Gender ideology rots the brain – and NHS Fife are proving it in court. They're only following the Scottish government line though. Alex Massie in the Times on the Sandie Peggie case:
The stupidity displayed by NHS Fife throughout this saga would put halfwits to shame. On Wednesday Isla Bumba, the health board’s head of “Equalities and Human Rights”, told the tribunal that she could not be sure of her own sex. “No one knows what their chromosomes are,” she said, a development which may surprise any woman who has, say, given birth.
Until recently, however, this was a statement that was simultaneously obtuse and orthodox. Multiple Scottish politicians have said similar things. Meanwhile, Upton says “I’m biologically female”, though we should also acknowledge that “the term biologically female or biologically male is completely nebulous”. I remind you that this person is a qualified physician.
Well, I am not persuaded Upton is correct about the science here but I am confident that the science is irrelevant since this is a question of law and the law is entirely clear: Upton is a man because he is biologically male.
The health board’s defence for its apparently unlawful policies appears to be no stronger than the suggestion that every other health board in Scotland was doing the same thing. I submit that “Cut us some slack, everyone else was incompetent too” is a bold claim of justification that is unlikely to prove persuasive….
Collared by the radio station LBC, John Swinney declared that of course he had confidence in the people running NHS Fife. He could hardly say otherwise without making the board’s position even less tenable than is already the case. Yet for all that Swinney would dearly love this issue to disappear, it will not. NHS Fife may be run astonishingly badly but it is hardly the only organisation in Scotland of which that judgment could be made.
For the health board was not acting independently or in any kind of off-the-reservation, freelancing capacity. On the contrary, it was following the same mistaken and unlawful “advice” as every other public sector agency and it was doing so in circumstances in which the baseline and expectations for behaviour were set by the Scottish government itself. If there is rot here — and, my, there really is in every sense of the word — it begins at the very top.
In other words, the Scottish government cannot wash its hands of this affair any more than NHS Fife can emerge from it with its reputation enhanced. Magical thinking has been the default proposition across the public sector for many years and we are only now gaining a full sense of the damage this nonsense has caused. The Peggie case is but a microcosm of the macro failings apparent across a public sector where immovable stupidity meets unstoppable incompetence.
Yes, Peggie's been cleared of gross misconduct, but this tribunal case rumbles on…
Added:
Number a thousand in "obviously correct things nobody could possibly have imagined ten years ago would need to be said". https://t.co/qEjOPyfzXp
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) July 17, 2025
Mick Hartley 