The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s advice to the minister for women and equalities (Kemi Badenoch could rewrite law to allow trans exclusion from single-sex spaces, 4 April) appears to avoid addressing the key issue driving recent attention on the rights of trans people: access to single-sex toilets and changing spaces. They appear not to have taken the issue to a logical conclusion, an exercise that reveals two glaring flaws.
First, if such spaces are to be divided by “biological sex”, this will force trans women into men’s spaces and, more alarmingly, trans men into women’s spaces. The latter will mean that a greater number of more masculine people will be present in women’s spaces, thereby making it easier for cis (or biological) men to infiltrate them. This will increase the risk to women using such facilities, not to mention the increase in risk to trans women using men’s facilities.
Second, how should such a policy be policed? Fundamental statistics tells us that almost any feasible system of distinguishing between trans and cis people will reject more cis people than trans, as they make up 99.5% of the population. This will be deeply prejudicial against any women wishing to use such facilities who do not appear sufficiently feminine.
There is no evidence of an increase in risk to the public at large when trans people are legally allowed to access the toilet and changing facilities appropriate to their preferred gender; there are multiple jurisdictions in Europe and North America where this is the case. Any administration seeking to increase the protection afforded to women should be pledging to criminalise sexual harassment, decriminalise abortion, introduce menstrual leave, increase funding for women’s refuges, make misogyny a hate crime, increase prosecutions for rape, and end rapists’ parental rights.
Dr Matti Wenham
Bristol
