Cambridge University’s women-only college is reportedly continuing to welcome trans women, despite the UK Supreme Court ruling on gender.
Newnham College, founded in 1871 and which counts broadcaster Clare Balding, novelist Iris Murdoch and actress Miriam Margolyes among its alumni, is believed to have created a new policy document that allows trans students to access single-sex spaces and facilities.
The decision, reported by MailOnline, comes little more than six months after a decision was handed down in the case of For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers, which deemed the definition of “sex” for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act meant biological sex only.
In the wake of the decision, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published interim guidance which recommended organisations, businesses and service providers ban trans men and women from single-sex services and spaces, such as changing rooms and toilets, which aligned with their gender. It also added in “some circumstances” from trans people could be barred from spaces based on “biological sex” too.
The EHRC later clarified that the “circumstances” referred to situations where “reasonable objection” could be taken to a trans person’s presence, such as in female spaces, when “the gender reassignment process has given [a trans man] a masculine appearance or attributes”.
Newnham College is reportedly flying in the face of the Supreme Court ruling. (Canva)
Criticising the college’s decision, postgraduate Maeve Halligan, who founded gender-critical student group the Society of Women, told the Mail: “The category of woman is being totally usurped, hijacked and attacked. Sexism is written into the history of Cambridge University and now it’s come back in disguise.
“This historic college has some of the most famous alumni, such as Germaine Greer. I can only imagine what she would think if she saw [the] new admissions policy.”
In a letter to students, seen by MailOnline, college principal Alison Rose said the policy had been “cleared by lawyers” and meant Newnham would remain inclusive.
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“We are open to all female applicants”
“We are a women-only college, under the provisions of Schedule 12 of the Equality Act 2010 and our charter and statutes,” Rose wrote.
“We are open to all female applicants [and] will consider at the admissions stage those applicants who hold a form of formal identification as female, on a current passport, driving licence, birth certificate or gender recognition certificate.”
Gender-critical campaigner Maya Forstater said Newnham “should have been urgently reconsidering its policy to bring it back into line with the law”, following the Supreme Court’s decision. “Instead it has been looking around for loopholes. This is fruitless and foolish.”
Hannah Caldas has been banned by World Aquatics for five years for refusing to take part in a gender-verification test, but she says if the suspension is the price she has to pay to “protect my most intimate medical information” then she is “happy to pay”.
Caldas, who also goes by Ana, took part in the World Aquatics Masters Championships in Doha in 2024, finishing first in her age category in the women’s 100m freestyle, and also competed in the Spring Nationals run by US Masters Swimming (USMS) in San Antonio, Texas in April, winning several events.
In response to the Masters Swimming competition, anti-trans Republican governor Ken Paxton launched an investigation into the organisation and claimed in a suit it violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act by allowing trans participation.
Paxton’s office sought $10,000 for each alleged trade practice act violation, according to coverage at the time by the Texas Tribune, and the governor labelled Masters Swimming’s policies “insane” and said it “cowered to radical activists pushing gender warfare”.
In August, USMS declared Caldas is eligible to compete in the female category, with a report into her eligibility stating the “documents the swimmer submitted all demonstrate that she was assigned the female sex at birth and that she identifies as female, although she swam in the male category at USMS events 2002-2004”.
However, World Aquatics have ruled the 48-year-old will be suspended for five years until October 2030 and her swimming results from the previous three years – between June 2022 and October 2024 – have been disqualified after she declined to take a gender verification test.
In a statement attributed to a New York Aquatics press release, Caldas declined because “chromosomal tests are invasive and expensive procedures”.
“My life and privacy have been invaded enough”
“My insurance refuses to cover such a test because it is not medically necessary,” she said. “No US state requires genetic tests for recreational sports events like these.
“Not even US Masters Swimming, the national governing body for recreational adult swimming in the US, demands this for any of its events.”
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Caldas continued: “I understand and accept the consequences of not complying with a World Aquatics investigation.
“But if a five-year suspension is the price I must pay to protect my most intimate medical information, then it’s a price I am happy to pay—for myself, and for every other woman who does not want to submit to highly invasive medical testing just to swim in an older-adult competition.”
She added she had been “swimming in sanctioned events for over 30 years” and is “prepared to let it all go”.
“My life and privacy have been invaded enough,” she explained “It is time to prioritise my health and personal safety.”
Lia Thomas reacts after finishing tied for 5th in the 200 Freestyle finals at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on 18 March 2022. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty)
Back in 2022 World Aquatics voted to implement rules which ban trans women from competing in elite races if they have undergone any male puberty.
It was under this policy that trans former University of Pennsylvania swimmer swimmer Lia Thomas, who made history in 2022 as the first trans woman to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association swimming championship, was banned by the swimming body.
Thomas filed a legal dispute against World Aquatics policy with the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland in September 2023.
However, the court rejected her claim that the policy was discriminatory.
As reported by the BBC the ruling outlined that Lia Thomas was “simply not entitled to engage with eligibility to compete in WA competitions” as someone who was no longer a member of USA Swimming – “let alone compete in a WA competition” – and hence was “not sufficiently affected” by the rules to be able to challenge them.
World Aquatics welcomed the court’s decision and said the ruling was a “major step forward in our efforts to protect women’s sports”.
Dallas Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb refused to wear a rainbow armband during a game, Olympian Mollie O’Callaghan pledged to no longer compete if trans swimmer Lia Thomas is allowed to, and singer Sam Smith took issue with conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel, as two individuals, using they/them pronouns.
You might have seen these divisive posts on Facebook, you might even have been outraged by them or shared them, but they’re not real – they are anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation falsely framed as legitimate news content.
You only need to make a cursory Google search to see the claims can be easily disproven.
Sports editor David Evans, writing for Sportscasting, concluded the story about Lamb was fabricated because there is absolutely no source for his alleged quote nor did any reputable sports outlet run coverage on it.
Swimming Australia swiftly issued a public statement declaring the comments attributed to O’Callaghan, and subsequently fellow swimmer Kyle Chalmers, were fake.
Sam Smith has been the subject of online misinformation, claiming they are semibisexual. (Didier Messens/Getty)
As important as it is for those impacted by fabricated content to clarify when a piece of information is absolutely not real, the simple fact is that the truth alone is not enough to rectify the power of fake news in this predominantly digital-first era we live in.
At a time when social media fact-checking and moderation is in decline, algorithmic rules govern our social media feeds – often reinforcing our own unconscious biases and echo chambers – and the lines between reality and fantasy are increasingly being blurred by AI, it is more and more difficult for many people to consistently tell fact from fiction.
A user who viewed such fake anti-LGBTQ+ posts as referenced earlier and instantly believes it to be true, perhaps because of their own prejudices and/or lack of skills at verifying the validity of media, would be unlikely to purposefully seek out any fact-checking. They would not think they need to – they saw it on Facebook, you see, so it must be true.
A more discerning user, however, might instantly be able to tell the post is nothing more than clickbait and/or engagement farming, or at the very least it is misleading and perhaps twisting someone’s original words.
Indeed, there are large swathes of the population who believe they are good at spotting fake news but studies frequently find they are often overconfident and still extremely susceptible to it.
They, as much as those who come to their social media feeds with already prejudiced opinions towards LGBTQ+ folks, are being targeted by bad actors seeking to weaponise anti-LGBTQ+ content to sow division in society.
These bad actors create content with the purpose of reaching average people in a society, honing in on their fears and anxieties about the state and future of their community, outraging them and, ultimately, shifting their opinions on queer rights, legislation enacted by their government, the trustworthiness of their elected leaders and undercutting democracy as a whole.
Misinformation and disinformation – two distinctly different but intertwined concepts – are certainly nothing new and have been a part of the media ecosystem as long as verifiable news has been.
While misinformation refers to the spread of falsehoods via genuine misunderstanding or mistake, disinformation is far more sinister and instead refers to the process by which entirely false information is created, propagated and disseminated on purpose, with the aim of pushing a particular narrative or agenda to achieve a set of political goals.
Anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation, on the other hand, includes the far-right “groomer”conspiracy theory which inherently links LGBTQ+ people to vile child abuse, claims pushed by Donald Trump that school teachers are performing gender-affirming surgeries on pupils in classrooms, and the recent posts above falsely attributed to notable athletes and other famous names.
In recent months, there has been an increasing number of posts appearing on social media – namely Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram – which are stylised to look like the image-based breaking news posts often used by media organisations, despite the fact they are being posted by the furthest thing from a news source.
The posts are usually overlaid with a quote or headline and captioned with some sort of breaking news kicker and the start of what looks like copy for a published news story.
In many cases, the same post – using the same image and caption – is shared across various different pages for maximum reach.
Many of the posts consistently appear to be about trans rights, namely the hot button issue of trans inclusion in sports or specific gender identities, with many referencing trans American swimmer Lia Thomas.
In 2022, Thomas made history as the first trans woman to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association swimming championship. She has since become a key figure in the right’s war against trans athletes.
PinkNews was unable to verify who was behind the Facebook pages which are sharing the current wave of anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation.
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference
However, similar tactics have been used by bad actors in the past and in national security circles as Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), which the EU defines as a “pattern of behaviour that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures and political processes” wherein such activity “often seeks to stoke polarisation and divisions inside and outside the EU while also aiming to undermine the EU’s global standing and ability to pursue its policy objectives and interests”.
The report found that anti-LGBTQ+ FIMI is politically motivated and seeks to harden public opinion in opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, along with sowing divisions in communities and undermining democracy.
“The reach of FIMI cases targeting LGBTIQ+ goes beyond this community,” the report reads. “According to the evidence collected during the investigation, FIMI actors aimed to provoke public outrage not only against named LGBTIQ+ individuals, communities, or organisations – but also against government policies, the concept of democracy as such, and local or geopolitical events.
“While undermining LGBTIQ+ people was a common theme in many of the FIMI cases identified, the overarching narrative in many of them was that the West is in decline.
“By leveraging the narrative of decline, FIMI threat actors attempt to drive a wedge between traditional values and democracies.
“They claim that children need to be protected from LGBTIQ+ people, that LGBTIQ+ people get preferential treatment in sports and other fields – to the detriment of others – and that Western liberal organisations or political groups are demonstrably weak because they surrender to “LGBTIQ+ propaganda”.”
Fake content “keeps debates falsely alive”
Speaking to PinkNews, Dr Dani Madrid-Morales – lecturer in journalism and global communication at the University of Sheffield and co-Lead of the university’s Disinformation Research Cluster, said the style of anti-LGBTQ+ posts currently being shared on Facebook are “a very common approach that different actors use”.
Madrid-Morales noted that whilst political actors certainly use these coordinated strategies for a particular end goal, they are also used by isolated individuals who “benefit economically from creating this content that is highly polarizing [and] that’s likely to get a lot of engagement”.
He went on to explain that the content, of course, has a negative impact on the community it is focused on directly but “more broadly, it sort of keeps these debates sometimes falsely alive in the sense that in the political arena”.
“By keeping these debates really highly active on social media, certain groups benefit from being able to say, ‘oh, look, people are really interested in us talking about this’, because a lot of people on social media are discussing these topics and sometimes it’s very artificially inflated.
“We’ve seen that before with other topics, for example health disinformation and anti-vax campaigners, where they create false information.
“They use amplification techniques on social media to get that widely spread, and then they create the false illusion that’s a topic that people are really concerned about when in reality it’s not.”
The number of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales have marginally decreased, but they are still not figures to celebrate.
Home Office figures published on Thursday (9 October) show in the year ending March 2025 there were a total of 115,990 hate crime offences, up from 113,166 the year previous year, which marks a two per cent increase.
Notably, these figures exclude the Met Police due to a change in the way in which the force’s data is recorded, hence its numbers are excluded from year-on-year comparisons. Because the Met Police covers the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ population (London), its exclusion likely under-represents national totals for LGBTQ+ hate crime.
It’s also important to note that recorded hate crimes reflect police‐recorded / reported incidents only and not necessarily the true prevalence of hate crime. Many hate crimes go unreported and changes in reporting practices, public awareness and police recording practices etc. all influence the numbers.
So, with these caveats out of the way, what do the 2024/2025 figures actually say?
LGBTQ+ hate crime figures in England and Wales ‘deeply worrying’ despite slight drop (Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Well, in terms of LGBTQ+ hate crime, there was a 2 per cent decrease in offences related to sexual orientation and an 11 per cent decrease in offences related to transgender identity.
In 2023/24 there were 19,127 hate crimes recorded related to sexual orientation which dropped two per cent to 18,702 in 2024/25, while there was an 11 per cent drop in anti-trans hate crime from 4,258 to 3,809.
Despite the decrease, both sets of 2024/25 data are still higher than they were five years ago. In the year ending March 2020, there were 105,090 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales,
As has been seen in previous years, race hate crimes accounted for the majority of police recorded hate crimes, with 82,490 offences recorded. This was up six per cent on the previous year but still remains below the peak of 87,905 offences seen in March 2022.
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This year’s religious hate crime data shows a three per cent rise from 6,973 to 7,164 offences.
Religious hate crime targeted specifically at Muslims rose by 19 per cent, from 2,690 to 3,199 offences.
Hate crime targeted at members of the Jewish community went down from 2,093 to 1,715 offences, or 18 per cent, during the same period. However, the Home Office urged caution as such figures exclude Metropolitan Police data which recorded 40 per cent of all religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people the previous year.
Stonewall’s statement:
Issuing a statement following the release of the statistics, CEO of Stonewall Simon Blake said: “Unsurprisingly, the Home Office statistics released today show that overall hate crime continues to rise, which is damaging for our neighbourhoods, communities and society.”
“Yet, these numbers don’t tell the full story for the LGBTQ+ community,” Blake continued. “Today’s headline data focuses on hate crimes reported outside of London and excludes the Met Police numbers due to reporting changes, which will inevitably affect LGBTQ+ data because of where many LGBTQ+ people live.
“Trust in the Police has also fallen more widely, compounding what we already know – that LGBTQ+ people often don’t report hate crimes.
“No one should have to live somewhere where they don’t feel safe.
“The stories we hear every day tell us that LGBTQ+ people are experiencing more hate and are living in fear, especially following the April Supreme Court judgment, a period that doesn’t fall within these statistics.
LGBTQ+ refugees may face outing in their home countries before being dragged through an archaic asylum system that forces them to ‘prove’ their identities to complete strangers, case studies from a refugee charity shared for National Coming Out Day show.
National Coming Out Day takes place every year on 11 October and was first celebrated in 1988, with the date marking the one year anniversary of the the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It was created to honour LGBTQ+ people who decided to come out and live their lives openly as queer people.
Coming out is a deeply personal and individual experience for LGBTQ+ folks and people can ‘come out’ at any age.
For some, it won’t be a big deal at all and might something they do off-hand or causally – such as explaining what their identity is or introducing their partner to friends or family – but for others it can be very challenging, especially if they come from communities where anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination is commonplace.
For LGBTQ+ refugees, the coming out process can be a dangerous and upsetting one, with queer people facing rejection from family and friends, abuse, criminal charges or even the death penalty.
For National Coming Out Day 2025, PinkNews heard case studies from two people who are supported by LGBTQ+ refugee charity Rainbow Migration about their experiences with coming out.
Jalal, a gay man from Morocco, explained he lived his whole life there until he moved to the UK at the start of 2021 to undertake a higher degree.
“You’ll have to leave or he’s going to kill you”
“In one of my visits home, I had a huge confrontation with my family,” he explained. “I brought a lot of clothes and other items, knowing my family normally would not touch any of my stuff, like my phone.
“But this time, I was really surprised when my mum took the opportunity to go through my stuff when I wasn’t looking.
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“Thinking back on it, I think she was very suspicious about my lifestyle in the UK. Every time we video called, I would keep it short and always say the same things, so she wanted to know more.
“She found my letters and a picture of me and my ex.
“When I got back, she was holding all the things I was hiding, and we had a fight.
“I had to go back to my room for safety because it was getting really violent. Eventually my parents told me to leave, or my dad was going to kill me. ”
Jalal explain his father “left the house to cool off” and his mum told him: “Once he’s back, you’ll have to leave or he’s going to kill you.”
“So that’s what I did. I took my passport, my luggage and anything that I could grab.
“I went to stay in the cheapest hotel, waiting for the cheapest flight ticket [back to London]. Eventually, I took the flight. I needed three days before I applied for asylum to just process everything. I was so tired from the flight.”
Once queer people reach the UK, the system can itself be discriminatory in the way it asks LGBTQ+ folks to ‘prove’ their identities to officials through evidence in order to be granted asylum.
As research from Rainbow Migration has previously shown, the UK governmentfrequently does not believe LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum and disregards testimony from friends and family which attests to an individual’s sexual or gender identity.
A bisexual woman from Pakistan who receives support from Rainbow Migration said of the system: “In my main interview, I had to talk about parts of my life I had buried deep.
“I had to explain trauma, abuse, and fear to strangers — and try to stay composed, because I knew they were watching closely to see if I was “credible enough.”
A domestic flight in the US was forced to make an unscheduled landing after a passenger shouted out that LGBTQ+ people were giving him cancer and that “the plane is going down”.
The Sun Country Airlines plane left Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport at around at 7.15am on Friday (3 October) bound for Newark, New Jersey, but was forced to land in Chicago little more than an hour later – about halfway through the scheduled flight time.
Speaking to The Minnesota Star Tribune, passenger Seth Evans said the unruly man was sitting across the aisle from him and acted erratically throughout the flight. Between playing games of Candy Crush, the man reportedly shouted about being “gang chased,” “cooked” and “radiated” by the LGBTQ+ community, adding that this was causing him to develop cancer.
Evans said his fellow passenger was wearing “no less than 15″ face masks stacked one on top of the other and told others on the plane that “Trump is here”.
The man was handcuffed by police and escorted off the flight after the plane landed at O’Hare International airport. A spokesperson for Sun Country said the flight “landed without incident as a precaution, in response to a disruptive passenger”, adding: “The passenger in question was turned over to law enforcement and removed from the aircraft.”
New street art in Walker’s Point commemorates the neighorhood’s rich LGBTQ history. Crosswalks at the intersection of 2nd Street and National Avenue are now painted rainbow, in a design by street artist Jeremy Novy. The project was led by the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project, as a way to show the neighborhood’s pride and inclusiveness as a safe space for all.
The new artwork was unveiled at a dedication ceremony Oct. 6, with remarks from Milwaukee leaders including Mayor Cavalier Johnson.
“Today we’re here to celebrate legacy. For more than 80 years, the Walker’s Point neighborhood has been a safe haven for Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ community,” Johnson said. “Now this place is where people could come as they find acceptance, as they find belonging, and where they really find joy in our city.”
Read the full article. The crosswalk was funded by private donations. Meanwhile, yesterday in Miami Beach a state crew jackhammered away the rainbow mosaic crosswalk leading to the city’s famed “gay beach.”
The bodies of three trans women have been found dumped on the side of the road in Karachi, Pakistan.
The gruesome find was made in the Memon Goth area of the city, the largest in Pakistan, on Sunday (21 September). Police spokesman Javed Ahmed Abro told the AFP news agency that the bodies were “bullet-riddled”. All three victims were shot at close range.
Syed Murad Ali Shah, the provincial chief minister for Sindh, the province in which Karachi is located, said: “Transgender persons are a vulnerable segment of society and we must all give them dignity and respect.”
Meanwhile, activists in the region described the deaths as an attempt to “silence” trans voices.
Trans rights campaigner Bindiya Rana told The Associated Press that violence aimed at trans people in Pakistan “is not new and it is deeply embedded in our society”, adding: “If the police fail to identify the killers, we will announce a countrywide protest.”
Fellow activist and Karachi councillor Shahzadi Rai said: “When hate speech and campaigns are carried out so openly, outcomes like this are inevitable. Even though the state and police are on our side, killings are still occurring, which indicates that deep-rooted hatred against transgender people persists in our society.”
Pakistan’s transgender community faces “deep-rooted hate”. (ASIF HASSAN/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the BBC, a report in the medical journal The Lancet in 2023 claimed that 90 per cent of transgender people in Pakistan have faced physical assaults.
A spokesperson for rights group Gender Interactive Alliance identified the women as “khawaja sira persons”, a term referring to the third-gender community in Pakistan, and cited an attack just days earlier.
“These back-to-back tragedies show that the khawaja sira community is being systematically targeted. This is not just about individual killings, it’s an attempt to terrorise and silence an entire community,” they said.
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Gender Interactive Alliance set out a series of demands, including calling on the police to conduct “immediate, transparent investigations and arrest all perpetrators”, the introduction of a specific protection unit for trans people, and new legislation to combat hate crime.
“The khawaja sira community will not remain silent, our lives are as valuable as every other citizens’,” the spokesperson added. “We demand justice. We demand protection.”
Despite being able to self-identify under the 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, the transgender community continues to face discrimination, abuse and harassment in the South Asian country.
Two trans women living in Mardan, a city about 30 miles east of Peshawar, were killed in their home in 2024, and a year earlier, Marvia Malik, the country’s first trans newsreader, survived an assassination attempt when two gunmen opened fire while she was at home.
A gay man was left needing hospital treatment after being head on the head with a baseball bat when he and his partner were attacked in Boston, in an incident that is being treated as a possible hate crime
The attack took place in the Mattapan neighbourhood of the Massachusetts city at about 7.45pm on 13 September when the couple were walking towards a convenience store.
At first a group of men shouted gay slurs at them, some of which were in Haitian Creole, a French-based language, before a fight broke out, a witness told The Boston Globe.
One of the gay men was then hit with what appeared to a be a bat. Boston pofficers found him in a parking lot, bleeding from the back of his head.
He was assessed at the scene before being taken to hospital. His condition is unknown. His friend was interviewed by the officers, and the attack is being investigated by the Boston Police Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“Hate is never tolerated in Boston,” a police spokesperson said. “Our thoughts go out to the two victims, and we ask anyone with information to contact [us].
Marks & Spencer’s bra-fitting services are for designed for “biological females”, a spokesperson for the high-street store has said, following a row where a member of staff, claimed to be transgender, asked a customer if she needed help.
The 141-year-old retailer recently apologised to a mother who complained complained that an employee she believed to be trans offered to help her and her teenage daughter while in a store.
The mother claimed the member of staff was a “biological male”, according to The Telegraph, causing her daughter to be “visibly upset” and “freaked out”. She added that it was “obviously the case” that the employee was transgender because they were “at least 6ft 2in” tall.
A customer service spokesperson said M&S was “truly sorry” for the “distress” and assured the mother and 14-year-old daughter that they would “receive assistance from a female colleague”. The employee does not carry out bra fittings but works in the clothing section, and so offering to help was part of their job, they added.
JK Rowling responded by calling for a boycott of M&S, seemingly forgetting that there was already meant to be one after campaigners complained that the retailers use of the phrase “First bras for fearless young things” in an advert last year erased women.
The M&S apology sparked complaints. (Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the apology led a number of customers to complain and hundreds signed an open letter saying the complaint “should never have been legitimised, let alone publicised and appeased.”
It continued: “By doing so, M&S has not only failed to support its employee but has [also] inadvertently signalled that discriminatory views will be entertained – if not validated – under the guise of customer feedback.”
The retailer has since now issued a statement to clarify the situation.
“Our bra-fitting service has been developed for our female customers and all our bra fitters are female,” a spokesperson told The Scottish Sun. That meant “biological females”, they said.
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The controversy came in the wake of the UK Supreme Court ruling that the protected characteristic of “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act did not include trans people.
In the days that followed the judgement, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued draft guidance calling for service providers to bar trans men and women from single-sex services and facilities.
It was later clarified that the “circumstances” were where “reasonable objection” could be taken to a trans person’s presence, including – such as in the case of female spaces – when “the gender reassignment process has given [a trans man] a masculine appearance or attributes”.
A leaked version of the EHRC’s finalised guidance, published by The Times last week, is said to be not too dissimilar to the draft guidelines and will ban trans people from changing rooms, wards and sporting competitions, as well as other spaces and services.
Speaking to The Scottish Sun, Fiona McAnena, campaign director of gender-critical group Sex Matters, called on M&S to “rethink its priorities and remember that women and girls have rights too”, adding: “Retailers that meet one group’s demands for special treatment without considering the impact on others are going to get into this sort of tangle.
“No matter how well-intentioned, policies built on the falsehood that ‘trans women are women’ inevitably compromise other people’s rights. Single-sex spaces become mixed sex as soon as a trans-identifying man is allowed to access a women’s toilet or changing room.”
Meanwhile, Virgin Active recently announced that its changing and bathroom facilities will be divided according to “biological sex”.
