Complaint about man's behaviour in toilet led to me being investigated

Discussing the case on BBC Scotland’s Scotcast, a BBC reporter asserted that the judgment would “embolden people … to make complaints through their line manager” if they were uncomfortable about sharing facilities with someone of the opposite sex.

I had to pause the podcast and take a minute.

Sandie Peggie’s case against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton was raised in May 2024, following her suspension earlier that year. She first complained to her manager about sharing facilities with Upton in August 2023. More than two years of the nurse’s life have been spent in limbo, and during that time her name has become known to anyone in Scotland who even vaguely follows the news.

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Her private communications have entered the public domain, her husband and daughter have been dragged into debates about her beliefs, and the ordeal isn’t over yet.

What right-minded person who followed even a fraction of the coverage of this case would feel “emboldened” to make a complaint about having to share facilities with a colleague of the opposite sex?

Some might say that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from a full public examination of any complaint, their conduct and their private communications.

They may take the view that it’s quite right for Peggie to have faced scrutiny over appalling racist jokes that she shared, given her job involves caring for people when they are at their most vulnerable.

But my own experience of making a complaint – not to my employer, but to a public body, and not about a colleague, but about a stranger – demonstrates the derangement to which organisations are vulnerable if any issue is raised that feels even slightly adjacent to the so-called “trans debate”.

As I described in these pages in 2019, in the summer of that year I had an unsettling encounter at Glasgow’s Tramway arts venue.

Using the toilets after visiting an exhibition, I became aware that there was a man hiding in the cubicle next to me. When I emerged to wash my hands, he followed me out and stood silently watching me in the mirror as I washed my hands. When I turned around to challenge him, he lowered one hand to the button of his trousers. Once he’d got the alarmed reaction he wanted from me, he fled.

It was grimly ironic – given I had written in these pages about the consequences of women-only spaces being removed – that I should encounter a man taking advantage of toilets being made mixed-sex to lurk in them and intimidate women.

When I told a junior staff member at the front desk what had happened, the instant response was that no-one else had complained.

Bemused, I gave a description of the man, and was told he had been observed “circling the space” earlier in the day, when a children’s event was taking place, but had now left the building. It was then suggested that I might wish to write about my experience in a comments book.

I opted instead to report the incident to the police, in case it was part of a pattern of intimidating behaviour by a known sex offender.

This was by no means a traumatising experience for me – and the police response was faultless. What ultimately did cause me stress and anxiety was not the incident itself, or reporting it, but the decision of Glasgow Life – the arm’s-length organisation that runs the city’s leisure services – to start investigating me.

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In the end it took an astonishing six months, but after raising a complaint, filing a Subject Access Request, then challenging the response to said request on the grounds that large chunks of text were redacted, I finally learned the truth.

An email stated that “[redacted] is aware of Shona Craven and her friend’s roles as journalists who are flagrantly opposed to gender neutral toilets. They have since made many Facebook comments about this ‘harassment’ and have posted on Facebook that they are awaiting our response".

It was further commented that I had objected to the presence of a “strange-looking man” in the toilets – which I took to be an attempt to insinuate racism, given the man’s ethnicity.

To clarify, my Facebook page was and is private. Glasgow Life never provided any explanation as to how any reference to it made its way into correspondence between members of its staff, or why any such comments would be considered relevant to the handling of my complaint.

I did eventually receive two unreserved apologies for reference being made to my supposedly “flagrant” opposition to gender-neutral toilets, and was told there was neither an investigation into my social media accounts nor any attempt to cover up staff misconduct.

This long-drawn-out experience rattled me. As a columnist I make my views on many issues known, but the idea that these might have been used to discredit me when I was challenging safeguarding policies was chilling. How quickly a victim can be reframed as a perpetrator, should this switch be felt ideologically convenient.

If the time spent investigating heretics like me could instead be spent on improving protections for women and children, Scotland would be a much safer place.