Thirteen months after the UK Supreme Court ruled that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, and ten days after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) presented an updated draft code of practice to parliament, the UK is again debating single-sex spaces, particularly toilets. The purpose and value of these spaces for women risk being overshadowed by objections from those who prefer non-compliance with current law.
The code confirms that no single-sex service can legally be opened to people of the opposite sex, even if they are transgender. Organisations are advised to address potential disadvantage to trans people by providing alternative mixed-sex facilities. Associations with membership rules can be trans-inclusive if they do not claim to be single-sex. Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, cited avoiding new burdens on business as a reason for the delayed release of the revised guidance.
Trans rights groups reacted angrily, viewing the guidance as a mandate to exclude them from ordinary life. Public toilets are a totemic issue, being the most commonly encountered single-sex space. However, entry criteria must be based on sex, and any checks, such as in a women's health setting, must be conducted sensitively to avoid discrimination.
Among those welcoming the Supreme Court ruling, there is relief but also frustration. The charity Sex Matters criticised a section stating that sex should be treated as special category personal data and kept private, arguing this could make single-sex spaces harder to operate. The implications extend far beyond toilets, which were never the top priority for groups like For Women Scotland, Woman's Place UK, and Fair Play for Women, who led the campaign for sex-based rights.
From the outset, these groups were more concerned with less visible spaces that hold special status in the women's movement: prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, lesbian groups, women's health centres, and sports. Attacks on the exclusionary nature of such spaces by the trans rights movement are a key reason gender-critical feminism exists. Several leading figures, including lesbians and sexual abuse survivors, have spoken publicly about this. Karen Ingala Smith, co-founder of the Femicide Census, advocated for single-sex services years before Women's Aid supported them. Her book, Defending Women's Spaces, explains from a refuge provider's perspective why these spaces are vital for traumatised domestic violence victims rebuilding confidence and boundaries.
Trans people also suffer high rates of domestic abuse and need services. Concerns about inadequate funding are justified, but mixed-sex support groups already exist, and a trend towards gender-neutral commissioning has been noted. The vast majority of public spaces are mixed-sex, which is why the Equality Act refers to single-sex ones as exceptions. It is unacceptable to remove this option on grounds that seeking female-only space is bigoted, or to claim a service is single-sex when it is not.
The law is the law, and the EHRC is only the messenger. So far, Reform UK is the only party with a plan to repeal the Equality Act. If a campaign emerges to eliminate single-sex spaces, arguments against it will prominently feature rising levels of sexual violence. Radical and gender-critical feminists are often accused of stigmatising transgender people and fixating on anatomy, but a vast body of evidence points to males' far greater propensity for violence and sexual abuse.
Nature or nurture? Biological drives need not come into it. A gender transition, particularly later in life, cannot erase the previous person and everything that shaped them. Since there is no objective test of gender identity, there is no failsafe way to distinguish a transgender woman from a man who wishes to access female spaces. Research in this contested area is limited, but facts back up the gender-critical view. In 2024, a government minister reported that out of 245 transgender prisoners identifying as women in England and Wales, 151 were convicted of a sexual offence – a far higher proportion than the roughly 2% of female prisoners jailed for sex crimes. Other data may point to different conclusions, but it remains scarce; for example, we do not even know how many trans people live in England and Wales after a census question was botched.
The threat posed by men to women is not the only reason single-sex spaces matter. Fairness in sport and the right of women, including lesbians, to have their own groups are also important, as are the privacy and dignity of women obliged to change clothes at work, such as nurses in Darlington who objected to undressing in front of transgender colleagues and brought claims against NHS employers. With 739,000 female victims of sexual offences in England and Wales last year, and grim trends including a huge rise in camera-enabled crimes, many women see the case for single-sex spaces getting stronger, both as a prevention tool and a resource for survivors. Mixed-sex school toilets strike me as one of the worst ideas ever.
The trans population faces its own challenges, and the code is emphatically not a reason to disregard these. But it should not have taken the Supreme Court or the EHRC to clarify that sacrificing single-sex spaces is not the answer.
