Sandie Peggie’s second employment tribunal asks whether the Royal College of Nursing allowed its institutional commitments on sex and gender to colour the advice, representation and legal assessment it gave a dissenting member. The answer remains for the tribunal. The wider principle is already clear: a union may campaign, but professional representation cannot become conditional upon ideological conformity.
“Trans lobby has blinded nursing union,” ran the stark headline over Sandie Peggie’s interview with The Sunday Times.¹ It is a serious accusation. It is also now an allegation being tested in evidence rather than merely argued in the press. Peggie has brought the Royal College of Nursing, her union of some thirty years, before an employment tribunal in Dundee, claiming that she was discriminated against because of her gender-critical and sex-realist beliefs when she sought assistance following the changing-room dispute which eventually produced Peggie v Fife Health Board and Upton. The RCN denies the allegations. The importance of the case lies precisely there: not in assuming its conclusion, but in asking whether a professional organisation can campaign vigorously on contested questions while keeping its representative machinery genuinely neutral between members who disagree about them.¹²
Peggie told the tribunal that after NHS Fife placed her on special leave in January 2024 she felt that her RCN representative, Stuart Fraser, “wasn’t taking it as seriously as I was”. She said she felt unsupported and believed that he assumed she must have done something wrong because disciplinary allegations had been made against her. The claim goes further than dissatisfaction with one representative. Peggie alleges that the RCN failed to advise her at the outset that she might have an employment claim, later declined formal legal support, and failed adequately to pursue her demand for assurances over single-sex changing facilities. She says her protected beliefs materially influenced that treatment. The RCN says they did not.²
There is an important distinction at the outset. Peggie is not entitled to win this case simply because aspects of her dispute with NHS Fife later succeeded, nor because the legal landscape subsequently shifted substantially in her direction. Advice given in 2024 must be judged against what was reasonably knowable then. A trade union is not obliged to fund every claim advanced by every member, and professional representatives are entitled to tell members that an argument is weak, a proposed strategy unwise or particular conduct capable of attracting disciplinary consequences. The issue is narrower and more searching: was Peggie’s case assessed by the same professional standards that would have been applied had her protected belief been institutionally congenial rather than controversial?
The first Peggie tribunal itself demonstrates why slogans are inadequate. In December 2025 the Employment Tribunal upheld part of her harassment claim against NHS Fife but dismissed her remaining allegations of direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and victimisation and dismissed the claim against Dr Beth Upton. The tribunal held that the Health Board had initially acted lawfully in permitting Upton to use the female changing room, but that once Peggie complained the permission should have been withdrawn temporarily while alternatives were considered. It further held that the later arrangement under which Peggie and Upton were not working simultaneously rendered the permission lawful again. The Board was also found to have harassed Peggie through aspects of its investigation, including its excessive duration.⁴
The judgment therefore supports neither caricature. It did not hold that a person with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment possesses an unconditional right to use every facility designated for the opposite biological sex. Nor did it find an absolute workplace rule under which the objection of one employee automatically settles the matter. The tribunal instead constructed what it regarded as an objective-justification exercise, weighing the circumstances of the employees and the alternatives available to the employer. Peggie is appealing that analysis. On 31 July 2026 the Employment Appeal Tribunal permitted thirteen grounds of her appeal to proceed to a full hearing. The jurisprudence generated specifically by her workplace dispute is therefore not finished.⁴⁵
There is nevertheless one matter on which the law has become considerably clearer. In For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers, the Supreme Court unanimously held in April 2025 that “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The Court expressly identified changing rooms, medical services, communal accommodation and other single-sex provision among the statutory contexts which require that coherent biological meaning. It also expressly rejected the suggestion that this removes protection from transgender people: gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic, and the Act continues to provide protection against unlawful discrimination and harassment. The judgment clarified the categories; it did not abolish one category in favour of another.⁶
That distinction is especially important in a hospital. Nursing is not performed in an abstract office environment. Staff change into clinical clothing; patients may be undressed, incapacitated or undergoing intimate treatment; questions of bodily privacy, dignity and sex can arise as practical realities rather than ideological propositions. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 recognise precisely this reality. Regulation 21 requires separate washing facilities for men and women unless facilities are contained in rooms capable of being secured and used individually, while regulation 24 requires separate changing facilities, or separate use, where necessary for reasons of propriety.⁷ Whatever questions remain about the interaction between those regulations and discrimination law, the proposition that sex and privacy matter when people undress is hardly an eccentric innovation produced by the culture wars.
Care is also required with the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new statutory Code. The revised Code which came into force on 5 August 2026 concerns services, public functions and associations; it does not itself provide the employment code governing a workplace dispute such as Peggie’s. Indeed, the Code expressly notes that trade organisations fall under Part 5 of the Equality Act and are outside its Part 7 provisions for associations. The RCN itself has called for governments to produce unequivocal, health-specific guidance explaining how the post-For Women Scotland law is to operate in practice.¹³¹⁴ That is a reasonable request. Neither nurses nor patients should have to discover the legal architecture of privacy and single-sex provision through disciplinary proceedings after a conflict has already occurred.
But the present tribunal is not fundamentally deciding the whole law of changing rooms. It is deciding how a trade organisation treated one of its members. Section 57 of the Equality Act is therefore particularly important. It provides that a trade organisation must not discriminate against a member in the way it affords access to a “benefit, facility or service”, nor subject a member to another detriment. Religion or belief is among the Act’s protected characteristics. The question whether gender-critical belief can qualify for that protection ceased to be seriously arguable after Forstater v CGD Europe in 2021.⁸⁹
Higgs v Farmor’s School subsequently sharpened the related distinction between holding a protected belief and manifesting it. The Court of Appeal held in February 2025 that dismissal merely because of the expression of a protected belief amounts to direct discrimination, while accepting that objectionable manifestations may in appropriate circumstances attract a proportionate response.¹⁰ That matters because neither Forstater nor Higgs gives an employee a licence to behave however she wishes. They establish something more disciplined: unpopular belief cannot itself be converted into professional misconduct, and any restriction upon its manifestation requires attention to what was actually said or done and to proportionality.
The RCN’s own account of its purpose makes the present case sharper still. It describes itself as the world’s largest nursing trade union and professional body, representing more than half a million nursing staff and students. It advertises workplace representation, specialist legal support and employment advice. Its own explanation of trade unionism says that unions provide representation to members, “ensuring all workers are treated fairly by their employers”.¹¹ That is not an incidental benefit attached to the organisation’s public campaigning. It is part of what members are paying for.
At the same time, the RCN is explicitly an influencing and campaigning organisation. It seeks to shape government policy, improve working conditions and campaign on questions affecting nursing.¹¹ There is nothing improper in that dual role. Indeed, it may make a professional union more effective. But it creates a structural risk which an organisation of this kind has to manage consciously. Once an institution acquires corporate positions on contested moral and political questions, the people who implement its representative function must remain capable of distinguishing between what the organisation campaigns for and what an individual member is legally entitled to believe.
The RCN’s legal-support threshold illustrates the point perfectly. Its published policy says that it can support a member through early conciliation or employment tribunal proceedings where membership requirements are satisfied and the proposed claim is judged to have reasonable prospects of success, defined as more than a 51 per cent probability.¹² That is an entirely defensible stewardship principle. Union subscriptions are finite resources and there is no obligation to spend them pursuing hopeless litigation. Peggie therefore cannot establish discrimination merely by showing that the RCN declined to finance the case she wanted to bring.
The real question lies one stage deeper. How was that 51 per cent judgment reached? What legal assumptions informed it? Were the same degree of curiosity, urgency and professional scepticism applied to the employer’s position as would ordinarily have been applied when defending a member? Were Peggie’s concerns treated as potential sex-discrimination and belief-discrimination questions requiring legal examination, or regarded first as evidence that the member was on the wrong side of an institutional equality policy? “Merits” is a neutral concept only if the process by which merits are assessed is itself neutral.
That question cannot be answered fairly from Peggie’s evidence alone. The first day of the hearing produced evidence favourable to the RCN as well. Peggie accepted under cross-examination that Gillian Tait, who later assumed responsibility for her case, had contacted her repeatedly. Counsel put to her that Tait had attempted contact on at least eleven occasions between June and December 2025. Emails showed Tait pressing NHS Fife over clarity on single-sex facilities, and Peggie acknowledged that it “wasn’t right” to say that the RCN had never pushed the Board on the matter. Her response was narrower: she believed that little had been done before Tait took over.² That distinction may prove important. The tribunal is examining a chronology, not an institutional caricature.
Evidence on the second day has, however, made the institutional-culture question harder to dismiss as fanciful. Former RCN policy officer Lisa Mackenzie told the tribunal that after becoming involved in gender-critical policy work outside the organisation in 2019 she was asked to “consider whether her values align with the RCN’s values”. She said the episode left her feeling that she was being regarded as “deficient” or a “bigot”. The RCN’s counsel put a materially different explanation: Mackenzie’s professional portfolio included the Scottish Prison Service, while her external activity criticised policy in that field, creating a possible conflict with the RCN’s own work.³ The tribunal has not determined whose interpretation of those events is correct. Mackenzie’s evidence is therefore context, not proof of Peggie’s claim. But it makes the question of institutional culture a legitimate evidential issue rather than a mere slogan imported from a newspaper headline.
The RCN’s own public position since For Women Scotland is instructive. It has reaffirmed its commitment to being an anti-discrimination organisation while acknowledging that its membership contains “diverse views” on these questions.¹³ That is precisely the right principle. But institutional pluralism is not demonstrated by saying that members may disagree. It is demonstrated when a member whose belief conflicts with the dominant institutional outlook receives the same quality of representation, the same legal attention and the same presumption that her interests deserve professional examination as the member whose complaint accords with it.
This is where the RCN’s dual character as union and professional body becomes decisive. A campaigning organisation may legitimately select the causes it campaigns for. A trade union cannot select which members deserve ordinary professional fairness according to whether their beliefs assist those campaigns. The first activity is advocacy; the second is representation. Confusing them corrodes the purpose of the union itself.
The principle cuts in every direction. A transgender nurse experiencing unlawful harassment should be able to expect conscientious representation from a gender-critical union official. A woman asserting a right to bodily privacy should be able to expect conscientious representation from an official committed personally to transgender inclusion. A Christian nurse contesting participation in an ethically disputed procedure should not first have to demonstrate that her theology accords with the union leadership. Nor should a Muslim, atheist, socialist, conservative or any other member. Representative professionalism exists precisely to prevent the adviser’s worldview from becoming an additional tribunal through which the member must pass before reaching the real one.
There is a wider warning here for professional Britain. Trade unions, medical colleges, professional associations, regulators, universities and charities have increasingly developed institutional positions on questions which remain deeply disputed among the people they represent. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing so. The danger begins when the corporate position ceases to be merely what an institution advocates and becomes the intellectual lens through which individual members are judged. At that point dissent starts to resemble misconduct, disagreement becomes a values problem and apparently neutral processes can acquire an ideological loading without anybody ever writing a discriminatory instruction.
That is why the sequence in Peggie’s case matters. Her confrontation with Upton occurred in December 2023 and her special leave followed in January 2024. For Women Scotland was still more than a year away. The RCN cannot fairly be criticised for failing in January 2024 to predict every consequence of an April 2025 Supreme Court judgment. But Forstater was already settled authority. Gender-critical belief was already capable of protection. A competent representative therefore did not have to agree with Peggie to recognise that the legal problem was more complicated than a conflict between equality and prejudice.
The same applies in reverse after For Women Scotland. The judgment does not authorise mistreatment of transgender employees. It does not make their dignity optional and it does not extinguish protection for gender reassignment. What it does make untenable is the assumption that recognising biological sex is itself an unlawful or illegitimate proposition.⁶ Institutions must now do what many avoided doing for years: confront competing rights and practical circumstances explicitly rather than concealing the conflict beneath the vocabulary of inclusion.
Too often the result of avoiding that exercise was predictable. A policy would proclaim inclusivity without answering the concrete question of how sex-specific facilities were to operate. When somebody eventually objected, the policy itself remained untouched while the individual became the management problem. The argument moved from the substantive question — what is the rule and is it lawful? — to the interpersonal one: why is this employee causing difficulty? Grievance procedures, conduct investigations and equality language can then become substitutes for resolving the underlying policy contradiction.
That is the larger significance of Peggie’s litigation even if she ultimately loses this second case. If the RCN establishes that its officers acted according to ordinary professional standards, that its legal department applied its normal 51 per cent threshold impartially, and that shortcomings perceived by Peggie resulted from case management rather than belief discrimination, the tribunal should say so. If the evidence establishes instead that assumptions about gender-critical belief affected the seriousness with which her position was considered, the advice supplied to her or her access to ordinary union services, section 57 exists for precisely that kind of question. Either result should be reached from evidence, not allegiance to one side of the sex-and-gender argument.
The test is therefore more exacting than The Sunday Times headline. The tribunal does not need to decide whether the RCN has been “blinded” by activists in some general cultural sense. It must decide whether protected belief affected specified treatment of a specified member. But the narrower legal test exposes the larger institutional principle more effectively than the headline does. A union may campaign for causes. It may publish equality policies. It may disagree profoundly with a member. It may tell that member that she is legally mistaken. It may even decline to fund her litigation where an impartial assessment finds insufficient prospects of success. What it cannot legitimately do is make conformity with its preferred understanding of a contested question an unwritten prerequisite for receiving the professional representation for which membership exists.
The RCN itself says that trade unions exist to ensure workers are treated fairly by their employers.¹¹ The Peggie case asks whether that promise remains equally secure when the member asking for protection is inconvenient to the union itself. That is a test not merely of the Royal College of Nursing’s position on sex and gender, but of the integrity of representative institutions. Their value is proved most clearly not when they stand beside the member with whom they agree, but when they can represent conscientiously the member with whom they do not.
¹ The Sunday Times, “Sandie Peggie: ‘My nursing union is blinded by trans activists’”, 20 September 2026. The Times
² The Irish News/Press Association, “Trans row nurse ‘felt discriminated against’ by union, tribunal told”, 23 September 2026. The Irish News
³ The Irish News/Press Association, “RCN made me feel like a ‘bigot’, ex-worker tells Sandie Peggie tribunal”, 24 September 2026. The Irish News
⁴ Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, “Peggie v Fife Health Board and another — Press Summary”, 8 December 2025. Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
⁵ The Standard/Press Association, “Sandie Peggie employment tribunal appeal allowed to proceed”, 3 August 2026. The Standard
⁶ UK Supreme Court, “For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers — Press Summary”, [2025] UKSC 16, 16 April 2025. Supreme Court
⁷ UK legislation, “The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992”, regulations 21 and 24. Legislation.gov.uk
⁸ UK legislation, “Equality Act 2010”, section 57, trade organisations. Legislation.gov.uk
⁹ Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, “Forstater v CGD Europe and others”, Employment Appeal Tribunal, 10 June 2021. Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
¹⁰ Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, “Higgs v Farmor’s School”, [2025] EWCA Civ 109, 12 February 2025. Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
¹¹ Royal College of Nursing, “What the RCN does”; RCN, “Working and coming to work in the UK”; RCN, “Nurse or midwife members”. The Royal College of Nursing
¹² Royal College of Nursing, “Employment tribunals and the courts”, legal-support eligibility and 51 per cent merits threshold. The Royal College of Nursing
¹³ Royal College of Nursing, “RCN statement on the updated EHRC Code of Practice”, 21 May 2026; RCN, “Royal College of Nursing calls on governments to urgently publish health and care guidance”, 5 August 2026. The Royal College of Nursing
¹⁴ Equality and Human Rights Commission/Office for Equality and Opportunity, “Equality Act 2010: Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, 2026”, in force 5 August 2026.
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