Trans People Can be Banned from Single Sex Spaces, Rules UK Equality Watchdog

DURHAM, NC - MAY 10: Gender neutral signs are posted in the 21C Museum Hotel public restro
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Single-sex spaces where transgender people cannot enter are perfectly legal, Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission has said.

Issuing guidance on the increasingly controversial issue of single-sex safe spaces, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on Monday said that while the Equalities Act states that businesses cannot discriminate against people over “protected characteristics of sex or gender reassignment,” it said that there are some exceptions for single spaces.

The EHRC said that organisations such as hospitals, retailers, hospitality and sports clubs are all allowed to place limits on single sex areas to limit them to only those biologically born either male or female, so long as the “reasons are justified and proportionate.”

Such businesses and organisations are also within their legal rights to opt to open up such spaces to anyone, the equalities watchdog said.

Explaining the guidance, the chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Kishwer Falkner said: “Where rights between groups compete, our duty as an independent regulator is to help providers of services and others to balance the needs of different users in line with the law.

“Organisations are legally allowed to restrict services to a single sex in some circumstances. But they need help to navigate this sensitive area. That is why we have published this guidance – to clarify the law and uphold everyone’s rights.”

The decision has been hailed by female rights activists, including feminist campaigner Maya Forstater, who told talkRadio on Tuesday that safe spaces for women were not introduced only for safety, but also for “dignity and privacy”.

“There is a demand by people who want to use opposite-sex services in order to validate their feeling that they are really a man or a woman and there has been an expectation that they could do that,” she said.

Forstater claimed that in many cases transgender people where told by their doctors to try to use single sex spaces “as a test of whether they could get around in the world, but those doctors didn’t have the right to overrule the consent of other people.”

“We are also going around our day to day lives, and we aren’t there to validate someone’s gender feelings, we are trying to have our own dignity and privacy,” the campaigner concluded.

The guidance on single sex spaces was criticised by the pro-Trans lobby, including from the radical LGBTQ organisation Stonewall, which claimed that the statement from the EHRC will only “create more confusion”.

“It appears to go against the core presumption of the Act which is that inclusion should be the starting point, and shifts the focus towards reasons trans people, and specifically trans women, can be excluded,” the group said.

The advice from the EHRC did not extend to the issue of transgender prisoners, which has also become a touchstone issue in the country.

Though the UK opened its first transgender prisoner wing in a women’s prison in Downview in 2019, there are still trans inmates being placed among biologically female prison populations, despite concerns over the safety of women inmates.

The British Parliament was warned in 2015 by then-President of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, Dr James Barrett, who said that there was a “plethora of prison intelligence suggesting” that the “driving force” behind many prison gender transitions was in order to make “subsequent sexual offending very much easier”.

Despite this, the High Court ruled last year that biological males could be placed in female prisons if they identify as women. The nation’s socialised healthcare system has also been placing transgender sex offenders in female hospital wards.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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