Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Good relations between groups of staff.

…NHS Fife has a duty to foster good relations between groups of staff with different protected characteristics.

Yeah, but some groups are more equal than others.

Neither Upton nor Peggie should ever have been put in this position. It is the employer’s failing and NHS Fife has failed both.

I disagree. NHS Fife did not “put” Upton “in this position.” He put himself in that position all by himself. Upton chose to enter a female single sex space knowing he was male. NHS Fife permitted him to do so. That was not an accident. That was not a mistake. It was deliberate, on the part of both Upton and NHS. They are co-conspirators, or at least offender and enabler/apologist.

Sporting bodies which allow men to cheat against women are doing no disservice to the men who are cheating. Siding with cheating men, and persecuting women who complain is a violation of their duty of care to the women under their rules and regulations. Similarly, NHS Fife, by allowing Upton to enter women’s spaces, was not “failing” him, they were aiding and abetting him, because they took measures against Peggie. They were allowing his violation of boundaries, and he knew he was violating those boundaries, just as men in women’s sports know they’re cheating.

Just because the authorities let them cheat doesn’t let men off the hook for willingly taking advantage of the opportunity to cheat they’ve been handed. Their poor sportsmanship and taking of women’s places is still on them personally, however “inclusive” the sports federation might be. Would they feel that they’d been “failed” if they were allowed to compete against children, stealing all their awards and risking injury? Would they be absolved from their own opportunism in this case? No. Well the same goes for Upton. He knew what he was doing when he did it; he took advantage, in a predatory way, of a loophole opened to him by authorities who should have known better, who were failing to meet and uphold their legal and moral obligations to the women they betrayed, then punished.

How about another analogy. It is no defence of your actions if a misguided or corrupt police officer or police department tells you it’s okay to break into somebody’s house. It’s still wrong, supposed “official” “permission” or “inclusion” notwithstanding. He wasn’t yet eligible for even the flimsy, fictional, figleaf of a GRC, so however mistakenly supportive the current laws are, he did not even clear their offensively ridiculous low bar of acceptance.