boswelltoday on Peggie V NHS Fife & Dr Upton:

Jane Russell’s Closing: A Masterclass in Wishful Thinking

Jane Russell KC’s closing argument for NHS Fife and Dr. Upton was a performance in the art of inversion – turning reality inside out and expecting the tribunal to applaud. She spoke with elegance, but what she asked the panel to believe was preposterous: that a nurse of thirty years’ service was a bully, that a man in a women’s changing room was harmless, and that the law demands women silence their instincts to preserve a colleague’s feelings. She began with her little parable about hoofbeats – “think horses, not zebras.” According to Russell, Peggie had conjured up a fantasy of danger. Yet the “horse” standing there was obvious: a male body in a female space. Only a lawyer desperate to deflect would try to convince a roomful of adults that it was the zebra.

Also, danger isn’t the only issue. Privacy matters. Sex matters. Who is which sex matters. Shame matters. Embarrassment matters.

Her biblical comparison was worse. The tribunal, she claimed, need not decide whether sex is immutable, any more than it must decide if Noah built an Ark in seven days. This was sophistry dressed as wit. Everyone knows that sex matters in law – in medicine, crime, safeguarding, and equality. It is written into the very statutes she pretended to interpret. To wave it away as mere belief was not clever – it was insulting.

What a comparison. The fairy tale of Noah’s ark, and whether or not people can change sex. A very old biblical story, and a very current ideology that says men are women if they say they are. NOT COMPARABLE.

Russell then invoked Goodwin and Article 8 as though they were magic words. She insisted that Dr. Upton’s “right to live as a woman” was inviolable.

It may be inviolable in private. Why in private? Because there it doesn’t affect anyone else. But the minute you take it outside, it very much does affect anyone else. There’s a pretty much infinite list of things we can’t do because they impinge on other people. In a whole lot of circumstances and contexts, pretending to be a woman is one of them.

The evidential gymnastics were almost comic. No “smoking gun” was found, so Peggie must be imagining things. No other women complained, so there must be no problem. In reality, every woman watching this case unfold knows exactly why others stayed silent. Peggie was dragged through suspension, investigation, and character assassination for daring to say what many quietly think. Silence in that climate is not proof of contentment – it is proof of fear.

And the Jane Russells of the world are fine with that.