The Royal College of Nursing failed to properly support nurse Sandie Peggie because her gender-critical beliefs were opposed to the union’s alleged gender ideology, her lawyer has told an employment tribunal.
Naomi Cunningham, representing Ms Peggie, said the RCN was “in the grip” of an ideology that holds that a trans woman is a woman. She argued that this made it “impossible” for the union’s officers to support Ms Peggie properly in a workplace dispute that arose directly from her beliefs.
The RCN rejects the allegations. Its barrister, David Hay KC, told the tribunal that the union’s conduct was influenced neither by Ms Peggie’s sex-realist views nor by any “institutional belief or culture”.
Both sides delivered their closing submissions in Ms Peggie’s employment tribunal case against the organisation. The Fife nurse claims the RCN directly discriminated against her because of her beliefs and failed to provide adequate support during a dispute with her employer.
The RCN denies all three claims.
Ms Peggie previously brought a case against NHS Fife after sharing a changing room with transgender medic Dr Beth Upton at Kirkcaldy’s Victoria Hospital in December 2023. An employment tribunal gave Ms Peggie a partial victory against the health board in December last year, upholding claims of harassment but dismissing allegations of discrimination, indirect discrimination and victimisation.
In her closing submissions, Ms Cunningham said the evidence showed that the RCN was “steeped” in gender ideology and that this had shaped its conduct towards Ms Peggie at every stage.
She said: “All the respondent’s relevant conduct was conditioned and caused by its adherence to gender ideology, which is in its nature antithetical to the claimant’s protected belief.”
According to Ms Cunningham, one RCN officer failed to recognise Ms Peggie in her original complaint as “the victim of a serious injustice”. Instead, she said, the officer treated her as being “in trouble” for potentially discriminating against Dr Upton.
Ms Cunningham said the same approach was evident in two further complaints. She argued that the union had refused to provide legal advice because it could not publicly support a member whose difficulties arose from gender-critical beliefs.
She also said the RCN’s reluctance to support the rights of its “sex-realist membership” contributed to its failure to advocate properly for Ms Peggie when she sought guarantees from Fife Health Board that changing facilities would be single-sex.
“The gender ideology in which the union had been steeped for years made it impossible for its officers to act vigorously, and especially to act publicly, in the best interests of a member whose protected belief was in direct opposition to that ideology,” she told the tribunal.
Mr Hay rejected those arguments. Opening the RCN’s submissions, he reminded the judge that the tribunal was “not a court of morals, it is a court of law”.
He disputed the suggestion that the RCN was governed by an “institutional belief or culture” opposed to sex realism. Even if such a culture existed, he said, individual staff members “have minds of their own” and would not automatically be influenced by it.
Mr Hay asked the judge to dismiss all three of Ms Peggie’s claims, maintaining that RCN staff had acted reasonably in each instance.
Regarding the first incident, he said the officer did not know that Ms Peggie wanted legal advice or that she held gender-critical beliefs. Ms Peggie had accepted that she, too, had not been aware of this at the time, he said.
Mr Hay also argued that, in February 2024, the officer was acting on the basis of a “contemporary understanding of the law” when he did not regard Dr Upton’s presence in the changing room as an issue. At that time, he said, trans women had the right to use women-only facilities in Scotland.
In relation to the second claim, Mr Hay repeated the RCN’s position that Ms Peggie’s request for legal assistance was refused because she had already obtained her own legal advice. He said this was “entirely in accordance with the respondent’s established procedure”.
He said the final claim concerned the failure of a union official to “copy and paste” Ms Peggie’s letter into an email to all NHS Fife RCN members. Changing the wording of the letter could not, “in no view”, have been to Ms Peggie’s detriment, he argued.
Mr Hay added that there was no evidence that other RCN members in Fife had raised concerns about single-sex changing facilities. As a result, he said, nobody had been waiting for the union to take broader action on the issue.
At the end of the hearing, employment judge Melanie Sangster said she would deliver a written judgment “as soon as (she is) able”.
