The evidence, one year on from For Women Scotland
A year ago this month, a judgment about the meaning of words in a single Act was received, by many people, as a ruling on what I am.
The judgment in For Women Scotland ruled that trans women, including those holding a Gender Recognition Certificate, are not “women” for the purposes of the Equality Act’s sex provisions. What it did not do was make any ruling about identity, personhood, or what trans women are. That gap, between a statutory definition and a statement about human beings, is where a year’s worth of bad faith has taken up residence.
Open any right-leaning paper this month and you will find the same story, told and retold. “Public bodies, charities and businesses are failing to protect women and girls.” “Trans inclusion has run amok.” “The fightback is gathering pace.” “Brave women are speaking up.” “Sensible institutions are at last waking up to the threat.”
My trans siblings and I have been living through this false narrative for the past year.
So let’s look at this supposed threat. TransLucent submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information requests to major public bodies in England between 2022 and 2024. Across 40 large local authorities, 35 reported zero complaints about changing room facilities, five held no records, and the single incident logged involved a cis person in the wrong facility. Across 102 NHS trusts, not one reported a complaint from a cis woman patient about sharing a ward with a trans woman. Four complaints, across 382 public bodies, over three years. That is the empirical record.
The tribunal cases held up as great victories tell a more complicated story. In Peggie, the tribunal confirmed that giving Dr Upton, a trans woman, access to the changing room was lawful. All discrimination claims were dismissed. The judgment also found that Ms Peggie had harassed Dr Upton in paragraph 1231 here.. None of that made the front pages. Hutchison was a harder outcome, but the remedy the tribunal pointed toward was not exclusion. It said the trust should have provided Rose Henderson with alternative, suitable and dignified facilities. The answer the court envisaged is better provision for everyone. The answer the gender-critical press took from it is a green light to exclude. Those are not the same thing.
In February, the Good Law Project’s High Court challenge to the EHRC’s interim guidance was dismissed. But buried in the judgment was something the gender-critical press has been careful not to report: the court confirmed that service providers may lawfully allow trans women to use women’s facilities without being forced to open them to cis men. That directly contradicts the claim, repeated across hundreds of column inches, that the law now requires trans people to be excluded. It doesn’t.
A false narrative doesn’t need to be true to be effective. It just needs to be repeated loudly enough, and long enough, to shift what organisations feel they can safely do.
The Women’s Institute and Girlguiding both made their announcements in December, within a day of each other. What is notable is what they said as they did it. The WI retained its “firm belief that trans women are women.” Girlguiding described its decision as made “with a heavy heart.” These are not organisations that changed their minds. They are organisations that changed their behaviour under pressure, while their values stayed where they were: institutions compelled to act against their own stated convictions because the legal and media climate made holding the line feel too costly.
ADF International is a different order of thing entirely. A US-based Christian legal advocacy group with a documented record of campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights across multiple continents, it has now turned its attention to British civic life, sending legal threat letters to ten sports bodies including Parkrun. Parkrun is a public health charity that organises non-competitive community runs on Saturday mornings. This is imported machinery, built in America to fight a culture war, now being deployed against a Saturday morning fun run.
This is what “protecting women and girls” looks like in practice. Not safer spaces. Legal threats against a public health charity.
The cost is being borne by trans people going about our lives. The trans girl who has to leave the Guides in September. The trans woman receiving a letter telling her she is no longer welcome at the WI. The trans runner wondering whether to register next Saturday. The trans NHS staff who now face the prospect of their gender being examined in a tribunal. Almost entirely unreported, and entirely real.
The evidence is in. The case the gender-critical press has been making is not standing up to it, and the people best placed to say so are the ones still living inside the story.
If “protecting women and girls” requires telling a country full of trans women that they are not who they have always been, then it is not protection that is being argued for. It is something else, and it is older than this argument by a long way. The job of liberal politics is to keep saying so.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
A medieval street at the heart of Swansea's social life
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
More missing scientists: Remembering the GEC-Marconi deaths panic of the late Eighties
Makerfield: we can breathe again.
Jana
Alex Macfie
Tom Bailey
Alex B
David Raw
7 Comments
Ultimately, Tanya, does a Scottish female prisoner deserve to be entitled to a safe space? I’m positive the Scottish Prison Service goes to great lengths in assessing any risk, but having said that, no amount of reports or recommendations by staff can absolutely guarantee that female inmate a safe space. Is it an isolated incident? Yes, but for any victim, once is enough.
Shame our leader has said more in opposition to animals on bank notes than he has about all of this.
@Chloe, every prisoner deserves a safe space, including cis and trans men and cis and trans women. That includes trans women, who the evidence consistently shows are among the most vulnerable people in the prison system, overwhelmingly victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it.
Your question implies that trans women as a category are inherently more dangerous. That isn’t what the evidence shows. The Canadian Correctional Service’s own government research found trans women had lower rates of institutional incidents than other groups, with the majority of all incidents across gender diverse prisoners being non-violent. The Scottish Prison Service, like serious correctional services globally, operates individual risk assessments precisely because risk is individual, not categorical.
The question isn’t whether safety matters. Of course it does. The question is whether blanket exclusion based on gender identity is an evidence-based response to a documented risk, or whether it’s something else dressed up in the language of protection.
“Four complaints, across 382 public bodies, over three years.”
Is it not entirely possible that women are too frightened, too exhausted or too upset to make a complaint? Women have the right to single sex spaces, for reasons of dignity and privacy, of religious practice, of safety and security. Women deserve these spaces, just as they deserve fair competition in sport.
It’s also the case that bad male actors can and will falsely use ‘trans’ to request they be imprisoned on the female estate, giving them access to vulnerable women
@ Chloe
I believe the evidence suggests that the rate of offending by trans women mirrors the rate of offending by men rather than the rate of offending by women. In that sense, housing a trans woman in a female prison is more risky than just housing an additional cis woman.
@Sheila, the under-reporting argument is being stretched quite far here. But we don’t only have UK FOI data. Over 30 countries have now introduced self-ID laws, some more than a decade ago. The UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination reported receiving no findings of self-ID being used by predatory men to cause violence in gender-segregated spaces across any of the 15 countries he surveyed. Argentina, which introduced self-ID in 2012, commissioned its own government study: one trans woman was convicted of sexual abuse in the seven years following the law’s introduction. Ireland has operated self-ID since 2015 with no documented increase in safety incidents. If the feared harm were real and widespread, we would expect to see it somewhere in that international record by now. We don’t.
Re your bad actors point: yes, this is a genuine concern and one that serious custodial policy addresses through individual risk assessment, which is exactly what the Scottish Prison Service operates. The answer to bad faith is better gatekeeping, not categorical exclusion of everyone who shares a characteristic with a potential bad actor. We don’t apply that logic anywhere else.
@Joan, the data you’re referencing has a significant sampling problem. The MOJ figures draw from a population that is disproportionately housed in the male estate because of their offence profile. It is not a representative sample of trans women as a population.
The Swedish study most often cited alongside this argument has been explicitly disowned for this use by its own lead author, Cecilia Dhejne. She has stated clearly that the post-1989 cohort in her research showed no significant difference in offending rates at all, and that anyone claiming her work shows trans women are a heightened risk is misrepresenting its findings. You can read her own words here: https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-check-study-shows-transition-makes-trans-people-suicidal_n_15483.htm
Parliamentary written evidence summarising the misrepresentation clearly: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/21023/html/
The original study itself: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885