This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The general editor looked. He saw ‘Russian plot… coup d’etat … overthrow constitutional government … red dictatorship … goat butts head of police … imprisoned blonde … vital British interest jeopardized,’ it was enough; it was news. ‘It’s news,’ he said, ‘Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Scrap the whole front page. Kill the Ex-Beauty Queen’s pauper funeral. Get in a photograph of Boot.’
This is the moment when Evelyn Waugh’s wittiest creation, the bumbling William Boot, “makes good”. Accidentally sent to cover a war in Africa, Boot gets the titular scoop — that a coup is being planned — because he is too green to realise he’s supposed to follow the press pack out of town on a wild goose chase, and the local British consul is a prep school chum. Even while parodying the news business, Scoop captures its excitement: if that quote doesn’t give you the shivers, you’re not cut out to be a journalist.
But sometimes getting a scoop doesn’t take detective work, either skilled or fortuitous. Sometimes it’s hidden in plain sight. There are stories every journalist working a beat knows about but has either given up pitching or never bothered to try. The ones editors will dismiss as too old, too early, too weak, too much trouble, too risky, too niche, not quite there yet, maybe next issue, if you find some more examples, if someone goes on the record …
And then suddenly, the story you couldn’t sell for love nor money is breaking news. The question is no longer why no one is interested but how much you can file, and how fast. Rather than a scoop that’s just been uncovered, it’s a scoop whose time has finally come.
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I was thinking about this as I signed in remotely to watch an employment tribunal held in Dundee in February: the case of Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife and Beth Upton. Peggie, a nurse, objected to her hospital’s policy of allowing men who identify as women (like Upton) to use women’s changing rooms.
Sometimes getting a scoop doesn’t take detective work; it’s hidden in plain sight
When she complained to management about Upton using facilities where she and other nurses changed into their scrubs, she was investigated, suspended and finally allowed to return to work only on inferior terms.
The story was certainly news. Scottish and national papers filed daily from the courtroom; multiple columnists opined on what it meant for women, the NHS, trans people and Scottish politics.
Questions were asked in Westminster and Holyrood. John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, got dragged in, making a fool of himself by saying he couldn’t comment on a live case and simultaneously expressing “full confidence” in NHS Fife, and claiming in quick succession that “woman” means adult female, but trans women, who are male, are women too.
But it certainly wasn’t new. Peggie is by no means the first woman I know of to get into trouble at work for complaining about a male colleague in the women’s changing rooms. She wasn’t the first to make her complaint public, or even the first nurse: a group at a hospital in Darlington went public about their own case earlier, and have already met Wes Streeting, the health minister, to talk about it.
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In schools, it’s a similar story. Many have replaced separate-sex toilets with mixed-sex (gender-neutral) ones; those that haven’t usually allow boys who say they’re girls to use the girls’ loos and changing rooms. Most school anti-bullying policies warn that any complaints about such a boy will be treated as bullying.
Even more alarmingly, most police forces don’t merely allow trans-identifying male officers into female changing rooms, they count those officers as female for the purpose of searches — including strip-searches. If a male detainee says he’s a woman, then a female officer may be told she has to search him. If she complains, she may be disciplined.
Youngsters were being taught at school and university that it’s impossible to define male and female objectively
All this is despite the law being clearly on women’s side. Employers are required by law to provide single-sex toilets and changing rooms; so are schools, for all but the youngest children. Any police search that goes beyond the removal of a detainee’s hat, coat and gloves must be carried out by an officer of the same sex.
It all looks like a great story. There’s obvious, widespread unlawfulness causing obvious, widespread harm. But somehow the story evolved from trivial to normal, unknown to ubiquitous, without ever passing through the right size to attract news attention.
Decades ago, when the first men who said they were women were admitted to women’s spaces, any commissioning editor who was told about it dismissed it as a sideshow. By the time vast numbers of people started identifying as trans, it was rejected because it had been happening for ages and was everywhere.
Also working against news coverage was a determined disinformation campaign. Youngsters were being taught at school and university that it’s impossible to define male and female objectively or to know which individuals are which. Older people were being convinced by lobby groups which wilfully misrepresent the law that if a man said he was a woman it was compulsory to play along.
Few people actively opposed the propaganda because those subjected to it mostly believed it and those spared it mostly didn’t know about it, and if they did, found it implausible that anyone could believe anything so dumb. Now that trans is everywhere, that mutual ignorance has ended. The two groups are increasingly clashing in workplaces, schools and everywhere else. And even if the new belief system doesn’t set editors’ news senses tingling, the clashes do.
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Peggie’s fight made a particularly good story because she’s admirable and relatable: an NHS nurse, aka a ministering angel, with an unblemished 30-year record. It also landed precisely when the same features that used to work to keep such stories out of the media started to count as positives.
One is the craziness, which used to be very hard to report on because it was so implausible it made the reporter look like the crazy one. When gender woo was only on Tumblr and in university gender studies departments, media gatekeepers either didn’t see it or didn’t believe it was happening. In the Peggie hearing it was repeated under oath in a courtroom — and by a doctor, no less.
Under cross-examination Dr Upton insisted that male and female aren’t well-defined terms but a “nebulous dog whistle”. He refused to accept that he isn’t a “biological woman”. Reporters gleefully scribbled it all in their notebooks.
Another aspect that’s being reinterpreted is the almost universal failure of officials to do their jobs. Previously, if a reporter told an editor that the Health and Safety Executive had been refusing to enforce regulations requiring single-sex changing rooms, it would have seemed more likely that the reporter was wrong, rather than the regulator. Now, a spreading anti-establishment mood makes institutional failure seem more plausible, and as the Peggie story has played out, the HSE’s failings have become part of it.
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More broadly, the narrative about trans issues is changing. Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist from 1938 to 1956, used to tell young journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. That may sound like unnecessary advice in the era of churnalism and social media, but it expresses a timeless journalistic truth: a story can only ever be about one thing.
And for many years, every trans story stuck to a singular narrative: the struggle of the uniquely oppressed and suffering person born in the wrong body, with everyone else relegated to supporting roles if they were lucky and bigoted villains if they weren’t. Now the narrative is in flux: you can still easily find stories about celebrities’ brave trans kids but there’s room to point out that other people’s rights and interests matter too.
Once enough people got their heads around the story, it flipped like an optical illusion. The same facts and events that were once dismissed as too crazy to be happening became the sort of crazy that makes great copy.
Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Pretending men can be women has been destroying institutions and women’s lives for years now. And finally, it’s news.
