TRANS women will be barred from using female toilets in the Scottish Parliament, it has been announced.
Presiding Officer Alison Johnstone said that from Monday, access to the parliament’s facilities would be based on biological sex, not gender identity, after the Supreme Court judgment on the definition of a woman.
The court dealt a major blow to trans rights by ruling that sex and woman were defined by biology, in a verdict which has resulted in trans women being barred from women’s football teams and now Holyrood’s female lavatories.
Johnstone, the head of the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body (SPCB), said access to toilets would be based on “biological sex” and that some of Holyrood’s facilities would be designated as gender neutral spaces, The Times reports.
The changes were signed off by the SPCB, which is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Parliament as a workplace and employer.
That body includes Green MSP Maggie Chapman (above), who found herself at the centre of a major storm after criticising the Supreme Court’s ruling as fuelled by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.
She narrowly survived a vote on a motion to remove her from her position as the deputy convenor of Holyrood’s Equality Committee last month.
The Parliament’s decision was informed by interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has told employers which provide single-sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms to base access on biological sex rather than gender identity.
The Times reports that it is understood that Holyrood authorities have no plans to police the use of its toilets but that they felt they had no choice when faced with the new guidance.
The Scottish Parliament will retain male and female toilets, while designating three existing toilets in its public area as gender-neutral, the paper reported.
An existing showering and changing facility with single lockable rooms, in an area of the building which is not accessible to the public, will also become gender-neutral.
There are around 600 members of staff in the Parliament and 1% of them are said to be transgender.
The changes have been met with uproar in the trans community, with lobby groups writing to the SPCB to raise concerns about how it will be enforced.
Campaign groups Scottish Trans and Equality Network questioned how the new policies would be enforced without infringing people’s privacy and said the changes would make trans people feel less welcome in Parliament.
Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, said: “If banning trans women from women’s toilets and trans men from men’s toilets turns out to be a genuine requirement of the recent Supreme Court judgment once the statutory code of practice is in place, then we do not expect Parliament to ignore or to flout the law. But we do expect parliamentarians to be honest and to show leadership when laws are clearly unjust, and cause harm to groups of people.
“We cannot understand why this decision has been described as one that will bring ‘confidence, privacy and dignity’ to everyone. It will not do so for trans people. It will exclude us and segregate us in the heart of Scotland’s democracy.”
Full statutory guidance on the implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling is expected next month and First Minister John Swinney has indicated that the Scottish Government will implement this in full.
Marion Calder, a director of For Women Scotland, said: “It goes to show that it is not that hard to comply with the law. Given the range of facilities in the Scottish government estate, we are wondering why it is taking them so long to comply.”
