juggernaut has crashed through policies on prisons, police data, intimate searches, rape crisis services, and workplace changing facilities, leaving a trail of bureaucratic disarray and public trust in government in tatters. Still graver issues arise in relation to oversight of the delivery of ‘trans’ healthcare.

There should be no consolation whatsoever found in the fact that, besides Scotland, these issues have manifested elsewhere. We live only once. The lives of many have been damaged, indelibly, because organisations entrusted by the public to uphold their rights and keep them safe abandoned their mandates. Should it come as a surprise, if support drains from the political ‘mainstream’ against this backdrop? The wider institutional and cultural pathologies that have found their most recent expression in the Peggie case and responses to it must be urgently addressed – or belief in the value of democratic institutions may be the last casualty.