Sandie Peggie verses The Big Lie
By Paul Tyson
On December 8, 2025, the Scottish Employment Tribunal handed down its decision in the case of Sandie Peggie v Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton. Peggie achieved a minor win in that the Tribunal recognized that the Fife Health Board did indeed harass Peggie in the manner in which they responded to Dr Upton’s harassment complaint against Peggie. The complaint came about after Peggie informed Dr Upton – a transwoman – that his male presence in the women’s changing room was unwanted and asked him to leave. In response, Dr Upton lodged a harassment complaint against Peggie, which the hospital vigorously pursued.
The Tribunal found that the manner in which the Hospital suspended Peggie and conducted its investigation was technically incorrect. Furthermore, NHS Fife had treated Peggie with unconscionable and unethical impropriety by attempting to uncover—or even manufacture—evidence of professional malpractice under the pretext of investigating alleged breaches of the NHS’s inclusivity policies. As a result, the Tribunal ruled that NHS Fife had harassed Sandie Peggie.
The Tribunal also appears to acknowledge, at least to some extent, that Peggie has a legitimate concern regarding access to female-only changing facilities at the hospital, in line with the Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers. Yet the substantive outcome of this Tribunal remains breathtakingly shocking.
Substantively – and in a manner that eviscerates women’s sex-based rights – the Tribunal did not find that Dr Upton had sexually harassed Mrs Peggie by being a biological male whose presence was unwanted, in virtue of his sex, in the women’s changing room.
What on earth does “sexual harassment” now mean for a woman who receives unwanted attention from a male in a sexually vulnerable space, such as a changing room? Are women now required by law to undress in front of men? And if a woman complains, is she the one who has committed sexual harassment? Indeed, the Tribunal ruled that Dr Upton’s harassment claim against Peggie was valid, stating that “Mrs Peggie had, in some of her remarks, impermissibly manifested her gender critical beliefs.” In effect, this decision outlaws any “manifest” expression of “impermissible gender critical beliefs” by employees of the NHS. An impermissible belief in the objective reality of the biological sex binary is a thought crime that – so the Tribunal stipulates – NHS employees should never express.
An Incoherent Mess
The Tribunal’s finding is outrageous. Further, its authors are explicitly attempting to uphold mutually exclusive stances. It is this refusal of bivalent logic – i.e., a bivalent proposition is either true or false, it cannot be both true and false at the same time – that makes the decision of the Tribunal rationally and factually incoherent. This is the difficulty that always arises when trying to uphold a lie as if it were true. Courts and Tribunals used to adjudicate between conflicting truth claims on the basis of factual evidence and bivalent logic, but that seems to have been thrown out the window here.
The Tribunal maintains on the one hand that “having the protected characteristic of gender reassignment did not mean that permission to use the changing room was necessarily lawful.” Yet, on the other hand, and at the same time, Peggie’s potential legal rights to the privacy protection of her biological sex “did not result in it being inherently unlawful for a trans female, who is biologically male under the Act, to be given permission to use a female changing room at work.” The use of the descriptor ‘a trans female who is biologically male’ is as brazenly incoherent an exercise in counter-factual assertion (lying) as I have ever seen. It is an uncontroversial example of what David Hume would describe as a matter of fact and a relation of ideas; one cannot be both female and a biological male. Basic facts and logical reasoning do not get clearer or easier than this.
Any male who claims to be a female is either lying, deluded, or psychologically unwell; he cannot be correct. Why should women, who are factually and logically correct, defer to the lies, delusions, fetish fantasies, or mental illnesses of males who want to be in their change rooms?
Regardless of whether these women are physically in danger of sexual assault or not from such males, allowing any male into a female change facility subjects women to voyeuristic abuse and requires women to accept the possibility of legally facilitated sexual violence in change rooms. This is profoundly contrary to natural justice. The ancient social custom of respect for female privacy in vulnerable contexts is not only culturally appropriate, but it is also there because women factually need safe spaces from male sexual predators. Such safe places need to be upheld by law and convention. When are transwomen just going to “get over it” and accept that males should not invade female-only spaces?
The Tribunal’s decision is a clear example of what George Orwell called doublethink. This is the denial of bivalent logic for totalitarian ends. Thus, thanks to doublethink, Peggie has a right to single-sex spaces, as upheld by the Supreme Court. At the same time, a male transwoman has a right to be unharassed in female-only spaces. The only solution to this incoherent, conflicting ‘rights’ situation, the Tribunal can see, is to make sure this particular woman (Peggie) and this particular male transwoman (Upton) are not rostered on at the same time. Some solution!
Understanding how a Tribunal could come to such a bizarre conclusion is actually easier than you might expect. To grasp how success works in the enterprise of pushing forward untrue assertions as factual in the public domain, all we need to do is look at the Really Big Liars of recent times. Adolf Hitler springs to mind as an excellent authority on such matters.
Führer of the Liars
In Mein Kampf, Hitler popularized a notion that had been around in ultra-nationalist antisemitic conspiracy circles in Germany since the 1880s: the große Lüge (The Big Lie). Unsurprisingly, Hitler – as is common to all Big Liars – never admitted to telling The Big Lie himself. But look at how he understands the psychology of effective public lying:
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”1
In purely pragmatic political terms, Hitler grasped something about the effective public psychology of deceptive propaganda that is worth examining more closely.
It is much harder to doubt a really preposterous lie – provided it is buttressed by the right authorities and carried off with an air of unwavering moral conviction – than to doubt a small lie. Psychologically, this is because we, normal people, are pretty experienced with small lies. We know how they work and are pretty good at identifying them in others. But we could not imagine trying, let alone getting away with, a really bold-faced Big Lie ourselves, so we doubt ourselves rather than The Big Lie.
There is no more brazen and obviously false Big Lie than that a male individual can subjectively gender-identify as a woman and thereby objectively become female. This is just obviously and straightforwardly untrue. It is so patently false that, ironically, once it has gained the right legal and intellectual authority, we cannot doubt it without performing an act of unfaithfulness to the authorities that we rely on for the public credibility of common truth itself.
I have spoken with highly intelligent academics who are well acquainted with the fabulous twists and turns of the history and philosophy of modern science, and they simply cannot believe that all our scientific, legal, educational, and medical authorities could be wrong about trans. There simply must be some complex and profound reality about the ‘fluid’ and ‘transitional’ nature of human gender and sex that they simply do not understand. Thus, they defer to the authorities rather than conclude the obvious, that the notion that a male can gender-identify himself into being female is unqualifiedly false. My scholarly friends, as intellectual specialists, reflexively defer to intellectual specialists outside their own area of expertise. It’s almost as if out of academic guild loyalty, they must maintain that only rarefied specialists – Gender Theorists – properly understand why the collapsing of objective biological sex (female) into cultural and subjective identity-defined gender (“woman”) is valid.
Note well: Highly educated people of good will within our elite intellectual and authority classes are the most likely to comply with an established Big Lie, because their own authority as arbiters of public truth would be in question if they turned around and said, “Well, yes, the Emperor actually is naked.”
Institutionalised Lies
This respectable commitment to a now entrenched Big Lie, as advanced through authoritative doublethink, is the problem that Sandie Peggie is facing in her two-year (thus far) struggle with the National Health Service in Fife. The Tribunal, in league with the NHS, is determinedly trying to perform the logically and factually preposterous squaring of a circle. The Tribunal and the NHS are determined not to give in to common sense or the obvious factual truth, for they are deeply committed to the logical incoherence and the overt denial of scientific truth entailed in keeping this authoritative and moral-sounding Big Lie afloat. But the reality is that there is actually no truth at all in trying to maintain that a transwoman and a biological female are of the same sex.
So – alas! – Hitler was right: the Big Lie really does work. The fabrication of a “colossal untruth” – which everyone actually knows to be false – once accepted by authority and power, becomes more entrenched than the obvious truth which anyone can verify for themself. Hence, Sandie Peggie’s struggle to have the NHS uphold the Supreme Court ruling that biological sex is distinct from certificated sex, and that biological sex-based privacies for women working in the NHS should be protected and upheld in law, is still subservient to The Big Lie that a male can become female.
This authoritatively mandated Big Lie means that we are required to accept that trans-people are vulnerable minorities who need special protection, but actual females just need to “get over it” and accept males identifying as women in female-only spaces, as if they really are female. It seems we have not learned much from George Orwell, or from the totalitarian horrors of Germany in the 1930s and 40s, after all.
Sandie Peggie has correctly and courageously decided to appeal the decision of the Tribunal. For truth is the only defence that real (i.e., biologically female) women have against the erosion of all privacy and safety rights for girls and women. In very clear terms, what Peggie’s case reveals to us is that the Queer Planet that militant and legally empowered DEI reformers are seeking to create is misogynist to its core.
The only thing that will ever defeat a Big Lie is courageous truth telling. Alas, history teaches us that, once power and authority are embedded in The Big Lie, it usually requires martyrs, who refuse to bow to lies regardless of the consequences, to restore sanity and truth to the public domain. These martyrs seldom come from within power and authority; they are the little people of unbendable commonsense conviction, like Sandy Peggie. But surely, if everyone stands up with Peggie, and if people of power and influence refuse the Lie and fight it, we can be spared the misogyny and insanity that this Big Lie seeks to impose.
Fortunately there are figures and organizations targeting power and authority – such as Genspect, Sex Matters, Kathleen Stock, and J.K Rowling – who do not bow to the Lie. We must stand up with them. If ordinary people refused to participate in doublethink, if powerful and authoritative people fight against The Big Lie with truth, we can turn this around.
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