The Problem with Pete

Imagine, if you will, a man called Pete. Pete is a manly-man, tall, with a beard and well-developed muscles. He’s also not real – or at least there may be many such men called Pete in the world, but the Pete who became a talking point in the Sandie Peggie tribunal this week is an invention of Naomi Cunningham, the barrister acting for Ms Peggie. Pete, Ms Cunningham suggested, enters the female changing rooms where a woman stands in her bra: he fails to leave; he shuts the door and walks into the room; he starts to undress. At what stage is a woman allowed to feel uncomfortable or scared? Well, according to the Doctor who was, by his own testimony, distressed, upset, and scared of an encounter with a “hostile” and “aggressive” (his words) nurse, the response of the unclothed woman should depend on the state of Pete’s mind. After all, the fictitious Pete claimed to identify as a woman and no-one, least of all mere actual women, should be permitted to question his sincerity. Pete was, said Dr Upton, a “gender non-conforming transwoman”, which, for those unsophisticated in the new orthodoxy, we can translate as a manly-man. The distance between manly-man and Gender Non-Conforming Transwoman is as thin as cigarette paper and far more fragile. Pete could have been a manly-man last month, yesterday, or a mere five minutes before he opened that door, and all would be valid – just as Dr Upton used to endure the “misfortune” of using urinals before the full realisation of his womanhood burst upon him some 18 months before taking up his role in the hospital in Kirkcaldy.

Without knowing Pete’s intention, Dr Upton said, we couldn’t judge his conduct in walking into the ladies and starting to strip, “I don’t consider it to be inherently menacing or sexual”, it might provoke “tricky conversations” about how we view gender and a “lack of willingness in a transphobic society to explore gender identity”, but ultimately Pete deserves to be treated with respect. In other words, suck it up, women!

For Upton, a woman’s unwillingness to be in a vulnerable state with a strange man is not dependent on her fears but her bigotry. She may only be be 5’6” to his 6ft, he may be a fit young man of 28 to her 50 years, he may have the advantage of class and connections, but in his telling, she represents the oppressor class. He was scared and shaking at being alone with a termagant: “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life!”, he said on more than one occasion, promoting many women to feel that a little less indulgence and more trips to the naughty-step should have featured in early childhood. The problem for Upton and for his counsel, Jane Russell, is that it isn’t fair or safe to insist women wait for a boundary-smashing man to act on a predatory instinct. By then it’s too late. And such men don’t always signal their malign intent by evil chuckles and moustache twirls. A man in an intimate space may be there for a vicarious thrill and he doesn’t need to ogle your embonpoint through opera glasses or undo the belt on his dirty mac before you are aware that something is wrong.

So let’s consider another manly-man. Not Pete this time, but ‘Annie’, a large, well-built man with prominent facial tattoos. In 2021, Annie enrolled on a course in a college: a beauty course, mainly attended by teenage women. Annie was said by the girls to be “overpowering” and “disruptive”, as Rachel, told the press:

“We had all kinds of accusations thrown at us in the middle of the classroom. I was being verbally attacked. She went to the head of the department and said we were all discriminating against her and were homophobic.

“I was really offended and hurt by that and didn’t go to college for three weeks because I was scared of the way she was coming at me.

“I didn’t even look at her because if I did, it gave her ammunition to say things to me.”

Rachel tried not to look at Annie, because in this topsy-turvy world a look can be violence. So, of course, can ‘non-looks’. One of Upton’s obsessively detailed litany of “contemporaneous” complaints about Peggie is that she didn’t look at him. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Despite this, Rachel still used Annie’s ‘preferred pronouns’ and another girl, well schooled in the Stonewall mantra of acceptance without exception, said, “She hadn’t fully transitioned yet but we all accepted her for who she wanted to be.”  In other words, like Upton’s kind, supportive colleagues, they put on a show, tried to buy-into and validate his identity, and hoped that the scary man didn’t take offence. They even kept quiet when asked to strip for a tanning class while Annie watched. In other words, they did everything Dr Upton would expect. Don’t question someone’s identity, don’t presume that medical or surgical changes have any bearing on the sincerity of the vulnerable trans person, and, above all, do not complain. Understand that you are operating on “misinformation” at best or “transphobic bigotry” at worst. This is not, to use Upton’s mangled language, a “cis” man, but a “trans woman” and, as such, he cannot be treated any differently to the teenage girls who dared not complain to the college, while he, like Upton, was happy to demand that those in authority enforced respect for his identity.

Annie, unlike Pete, is real. Annie’s ‘dead name’ was Adam Graham or Bryson and sometime after their traumatic experience at college, the girls were horrified to see Annie on the front pages. This time, Annie was wearing a cheap blonde wig and pink leggings, and Annie, now Isla, had been convicted of double rape.

Dr Upton and Jane Russell make a great fuss about the possibility that Sandie Peggie was likening Upton to this rapist when she talked of the “situation in prisons”, but the unfortunate truth is that, to Upton, men like the mythical Pete or the horribly real Adam, are “gender non-conforming transwomen” who deserve to have their identity respected right up to the point the jury returns a verdict and they get sent down. The other unfortunate truth is that most rapists are never reported, let alone charged or convicted. On balance, it is probably fair to argue that the man on the bus, walking behind you one night, joining your beauty course, or changing in the hospital staff quarters is not a rapist. But, as the girls in Ayrshire College discovered, he could be. At that point, their horror is retrospectively considered acceptable. Knowledge of the predatory act means the girls are then at liberty to say, “it’s so scary to think she was watching me with no clothes on… Anything could have happened.” Just as Pete might have walked to work as a man and entered the changing room as a woman, so young women’s fears of a huge, scary man in a wig are bigotry in the classroom but perfectly OK when he leaves the court in a prison van. At what point did Theo, the school boy who likely showered and changed with his male teammates, become Beth, the fragile lady-doctor who would never undress in the company of men? Conversely, at what point did Bryson stop being Annie, a would-be beautician innocently watching a spray tan session, and revert to Adam, a violent predator? This is no way to order society and certainly no way to ensure that safeguards are robust. If Pete – or Beth – get bored of the charade tomorrow and head back to work as a born-again manly man, will management have retrospective sympathy for the discomfort of any deshabile nurse, much as the college belated realised the girls might have had a point about Annie?

Moreover, if sex is as unknowable and nebulous as Upton would have us believe, all sorts of issues – from a lack of endometriosis research to ill-fitting police kevlar vests for female officers – become nothing more than phantasmagoria. Dr Upton, a graduate of Dundee School of Medicine and an employee of Fife NHS, told a court, under oath, that knowledge of someone’s gender identity was more important than knowing their sex. When asked how he would analyse blood samples from Pete, Upton prevaricated: was that Pete as a manly man or Pete as a gender non-conforming transwoman? Because, he claimed, there was a “growing area of research” to suggest that the reference ranges change with cross-sex hormone treatment and, after a time, align more closely with your chosen gender identity. This is dangerous garbage from anyone. From a doctor it is unforgivable.

How, one wonders, would Upton explain the case of Cameron Whitely? In 2016, Whitely was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. Whitely’s medical records all said this was a man, something that seemed confirmed by a natty beard, but Whitely was female, albeit a female who had been taking testosterone for 15 years. Yet, contrary to Upton’s belief, Whitely’s estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), which measures the amount of waste product in the blood had not hit the lower limit for men (while at critical levels for a woman), and Whitely was not considered a candidate for a transplant. By the time the doctors finally realised that Whitely was female, her kidney was functioning at less than 8% of normal capacity and dialysis treatment had led to massive blood loss. Whitely is lucky to be alive. Astonishingly, Whitely later said, “It was really cute and awesome that I was treated as male, but in being this way, they didn’t necessarily take into account the body.” Near death seems a heavy price for the “cute and awesome” validation.

Over on trans Reddit, threads are full of confused young people angry that they need to declare their sex when they give blood or even if they call for emergency care. Many say that they will just stick to their gender identity. After all, they argue, they have changed their medical records and what business is it of nosey doctors? Just as Dr Upton repeatedly denied that he was male and that he had no obligation to disclose his “trans history” to a traumatised patient begging for a female doctor, so these deluded Reddit users believe they too can overcome biology by sheer willpower. They might have an excuse for their ignorance, but he has none.

Dr Upton may be aggrieved by a “pejorative” comparison to  men in women’s prisons, but one doesn’t have to be a predator to upend women’s rights. If one man can walk into that changing room, he leaves the door ajar for the next Bryson. The evidence given by Upton suggests that his philosophy, if not the man himself, is dangerous as far as the safe operation of women’s spaces goes, while his glib refusal to acknowledge basic medical truth could do serious damage to the health of the “trans community” which he affects to champion.