On 5th August, as new statutory guidance on single-sex services was finally published, the leaders of six London councils wrote an open letter to Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson saying they did not intend to comply with the Equality Act’s provisions on single-sex spaces and services, as clarified by the Supreme Court last year and detailed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Code of practice for services, public functions and associations.

Describing themselves as “a group of London boroughs with collectively some of the largest Trans+ communities anywhere in the UK”, the six councils – Lambeth, Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham, Southwark and Waltham Forest – wrote:

“We say this to you in no uncertain terms: Trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are fundamentally valid.

“It is simply unacceptable that the Code of Practice is harmful to the rights of trans people and will make their exclusion from public life more likely, not less. This will feel like an attack to the countless trans people in our communities who are simply trying to live their lives in safety and wish to be treated with respect.”

When local authorities fail to protect single-sex spaces, their residents suffer. They are responsible for social care, community safety, changing and toilet facilities in places like sports centres, gyms and parks that they own and run, and many state schools. They are also responsible for inspecting health and safety at local businesses.

Research published last year by Women’s Rights Network shows that sexual predation by men against women and children is more common in leisure centres with mixed-sex changing rooms or changing villages, which enable male voyeurism, exhibitionism and assault despite being described as “family friendly”. WRN concluded:

“The safest changing room is a single-sex changing room.”

Councils also play a vital role in safeguarding children through social services and their work with state schools. The six signatories of the open letter are among London’s most deprived boroughs: all have substantial populations suffering domestic violence, addiction and homelessness. Eligibility rules that permit trans-identifying men to access these services harm female users of domestic and homeless refuges and rape crisis services, who have nowhere else to turn.

The Women Only One Stop Hub (WOOSH) run by Haringey council, for example, offers various services including sexual-health advice, support for addiction and other mental and physical health issues and shelter from domestic abuse. But despite the name, WOOSH is not women only: the council describes it as a “safe space for all women, including cis and trans women”. A woman traumatised by male sexual violence who attends a women-only support group or counselling session cannot be sure she won’t be confronted by a man – and one, moreover, she will have to pretend she thinks is a woman. Gaslighting victims of male sexual violence in this manner isn’t just unlawful, it’s cruel.

In October 2025 Miranda Newsom, a 60-year-old resident of Southwark, encountered a trans-identifying man using the female changing room in Castle Gym, a council-run leisure centre. Rather than apologising to her and fixing its rules to make clear that no male people may use the female changing room, the council investigated her and then banned her. Sex Matters, Women’s Rights Network and local campaigners demonstrated against the suspension. Miranda has now been allowed back to the gym, but Southwark has not changed its policies. Instead, it has told her that she can use the accessible changing room instead of the women’s changing room if she doesn’t want to risk changing with men. She is continuing to challenge this policy.

Local authorities are required to follow the law as it is. But some seem to be putting party policy first and taking the opportunity to grandstand. Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest have Green majorities. In Lambeth, Haringey and Southwark, no party has overall control but the Green Party is the largest. Its position is that the EHRC guidance should be withdrawn and the Equality Act reformed to bring in gender self-ID. Hackney’s mayor, a Green, has said that single-sex spaces and services in the borough will remain “trans inclusive” and that she has told council staff not to “police access”.

In contrast the Conservatives have stated that they support single-sex provisions based on biology. On 15th April 2026, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said she had asked Conservative-run councils to “adopt and publish clear, lawful policies on single-sex spaces across the services they run and fund”.

An injury to one…

Eight unions, with a combined membership of 3.6 million, have also criticised the EHRC code of practice. After a meeting on 19th August with “trans, non-binary and gender diverse members”, Andrea Egen, Unison’s general secretary, said she would work with them to “change the law for legal gender recognition”. In January, when supporters of Miranda Newsom protested outside Castle Gym against Southwark’s policy of allowing trans-identifying men to use women’s changing rooms, Unison organised a counter-protest (pictured above).

But unions too must follow the Equality Act. Among other things that means not discriminating against their gender-critical members – and three live court cases suggest they are not taking this duty seriously.

The first to come to a hearing will be that of Nurse Sandie Peggie, who took NHS Fife to the employment tribunal last year for allowing a male colleague to use the women’s changing room. She is suing her union, the Royal College of Nursing, alleging that it failed to support her in her dispute with NHS Fife and “contributed to her mistreatment”. The hearing starts in September.

Stephanie Pratt, a biomedical scientist working in the NHS, is suing Unite, the largest union in the UK. She says Unite refused to support her when she raised concerns about self-ID policies in her workplace and shared materials portraying gender-critical people as bigoted.

And Fiona Macdonald, a retired civil servant, is suing the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents government employees, for not inviting her to its annual conference to be presented with an award she has received – she says because it disapproves of her openly expressing gender-critical beliefs.

The government says it is committed to the Equality Act as clarified by the Supreme Court. On 6th August Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham’s newly appointed health minister, told Times Radio that “if there are single-sex provisions, then that has to be on the basis of biological sex”. On 14th August Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that local authorities had been given a “clear direction as to what they need to do” by the EHRC guidance. She did not say, however, what the government planned to do if councils failed to step into line.

Most ordinary people, across the political spectrum, support the Supreme Court ruling that “sex” in the Equality Act means biology:

Having a council that respects the Equality Act and provides single-sex services shouldn’t be a postcode lottery. And people who have paid into their union for years shouldn’t face discrimination.

Related content

Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife and Beth Upton

Miranda Newsom, gym-goer

The Green Party manifesto – human rights: not for women

Maya with Professor Jo Phoenix at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond

Even though the memo has been on holiday, I haven’t been. One of the things I have been working on is Sex Matters’ case against the City of London about the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond and Highgate Men’s Pond, two of the best-known single-sex services in the country.

The case will be heard in the High Court on 3rd and 4th November. Part of the City’s defence is that “trans inclusion” has been the rule since at least 2017. Before the Supreme Court put a stop to it, the City used to tell everyone that “trans inclusion” was required by the Equality Act, but it now admits that that was a misinterpretation of the law.

So I have spent a few lovely mornings swimming around in the dark, murky waters of the Ladies’ Pond – and several days delving into the records of the City’s even murkier decision-making, as well as looking back at the stories of some of the women who dived in headfirst to challenge it in creative ways.

You can read about what happened in 2017 and since on our website. It involves Edward Lord, a non-binary activist and city councillor; Gendered Intelligence; trans-identifying man Jane Fae of TransActual; Stonewall; several City of London committees, journalist Andrew Gilligan; the Sunday Times; IPSO, the press regulator; and indefatigable activists including Julia Long, Venice Allan, Janice Williams and an anonymous Mumsnetter who went undercover to a TRA conference – oh, and a lime-green mankini.

Our hearing has been a long time coming. We have argued that it is in the public interest for everyone to have clarity about the law, while the City has tried everything to stop the core question being answered by the court. It argued that our legal challenge was both “too early” (because it was carrying out an irrelevant consultation) and “too late” (because the initial decision to allow men into the Ladies’ Pond was made years ago). And if there was any case to answer, it argued, it was for individual women to bring personal claims, not for Sex Matters to challenge the policy itself.

Initially, the court agreed that we should not be granted permission. In November the decision to refuse us permission was overturned, meaning we were finally set to ask the High Court to rule definitively on whether any version of the City of London’s “trans inclusive” rules at the Hampstead Ponds is lawful.

Swimming in circles around a cold, dark pond where you can’t put your foot down to rest, and you don’t like to think what is at the bottom, is not for everyone. But this is more than a battle for a tiny oasis for a few hardy women in North London; the City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, London’s financial centre, and is hugely influential. It is frightening just how easily its decision-making was captured, and how much work it has taken by so many women to get even this far towards winning it back.

Thank you to everyone who has spoken up about the ponds, and who continues to support our work on this case. We hope to see some of you in court!

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Women in Northern Ireland speak up

What a cancelled panel says about the discussion on women’s rights

In this week’s podcast, Fiona, Maya and Helen discuss the cancellation of a panel organised by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland at the Féile an Phobail arts festival in Belfast.

They discuss how the event was successfully relocated, drawing greater public attention, and what the controversy reveals about the challenges facing gender-critical women.

They also examine media coverage of sex and gender issues, including recent updates to BBC reporting guidance and the frustrating way that even when gender-critical women are invited on broadcast shows, the discussion often stalls at disputes over “preferred pronouns” rather than progressing to substantive issues of women’s rights.

Watch the full panel discussion or read about it on our website.

In other news

Green fury after transgender woman appointed to party’s governing body as ‘female representative’

“Sex matters in politics, particularly when it comes to the representation of women. It’s completely inappropriate for a man who says he is a woman to take a female place in the Green Party’s leadership team in the east of... - Fiona McAnena

Fintan Starkey • GB News

Unions pledge to resist EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces

“The mad rush by unions to prioritise the feelings of trans-identifying men over the rights of women to safety and dignity in the workplace is a shocking scandal. Many of them have failed female members in their hour of need,... - Fiona McAnena

Bill Curtis • The Times

The British institutions defying the Supreme Court’s trans ruling

“That the City of London is willing to put its own reputation and respectability on the line rather than comply with a clear and simple law, and point people who don’t want a single-sex swim to the mixed pond, shows... - Maya Forstater

Jill Foster • The Telegraph

Ministers accused of ‘passing the buck’ over rebellious councils breaking toilet rules

“The Minister in charge of the department should not try to pass the buck to the EHRC in tackling councils that plan to make a mockery of the law.” - Maya Forstater

Sophia Sleigh • The Sun

Amnesty claims against Sex Matters ‘no isolated error’

“We hope that Amnesty will take responsibility for what is not simply a rogue briefing but a frequently and strongly expressed institutional view”. - Maya Forstater

Sanchez Manning • The Times

City giants tighten trans policies

Ali Lyon for City AM follows up on our Sex-based rights in the City report on the financial sector’s compliance failure, revealing that several major city firms have updated their policies on single-sex facilities since we published in May.

Ali Lyon • City AM

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They discuss how the event was successfully relocated, drawing greater public attention, and what the controversy reveals about the challenges facing gender-critical women.

They also examine media coverage of sex and gender issues, including recent updates to BBC reporting guidance and the frustrating way that even when gender-critical women are invited on broadcast shows, the discussion often stalls at disputes over “preferred pronouns” rather than progressing to substantive issues of women’s rights.

Watch the full panel discussion or read about it on our website.

Donate

BBC Radio Ulster covered the cancellation of the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland’s panel planned for the Belfast arts festival, Féile an Phobail, several times in the fortnight running up to the event. But that coverage was far from balanced.

The cancellation was first reported on the BBC NI website on 21st July. The next day The Nolan Show, the station’s big morning show, hosted Nora Calder of WRN NI, opposed by a local councillor called Fiona Ferguson from People Before Profit, a small political party.

Speaking to stand-in presenter Chris Buckler, Calder did a good job of explaining what the panel was about and why cancelling it was wrong, but Buckler allowed Ferguson to say several defamatory and false things about members of the Sex Matters team and about gender-critical groups in general, without any challenge. Ferguson also repeated discredited, scaremongering claims about suicide among young people who identify as transgender.

Later that day Talkback had Ruth Paterson of WRN NI against a local solicitor called Sarah Creighton who claimed that “transgender people had lost a lot of rights” and implied that WRN had targeted Féile in order to engineer a legal case, and that gender-critical campaigners “do not want trans people to exist or to have rights”. She named Sex Matters and said: “I cannot debate with people who think that my family members do not have the right to exist.” The presenter did not challenge her hyperbole and she repeated it, calling us “people that have no respect”.

Nolan returned to the issue on 24th July, moderating a discussion about the legal issues in Féile’s cancellation, with Maya Forstater and Robin Moira White.

On 27th July the Belfast Telegraph ran an opinion column by Allison Morris which referred to “anti-trans” groups and said “enthusiastically parroting and trying to import Trumpian-style moral panic is as far removed from feminism as you can possibly get”. Morris slurred WRN NI as “aligned with right-wing, misogynist political agitators”, and falsely claimed they were “heavily funded”.

On 28th July, Talkback gave Helen Joyce the opportunity to respond to Allison Morris. In a startling pre-emptive attack, Morris declared that Joyce had a “nasty attitude”, interrupted her constantly and made many false claims.

She said: “You couldn’t get a sheet of paper between them [gender-critical feminists and their supporters] and the far right”, that our supporters were “the same people that were cheering on attacks on migrants” and that we believe “all trans women are deviants and sex offenders”. We do not, of course, just as we do not believe all men are. We merely point out that since no-one can reliably distinguish between the good and the bad until after the fact, all men must stay out of women’s single-sex spaces. She said our beliefs were “toxic”.

Following complaints to the BBC about Ferguson’s unchallenged falsehoods on Nolan on 22nd July, Fiona McAnena was given the opportunity to speak to the same presenter, Chris Buckler, one to one for The Nolan Show on 4th August. This was just before the WRN NI panel went ahead at a new venue, as reported on BBC NI television news that evening.

Buckler put it to McAnena that she really had said the things Ferguson had attributed to her, and showed no interest when she explained that the context was a violent protest against women’s rights in which women were physically attacked and injured. Instead, he challenged her on why campaigners like her couldn’t use a better tone. He asked for her thoughts on an interview he’d conducted with a trans-identifying young man, Tristan Morrow, and demanded to know why she did not use female pronouns for him.

What does this coverage show?

Neither The Nolan Show nor Talkback shied away from the issue, to their credit. They platformed a wide range of guests, including two from WRN NI and all three directors of Sex Matters. The freedom-of-speech aspect of the story was aired and debated pretty well.

But in all that coverage, the fundamental issue – women’s rights and the need to speak about how they are under threat – was not explored with any openness or curiosity from the journalists.

Gender-critical campaigners were dealt personal slurs about our attitude. We were accused of guilt by association. The audience was told we were “far-right”. Claims were made that were simply false: that we wanted genital inspections at the doors to public toilets, that we did not believe trans people existed, that we want them to have no rights. Most of our airtime was spent denying these lies and defending our work and our right to speak plainly. In almost every interview, a woman had to point out that we were trying to talk about women, but the interviewer kept talking about trans people.

As some on social media observed, Chris Buckler interviewing Fiona McAnena appeared to equate “hurty words from women with physical violence from men”. The expectation that women advocating for our rights must show verbal restraint seemed baked in. The extensive challenge on McAnena’s use of male pronouns for a gay man was not matched by any challenge to the young man himself. He was handled with kid gloves, and was not asked why he believes he is a woman now, or what that means. As a vulnerable young man, perhaps Morrow should not have been put in that position at all.

The result was a fortnight of coverage in which the default assumption was that the campaigning women are intolerant of trans people, who themselves are harmless and vulnerable. The standard set for us was not truth and impartiality but a demand for concessions on our use of language and a focus on the needs of trans-identifying people.

The idea of “respectful debate” — meaning that trans-identifying men must be accorded female pronouns — was ever-present. The implication is that women who use accurate language have lost the right to be heard.

This shows how far we still have to go to reset the norm on something that many of us thought was settled years ago: that women and girls need male-free spaces and services, and that it is perfectly acceptable to say so.

What did listeners make of it?

Both Nolan and Talkback take calls from listeners. The producers select who gets on air, but in Northern Ireland there is always a majority in favour of sex-based reality. Among politicians, the issue has a sectarian bias along the same left-right axis as in other Western democracies, but with the addition of the local tribal politics of Republican (left/Catholic/green) versus Unionist (right/Protestant/orange). This is largely absent among callers to the shows.

People in Northern Ireland are the same as everyone else on this issue. They know there are only two sexes and they know about male violence. A poll by the Belfast Telegraph showed strong support for the Supreme Court judgment in the For Women Scotland case, supporting the point Helen Joyce made to Allison Morris that most people across the political spectrum hold sex-realist views.

What next in Northern Ireland?

The Equality Commission of Northern Ireland (ECNI) has applied to the NI high court to determine how it should interpret Northern Ireland’s equality laws in light of the decision in For Women Scotland. Both WRN and Good Law Project (GLP) have filed cases against the ECNI. WRN is challenging ECNI’s failure to issue guidance, while GLP is challenging an interim statement made by ECNI and later withdrawn. Hearings on all three cases are scheduled for September and November. The September hearing relates to procedural matters. The November hearing will determine whether leave should be given to proceed. If given approval to proceed, a court hearing to determine whether the definition of sex in Northern Ireland's sex-discrimination law is the same as in the rest of the UK should be scheduled for some time in 2027. Sex Matters has been granted leave to intervene in the ECNI case.

Related content

Speaking up for respect, rights and reality in Northern Ireland

Letter to Féile an Phobail

When will the BBC face up to the truth?

When Belfast’s publicly funded arts festival, Féile an Phobail, decided to cancel a panel organised by the community group Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, it reckoned without the strength, resilience and fury of rebellious women.

Refused both a spot at on the festival programme at St Mary’s College on the Falls Road and a meeting space in the Stormont Parliament, and falsely slurred as being “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators”, the group bounced back and found its own venue at the last minute.

The fringe meeting not only went ahead and sold out, but it was one of the most talked-about events of the festival, breaking through to Radio Ulster and the BBC News, and drawing commentary from the head of the Equality Commission of Northern Ireland (ECNI), Geraldine McGahey, who called for respectful public debate and respect for legal protections against belief discrimination.

The event took place on 4th August 2026, in a room packed with local women and a few men, as well as Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce from the Sex Matters team, women from Scotland who travelled to show solidarity with the women of Northern Ireland, and other visitors including Róisín Michaux from Brussels. Catherine McGinty, a journalist with The Derry News, moderated the event.

Each of the five women on the panel spoke movingly and passionately about why and how they are holding the line for sex-based rights for women and girls in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the UK and Europe, and about the attempts to subdue them and why they refused to be quiet.

Nora Calder of WRN NI introduced the organisation. “We are your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your friends…,” she said. “Those of us who speak publicly do so on behalf of all the many women who cannot.”

She keeps “her toaster in the cupboard”, she said (a reference to the TV show The Derry Girls – it signifies Protestantism), but added that this issue transcends Northern Ireland’s sectarian divisions. “This is not a Green or Orange issue. WRN NI is non-partisan, with women from all parties and political allegiances, all backgrounds and races and all ages.” To warm applause, she added: “Attempts have been made to silence us – we won’t be silenced.”

Nora gave a shout-out to Sara Morrison, whose case, though unsuccessful at first instance, was the first time the Fair Employment Tribunal in Northern Ireland accepted that “gender critical” beliefs are protected as political opinion for the purpose of Northern Ireland’s equality laws, which differ somewhat from those in the rest of the UK.

Daniella Loughrey from Gaels for Fair Play, a group of grassroots players, coaches, volunteers and parents seeking fairness for women and girls in Gaelic games, spoke next. “It’s hard to believe that we are still arguing that men and boys should stick to their own sex category when it comes to sport but on we go,” she said. She spoke about female players who have been injured by men allowed into the women’s game, and who have too little faith in the sports associations to make a complaint. “The sad consequence,” she said, “is not only dangerous injuries but also that females will self-exclude.”

This theme of fear of exposure was even more darkly explained by the next speaker, Sorcha Nic Lochlainn from The Countess, a grassroots group from the Republic of Ireland. It was set up in 2019 to focus attention on the conflict of rights and child-safeguarding issues caused by Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act 2015, which passed without public debate or political scrutiny. For the past decade, any man in the Republic who says he’s a woman can apply for a gender-recognition certificate, change the sex on his birth certificate, count as a woman for all legal and administrative purposes and access women’s spaces by right.

This includes prisons. In the sole standalone women’s prison in the Republic of Ireland, in Limerick, Barbie Kardashian – a violent and sexually abusive man – was locked up with women from 2022 to 2025. The dogma that people are men or women according to what they say isn’t grassroots, but enforced from the top down, Sorcha said, and results in women being totally silenced: required to lower their boundaries and demonised if they protest.

The next speaker was Marianne Driessen, who had travelled from her home in the Netherlands. She is part of Athena Forum, which advocates for sex-based right in the EU and Council of Europe. “The EU continues to find new implements to enforce gender ideology,” she said, “and one of the most profoundly affected fields is education, where it’s made its way into teaching materials for children as young as four.”

The final speaker was Sex Matters’ director of campaigns, Fiona McAnena, who was born in Derry. She spoke about her mother Josie, who had trained as a teacher at St Mary’s College (the venue for the cancelled talk), and gone on to become a headteacher while raising five children. “If she’d been born three years sooner she couldn’t have done that because of the ‘marriage bar’,” Fiona explained: until 1959 Catholic schools in Northern Ireland required female teachers to resign upon marriage. (The civil service did the same until the early 1970s.) “No one ever said of the marriage bar: ‘But how will we know who’s female?’,” Fiona pointed out. “Women couldn’t identify out of it. As far as I know, no one ever identified into it.”

This sort of sex discrimination is now thankfully outlawed, Fiona said, but the law also recognises that sometimes what’s fair or safe is to treat men and women differently or separately. She expressed her fury that single-sex spaces have become a negotiation. Saying that a space or service excludes all men “isn’t branding ‘all men’ as predators,” she said. “It’s ‘all men’ because it’s some men and we can’t tell which ones.”

Most men understand this perfectly well, and don’t object that being kept out of women’s spaces is some sort of insult, Fiona said. “They understand and accept the social contract.The problem is that if anyone can claim to be a woman then any man, even the wrong ’uns, can access women’s private spaces, single-sex services and sport by claiming to be trans. It’s not opening the door to a small number of trans people – it’s opening the door to all men. So, for the sake of 51% of the population, the boundaries must be based on sex, not identity.”

After the event the Sex Matters team went to meet our Northern Irish lawyers to discuss our prospects for challenging Féile’s belief discrimination in cancelling the panel.

We also talked about the next steps in judicial-review proceedings being brought by the ECNI, in which the regulator is asking the court to clarify how equality and related laws in Northern Ireland should be interpreted following the For Women Scotland judgment and in light of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which requires there to be no reduction in human rights and equality protections in Northern Ireland as a result of Brexit.

This case is dragging on slowly, and costing more public money. And when you focus on women’s rights, rather than the demands of men who wish they were women, it’s hard to understand why. As Nora Calder put it succinctly during the panel, it makes no sense to talk about people losing the right to access opposite-sex spaces, services and sports. This was never a right in the first place.

Helen, Maya and Fiona outside the High Court on 16th June before the hearing

The High Court has ruled against Sex Matters in our case against the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and British Transport Police (BTP) over their “consensual” searching policies.

It isn’t over yet.

We think that the judgment is wrong in law and we are applying for permission to appeal.

It’s been a long road to get here and we aren’t giving up.

The answer to whether male officers should be allowed to strip-search women, or female officers asked to strip-search male detainees, should be clear, simple and obvious. Whatever their pronouns, whatever they like to wear, whatever hormones or cosmetic surgery they may have had, it should be No.

Women have rights. But those in charge have again and again put trans-identifying men’s feelings and desires above the safety, dignity and autonomy of women.

In 2004 the House of Lords (which was then the Supreme Court) ruled in the case of A v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police that a man who “has done everything that she possibly could do to align her physical identity with her psychological identity” should be allowed to forcibly strip-search women. Lady Hale said that it would not be “rational” for women to object.

In 2012 the LGBTQ+ lead for the Association of Chief Police Officers wrote to all chief constables sharing advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission which drew on that case and said that what mattered for lawful searching was a person’s “legal gender”. In 2019 the next LGBTQ+ lead wrote to all chief constables encouraging them to permit officers to search detainees “without proof of their legal sex status”.

In July 2021 Standing for Women produced the first report challenging this practice. The NPCC doubled down. It got “independent legal advice” and issued guidance that trans officers be permitted to strip-search and even intimately search suspects of the opposite sex. ​The policy was adopted and implemented by the majority of police forces across the country.

By January 2024 the tide of public opinion had turned, so that when Women’s Rights Network (WRN) produced a report in January 2024 calling this “state sanctioned sexual assault” the government and police chiefs paid attention. The policy was withdrawn. But the policing minister said that gender-recognition certificates should allow cross-sex searching. Together with WRN and Fair Play For Women, we wrote to him and explained that this is not the law, and it is not fair or safe for women.

The NPCC doubled down again. In April 2024 it told us it was going to be consulting on new searching guidance and that it had an independent barrister advising on the law. This turned out to be trans-identifying male barrister Robin Moira White, who had advised on the policy the NPCC had just had to withdraw. I wrote to Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, pointing out that White is an activist in gender-identity politics. I sent screenshots of White comparing gender-critical women to Nazis and calling Sex Matters a “hate group” and the Minister for Women and Equalities “evil”.

The NPCC just doubled down some more. Gavin Stephens said: “The NPCC has considered at great length who is best placed to provide legal advice and given the subject matter.”

In November 2024, when British Transport Police issued its new policy based on the NPCC approach, we started down the road to legal action. After the FWS judgment the NPCC, BTP and other police forces withdrew their faulty policies, but didn’t say Sorry. Instead they developed new policies to let trans-identifying detainees request that an officer of the opposite sex would search them “consensually”.

When we raised concerns about female officers being put under pressure to strip-search trans-identifying men, the NPCC and BTP said that officers who refused to search trans-identifying detainees of the opposite sex would not face career detriment.

We know from experience that sometimes you have to continue up the court system to find judges willing to see past the years of exceptional practice and declare that ordinary truth and ordinary laws apply to everyone. It is infuriating. But we will keep going.

Why we’re continuing this legal fight

Read more about why we think this judgment is wrong in law, why we are seeking permission to appeal and why this case matters for female police officers, detainees and the rule of law.

Media coverage

Our searching case was referenced by The Telegraph (Hayley Dixon), who reported earlier in the week that Staffordshire Police force is treating trans-identifying male detainees as women, in defiance of the Supreme Court judgment.

Helen commented on the case in a wide-ranging interview with Alex Phillips on Talk TV, in which she also discussed transactivists’ threats and aggression and the failure of public institutions to tackle this intimidation.

Breaking news

As we were preparing to send this week’s memo, news broke that Bayswater Support Group, Keira Bell and James Esses have been refused permission to bring a judicial review seeking to halt the puberty-blocker trial.

The High Court’s decision is both devastating and inexplicable. These drugs have been blocked for use in gender treatment in both the NHS and private practice because of increasing evidence that they cause serious, permanent harm to vulnerable children. And yet a trial so badly designed that it cannot possibly produce any useful scientific data has irresponsibly been given the go-ahead.

Interrupting children’s development into healthy, fully functional adults is a human-rights abuse. Doing it with no more substantial goal than finding out whether it cheers them up briefly, as the planned trial does, is ethically monstrous.

The history of medicine is littered with tragic stories of researchers and doctors convinced by faulty theories doing terrible harm in the name of healthcare. Years later, public inquiries declare that “lessons must be learned”, but that is little comfort to the people whose bodies have been irreversibly harmed.

No more excuses: guidance on single-sex spaces comes into force

The EHRC code of practice finally comes into force on 5th August. In this week’s podcast, Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater discuss what it will mean for single-sex services, charities and associations. They make some predictions for the coming autumn, when organisations will no longer be able to claim they’re “waiting for guidance”, new school safeguarding policy will come into force and legal battles on conversion practices and the planned puberty-blocker trial will only become more fierce.

What the Supreme Court ruling means for charities

Can a single-sex charity become “trans-inclusive”? Our new briefing explains what charity law, freedom of association and safeguarding principles, taken together with last year’s Supreme Court judgment, mean for charities like the Women’s Institute and Girlguiding, and for single-sex associations more generally.

In other news

Helen’s debate with Northern Irish columnist Allison Morris on BBC Radio Ulster about the Féile an Phobail festival cancelling the event of Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland resulted in considerable criticism of Morris for her inaccurate claims and misrepresentation of WRN’s positions.

The Liberal Democrats have been accused of softening their stance on sex-based rights after taking more than £200,000 in donations from Simon Ruddick, who has a trans-identifying child, as reported by The Times (Geraldine Scott). Helen said that it’s impossible to know whether the noticeable change in the party line is linked to donations from any individual, but that its timing is remarkably aligned with donations from someone who has a significant personal interest in transactivism.

Coverage of the fallout from Amnesty International UK’s report continued, with The Times (Marc Horne) reporting that the charity’s chief executive has agreed to meet Maya in the autumn, following Sex Matters being named in the now-withdrawn report.

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The High Court has ruled against Sex Matters in our case against the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and British Transport Police (BTP) over their “consensual” searching policies.

Mr Justice Linden accepted a series of extraordinary legal arguments from the police, which included that constables can enter into consensual agreements with people in custody in the same way that private citizens can enter into consensual agreements with each other. It accepted an analogy drawn by counsel for the police between such “consensual” searches and private citizens consenting to sadomasochistic acts.

We will be seeking permission to appeal this judgment, which we believe is wrong in law.

Police searching and the law

When someone is being told by a police officer to remove their clothes, sex matters. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), strip searches are only to be carried out on a same-sex basis. PACE also covers other aspects of searching, such as when suspects may be photographed and who else can be present during a search.

Our case challenges guidance issued by the NPCC and BTP following the For Women Scotland judgment. This guidance seeks to circumvent PACE’s clear legal provisions by introducing a “shadow” searching regime based on consent.

Following an earlier challenge brought by Sex Matters, the NPCC and BTP had already withdrawn previous policies, which allowed trans-identifying officers to search detainees of the opposite sex. They also accepted that possession of a gender-recognition certificate has no bearing on who may search whom.

When we raised concerns about female officers being put under pressure to strip search trans-identifying men, the NPCC and BTP conceded further safeguards. They agreed in writing that an opposite-sex strip search “is very likely to be refused” by the senior officer in charge when there is nothing to suggest the detainee is trans, when the suspect had been arrested for a sexual offence or has a history of sexual offending, or if there is anything to suggest a sexual motive for requesting an opposite-sex search.

But none of these safeguards appear in the guidance. And the NPCC and BTP still insist that it is lawful to have a policy that envisages female officers being asked to strip search trans-identifying men, and male officers to strip search trans-identifying women, as long as both detainee and officer consent.

Why we say the policy is unlawful

Our case is simply that such a policy is unlawful: a police officer has no power to conduct a strip search other than in accordance with PACE. That law, which was brought in following the report of a royal commission on criminal procedure published in 1981, carefully balances state power and individual rights. It protects both officers and suspects by establishing clear rules and lawful powers.

The legal team representing the police seemed willing to overturn this whole meticulous framework of legal protections and safeguards, simply to avoid saying No to people who don’t want the law to apply to them.

The arguments they put forward did not concern human rights. Bizarrely, they argued that even while at work police officers are ordinary citizens who can enter into agreements that go outside of the rules governing police conduct, and that being detained does not prevent a citizen from being capable of entering into consensual arrangements with officers who are detaining them. They cited precedent establishing that people can consent to bodily harm in the context of sadomasochistic sexual encounters.

During the hearing, the judge asked several times whether it might be better to base the policy on a less extreme legal argument: that opposite-sex “consensual” searches are still being carried out under PACE, with only the same-sex rule waived. However, counsel for the police was adamant that an officer carrying out such a search would be acting outside PACE altogether, and instead within the world of consensual acts between private citizens involving removal of clothing.

The judgment sets all of this out, and then comes to the incoherent conclusion that the searches are not against the public interest “provided the consent is genuine and the search is lawful in all other respects”.

Read the judgment

Under pressure, police forces and the NPCC abandoned the illogical slogan that “trans women are women”. But instead of returning to reality and the law as written, they have taken refuge in an equally false and legally incoherent equation: “lawless searches are lawful searches”.

As counsel for the police admitted, when an officer steps outside PACE there are no longer any rules about what is lawful. The only constraints on an officer’s actions are those agreed on a consensual, voluntary basis. Perhaps similar arguments could be used to justify officers and detainees engaging in sexual or violent acts, or providing financial gifts or loans or other favours, with the sole question consideration being whether both parties “consented”.

We believe this judgment is wrong in law and we will be applying for permission to appeal.

Why this case matters

Our case is important because PACE protects female police officers from being pressured into searching male suspects. Evidence we placed before the court showed that some male detainees will request such searches for all sorts of reasons, including to humiliate female officers, to cause difficulties for police in custody suites and for sexual gratification.

PACE also stops male officers agreeing to search trans-identifying females, including young and vulnerable women who believe they must submit to this as a test of the authenticity of their gender identity. And finally, it protects officers of both sexes from later accusations that they acted unlawfully by carrying out a search not permitted under PACE.

One police officer we who we interviewed as part of our evidence said:

“I can’t understand how people are expected to give true consent while under duress to what essentially amounts to a sexual assault, if not just a physical assault.”

Another male officer spoke of a female detainee seeking consensual sexual relations:

“Where I have had a sexual approach in a professional capacity, it might be what she wanted but that does not make it right.”

The officers we spoke to did not think that the reassurance that refusal to carry out an opposite-sex search would not cause any career detriment to an officer was adequate:

“If you are seen as a troublemaker or somebody who won’t toe the line, then you won’t get any further.”

Some officers made the point that refusing to carry out an opposite-sex search on a trans-identifying detainee would, in effect, “out” an officer as holding “gender critical” beliefs that are widely regarded by policing leaders to be bigoted and even unlawful, and which have been described in training and guidance provided to officers as “transphobic”. The depth of these fears is evidenced by the fact that every serving officer with whom we spoke was willing to do so only on condition of strict anonymity.

More broadly than protecting individual officers and detainees, our case seeks to protect the rule of law. If Parliament had wanted to allow people in custody to request to be strip-searched by an officer of the opposite sex, it would have written this into PACE. It didn’t, and it is not for the National Police Chiefs’ Council or individual police forces to seek to subvert the law by creating a shadow searching regime.

Related content

Police strip-searching: Sex Matters’ judicial review

Police forces withdraw unlawful search policies

Sex Matters is challenging BTP’s abusive strip-search policy

During the past decade many charities for women or girls, among them the Women’s Institute and Girlguiding, became “trans inclusive”, meaning that they started to admit trans-identifying men and boys, and to regard such men and boys as beneficiaries of their charitable objects.

They did this not by rewriting their membership rules or going through the formal process required to change a charity’s objects, but by simply claiming that the words “girl”, “woman” and “female” included trans-identifying boys and men. This was never lawful. But girls and women who complained directly to charities generally discovered that the boys and men were allowed to stay, that they were subjected to disciplinary action and sometimes excluded – and that the rules were left unchanged. Meanwhile, instead of holding these charities to their objects the Charity Commission deferred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which misinterpreted the law.

Since the Supreme Court judgment of April 2025 on the meaning of “sex”, many charities and other not-for-profit membership associations are revisiting such decisions.

• Both the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and Girlguiding have accepted that they got the law wrong, and are in the process of requiring trans-identifying male members to leave.

• KENRIC, the UK’s longest-running social group for lesbians, held a consultation with its members regarding membership criteria and announced in June that it would return to being open only to biological women who identify as lesbian.

• Women’s Aid Federation has reaffirmed that it exists “to promote the protection of women and children survivors of domestic abuse”. It has welcomed the EHRC guidance, recognising that some services that are female-only will no longer be able to support “Trans +” survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence and saying that these survivors may need alternate caring, expert and reliable sources of support into which they can be referred.

• Similarly, Rape Crisis England and Wales says its purpose is “is to relieve the trauma and distress of women and girls who have experienced any form of sexual violence and abuse”. Some rape crisis centres offer services to men and boys (including those that identify as trans) while others offer services just to women.

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Some of these organisations are now experiencing a backlash. They are coming under pressure, both internally and externally, to become formally “trans inclusive” – that is, to make explicit what had previously been done by linguistic trickery.

Organisations such as the Good Law Project argue that Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of association, as well as the way the Equality Act is drafted mean that it would be lawful for women’s charities to remain “trans inclusive” (that is, to include trans-identifying men among their beneficiaries).

This is not the case.

As the EHRC Code of practice for services, public functions and associations makes clear, associations can limit membership to particular groups, but beyond that they must not discriminate.

For a single-sex association, becoming “trans inclusive” means changing the admission rules – if it doesn’t do this, it becomes vulnerable to discrimination claims. It may have articles of association that set out how to do this (for example, after consulting members or holding a vote). There is no need to justify the change (or indeed the original admission rules); this reflects the right to freedom of association.

However, this does not mean that single-sex charities can simply decide to become “trans inclusive”. In order to be a charity, an organisation must meet the “public benefit” test, which means it must have charitable objects that ensure it benefits the public and not just a group of individuals. Any restriction of benefits (such as being only for women) established in the charity’s objects must be either to tackle a specific disadvantage shared by that group or a proportionate means to a legitimate aim related to that group.

The Charity Commission has reminded charities that they must be compliant with the Equality Act and the EHRC code, and that “unreasonable delays in taking steps towards compliance may be considered a breach of those responsibilities.”

The rules for charities are stricter than associations because a charity doesn’t exist for its trustees or staff, or as a business for its customers. It exists for its beneficiaries, who are described in its objects. The assets it holds and the money it raises must be used solely in pursuit of those objects. It is fraudulent to raise money to benefit one group and then spend it on another. The fraud isn’t just against beneficiaries and donors, but against taxpayers, since charities receive generous tax breaks.

Charities can change their objects with permission from the Charity Commission, but they must continue to meet the public-interest test and the original beneficiary group must not be disadvantaged by the change. An example is the Scout Association, which went mixed sex in stages between 1976 and 1991. For the Women’s Institute, Girlguiding or any other single-sex charity to go “trans inclusive”, it too would have to show that its objects meet the public benefit test, and that the change is in the interests of its original beneficiaries.

But it is not obvious, to say the least, that men and boys with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment share any of the sorts of interests with women and girls that such charities were set up to meet. Girlguiding, for example, was set up to give girls an independent space away from boys, on the basis that in mixed-sex groups girls are often squeezed to the margins and see boys take up a disproportionate amount of time and airspace. Girl-only spaces give girls somewhere to be confident and outspoken, to gain leadership skills and to escape sexism and harassment. Since “trans girls” are boys, admitting them isn’t just incompatible with the charity’s objects, it undermines them.

As the Supreme Court said:

“The purpose of addressing the particular needs, disadvantages or participation levels of women as a group with the protected characteristic of sex, is undermined if women as a group includes trans women with a GRC (in other words, biological men who are legally female).”

Charities that serve children and vulnerable groups also have safeguarding responsibilities. Admitting boys with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment to Girlguiding, and permitting men with that characteristic to be Guide Leaders, would not only mean using the charity’s resources for a group other than the one it was set up to support; it would also put those girls at heightened risk by giving male people access to spaces that were previously female-only.

Girlguiding’s safeguarding procedures are built around being an organisation for girls. Although some specific volunteer roles can be held by both men and women, guide leaders are female, and toilets, washing facilities and accommodation on overnight trips are female-only. Including some men and boys would require a complete rethink of safeguarding procedures – and would simply be impossible if everyone was required to pretend that those boys and men were in fact female.

Any change to a charity’s objects or beneficiaries that harms the original beneficiaries like this will not be in that group’s interests. Organisations like Girlguiding are right to return to focusing on their purpose.

Sex Matters has published a detailed briefing on sex and the law for associations and charities. Policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie have also published a report on charities and a legal opinion from Karon Monaghan KC.

Read our briefing on post-FWS associations

The updated version of Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), which comes into force across England at the start of the autumn term, is a big step forward, even though it is not perfect.

It says that “schools and colleges should consider whether pupils would be best supported by a policy on social transition which explains the steps that a school or college will go through when a child requests support.” School governors and leadership teams will therefore be thinking about what policy to adopt, in line with the guidance, over the summer holidays and at the start of the autumn term.

But the most important aspect of the new guidance is extremely positive: it places significant constraints on what a school can accommodate in response to a family’s or child’s idea of “social transition”. It does this by placing for the first time, three vital principles within the statutory safeguarding framework:

1. All children’s sex must be recorded accurately in every situation throughout their school career.

2. All relevant staff must be aware of every child’s sex.

3. Schools must never allow any child to use toilets or changing rooms for the opposite sex.

Taken together, these three principles mean that schools will need to refer to all children by their sex routinely. Since KCSIE constitutes part of the statutory framework within which Ofsted operates, any policy that contradicts these principles is likely to come up during school inspections, either because the inspector spots the infraction or because parents bring it to the inspector’s attention.

However, the guidance still suggests schools respond to requests to accommodate “social transition” by working through complex legal justification exercises on a case-by-case basis. Its biggest flaw is that it suggests “full social transition” (which it doesn’t define) may be undertaken by a school, albeit “very rarely”.

Our model policy is designed to help schools set clear expectations for all pupils, families and staff, and to explain the legal constraints which mean they cannot accommodate requests to be treated as the opposite sex. School and college leaders who follow it can feel confident that their policies are in line with KCSIE and do not subject any children to unlawful direct or indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.

Sex-based rules and record-keeping – a whole-school model policy

If you are a school governor, work in a school or have a child in school in England, you can send our model policy to the senior leadership team and share it with the governing body. It is published under a creative commons licence, which means that they are free to adopt it and adapt it as they wish.

Send a school our model policy

Related content

Send a school our model policy based on new statutory safeguarding rules

Keeping children safe in education: better than before

What guidance from the Department for Education needs to say

Send our model policy to a school you have a connection with to help it make updates in line with the new guidance, which comes into force across England at the start of the autumn term.

Send to your child‘s school

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Maya on a visit to Belfast in 2024

One of the things we say to each other inside Sex Matters is that you know you’re over the target when you start catching flak. And this week it has been relentless.

Fiona is due to speak in Belfast on 4th August at a panel arranged by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland as part of the Féile an Phobail arts festival. On Monday the names of the four women on the panel were announced, and transactivists began to whip up an online campaign against them. The mob called for the charity to cancel WRN NI’s panel, and shamefully it did so.

This is belief discrimination and it is unlawful.

I’ve written to Féile spelling out the law and asking it to reinstate the event and apologise to WRN NI, Sex Matters, Fiona and the other speakers. Otherwise we will see them in court.

On Friday Gordon Lyons, the Northern Irish communities minister, weighed in saying that if the charity refuses to follow the law then it should lose public funding. This is quite right.

The reason that Féile and so many other charities commit unlawful discrimination so recklessly is that sensible voices among their staff and on their boards who might notice the legal risk have been silenced. In large parts of the voluntary sector – and the public sector and academia – people who dare to express facts as commonplace and evidence-based as the fact that men are statistically more dangerous to other people than women are, and that doesn’t change if those men call themselves women or non-binary, have been demonised.

This week For Women Scotland published a meticulous analysis of how public money has been used to embed the position often labelled “trans rights”, which can fairly be summarised as the demand that people and institutions ignore what they know about the dangers men pose when those men say they aren’t men.

Also this week, policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie mapped out Amnesty International’s role in this process. For almost a decade, Amnesty has used its good reputation to lend credibility to those who describe recognising facts that are necessary for safeguarding as “hateful” and “anti-rights”. It has repeatedly been shown to be wrong about human rights and the law, but it refuses to budge.

Now Amnesty is claiming that the Growing threat report it withdrew after widespread criticism was an isolated incident rather than indicative of any wider pattern. In response to my email asking for a meeting, Amnesty UK’s chief executive, Kerry Moscogiuri, said she could find time in September or October. Perhaps by then she will have worked out her organisation’s position.

While Amnesty has realised that it went too far in naming the target organisations to be cancelled, the Good Law Project (which claims to be “like a charity”, although it is controlled by one man, unregulated and owned by a trust based in Jersey) is less cautious. It has leapt into the role vacated by Amnesty and launched a campaign against Sex Matters, accusing us of running a “campaign of hate” and “spewing abuse online and in the media”. It says it has submitted 46 examples of this to the Charity Commission, but has been coy about the evidence for this claim.

From the few examples GLP has published, it seems that what it counts as “hate” is any clear articulation of the fact that men are statistically more dangerous than women, and that this doesn’t change if those men call themselves women or non-binary.

For those who regard this fact as taboo, what is “hateful” about saying it isn’t how you say it, but that you say it at all. In fact, if you say it politely, reasonably, calmly and with evidence, in ways that can be heard by politicians, journalists and employers, that makes it worse. If you say it while being a middle-aged woman, that is worst of all.

As Helen Joyce said in a speech GLP described as hateful (which you should watch if you haven’t already):

“When a lie is embedded in a system, over time it propagates throughout that system, and then everyone working within it has to try to protect the lie by staying well away from it. It’s worse than a loophole, which over time tends to get bigger – it’s a loophole you have to avert your eyes from and avoid mentioning.”

Helen gave the example of Sonia Appleby, the safeguarding lead at the now-closed GIDS clinic at the Tavistock in London, who successfully took the clinic to the employment tribunal after being disciplined for raising safeguarding concerns. It was two words she said that got her into trouble: Jimmy Savile.

Three are three lesson we should all take from Jimmy Savile, and from Wayne Couzens, the grooming gangs and every other institutional abuse scandal that has happened in plain sight:

1. Men are statistically more dangerous than women, and this doesn’t change no matter who they are or what positions they hold. This includes but is not limited to male celebrities, scout leaders, teachers, religious leaders, therapists, charity workers, dads, cousins, uncles, transwomen, non-binary people, LGBTQ+ allies, police officers, members of ethnic minorities, gym coaches, Hollywood moguls and politicians.

2. Situations where individuals or groups of men are excluded from the ordinary rules, scrutiny and safeguards that apply to other men are likely to attract men who are particularly dangerous.

3. Organisations where these facts cannot be stated are institutionally corrupt.

The discomfort you feel about saying this is real and justified. It means you are over the target and about to come under fire.

46 reasons to keep going

Here is some of our work defending safeguarding, human rights and women’s rights, which GLP describes as “hateful”. We invite you to judge for yourself:

• Fiona on GB News discussing the High Court ruling on Sex Matters v City of London

• Helen on sex, gender identity and human rights

• Letter to the Minister for Women and Equalities about the EHRC code of practice.

Media coverage

BBC News (Robbie Meredith) broke the news of the Féile cancellation, quoting Maya saying the festival was discriminating against WRN NI and Sex Matters. The News Letter (David Thompson) reported on our letter warning of legal action if the event was not reinstated. Maya joined BBC Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show with Robin Moira White, a trans-identifying male barrister, to discuss the festival’s decision.

In the Daily Mail, David Churchill highlighted an Amnesty report published in May, which Maya said showed a longstanding pattern of misrepresenting those who recognise the importance of the two sexes, and Noor Qurashi reported that the Charity Commission had opened a regulatory compliance case into Amnesty.

The Telegraph (Ruby Cline) and the Daily Mail (Will Hallowell) focused on JK Rowling’s offer to support legal action for organisations Amnesty had branded “anti-rights”. The Times (Marc Horne) quoted Maya saying Amnesty should have reported itself to the Charity Commission after promoting an interpretation of equality law that the Supreme Court later found to be unworkable.

In The Scotsman, Jenny Lindsay’s column teased out the lessons of the Amnesty report for other institutions captured by gender ideology. International coverage included the Washington Post (Andrew Doyle) and the National Post (Amy Hamm).

Keeping children safe in education

In this week’s episode, Maya and Helen discuss the updated version of Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), which places guidance for schools on dealing with trans issues within the statutory safeguarding framework.

The most important change is the addition of three clear safeguarding principles that constrain how schools can respond to requests for “social transition”.

Schools in England are updating their policies and training in time for September, when the KCSIE update comes into force. You can help them get this right by sending a school you know our updated whole-school model policy on sex-based rules.

Send a school our model policy

In other news

The Telegraph (Madeleine Ross) broke the story that the Cabinet Office has refused to publish its new model policy for trans-identifying civil servants. The story was followed up by GB News (Dan McDonald). Maya said the previous policy had done untold harm by embedding unlawful practices across the public sector and that its replacement should be developed with utmost transparency.

In the Daily Mail Sam Merriman revealed what was in the policy. Maya welcomed its protection of single-sex facilities but warned that it remains shockingly biased on pronouns and misgendering, and that threatening to punish staff for recognising biological sex is unjustified and discriminatory. Maya was also interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV about the leaked guidance.

The Daily Mail (Nicholas Pyke and Janet Murray) published an investigation based on Through the looking glass, a report by SEEN in Publishing exposing gender ideology in children’s books and schools. Helen was quoted saying that young children are especially vulnerable to believing the false idea that changing clothes or appearance can change their sex.

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The Good Law Project (GLP) has started a campaign against Sex Matters, saying that it has identified “46 examples” of Sex Matters “spewing hate”, including “harassment and discrimination”, which it says “breaks charity law”. It says it has submitted a formal complaint to the Charity Commission.

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Sex Matters was founded as a human-rights charity to create space for debate and understanding of laws and rights concerning sex and gender identity. We think that there are conflicts of rights and that it should be possible to talk about them openly and freely. We believe that this is how everyone’s rights can be protected, and institutions can be held to account.

As Akua Reindorf KC wrote in the Reindorf Review in 2020:

“The mere discussion of what ‘trans rights’ entail cannot be regarded as a violation of those rights in a context where the proper extent of those rights is clearly not settled either in law or in public opinion… and where there is a potential conflict of rights.”

Sex Matters and the wider movement we are part of have had some success in making it easier and safer to talk: in person and online, at work and in Parliament, in the media and in courts. And some people don’t like that.

What does GLP think is “hateful”?

GLP has not published its complaint or shared its 46 examples with us but it has published a selection of quotes and links on its website. When we looked at what it had identified as “inappropriate and offensive” conduct it was simply a set of examples of us pointing out the serious harms done by those promoting gender identity.

They include a powerful and insightful speech given by Sex Matters’ director of advocacy, Helen Joyce, at the Genspect Bigger Picture conference in September 2024, where she argued that the new belief system based on gender self-ID has co-opted and corrupted the language of rights and is harming women, children and vulnerable people, and breaking medical and scientific thinking.

As Helen explained (emphasis here and throughout added by GLP):

“Self-ID means that a man who strips off in front of naked women in a supposedly women-only space is doing something right and proper if he identifies as a woman… This is not just a destruction of human rights, it’s a full reversal. And it’s not just any old human-rights violation, it’s state-sanctioned sex crime – voyeurism and indecent exposure – and an Article 3 violation. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that being forced to undress in front of someone of the opposite sex violates Article 3 – the right not to suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. And note that Article 3 is an absolute, not qualified, right.”

We published the speech, together with the one she gave at the first Genspect conference, in Killarney in 2023, in a booklet called Sex, gender identity and human rights, which we sent out with our Christmas cards in 2024.

GLP also highlights a letter from Sex Matters to Bridget Phillipson, at the time the Minister for Women and Equalities, sent in May 2026 to welcome the new EHRC Code of practice on services, public functions and associations.

In the letter, Sex Matters’ chief executive, Maya Forstater, raises concerns about the section in the new code on “asking about sex”. The section warns service providers against challenging people who appear to be using the wrong facilities. As the letter explains, this will enable situations where sex-based harassment is allowed. We said:

“There is no legal basis for this instruction, which in effect licenses men to enter women’s facilities and claim that it is inappropriate, and possibly unlawful, to challenge them. Telling women (and staff supervising single-sex spaces) that they must second-guess themselves when they become aware of a man engaging in the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space is unwanted conduct related to the protected characteristic of sex. It ‘violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment’. Section 111 of the Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to instruct, cause, or induce another person to commit an act of discrimination, harassment or victimisation.”

GLP also complained about an interview of Maya Forstater on Talk TV in January 2026 concerning the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond.

In the interview she answers the interviewer’s question about what the problem is if a man who “feels they’re in the wrong body” uses the women’s pond, but changes “discreetly” in a cubicle:

“The ponds aren’t very discreet. They’re communal, open changing rooms and open showers. What you can’t do is let someone in and then say: ‘But you can’t use those changing rooms. You have to use a discreet changing room.’ If you let someone in, you let them in on the same rules as everyone else. At the same time, if there are women using the communal changing rooms and showers, they’re naked. If somebody walks past, the man might be dressed, but he’s walking past naked women. That’s a situation of harassment. You can’t let that happen. You have to have clear rules about who’s allowed into those kind of situations, and it’s really obvious what the decent rules are.”

GLP also highlights an interview of Sex Matters’ director of campaigns, Fiona McAnena, in January 2026 on GB News.

The interviewer asks why some men insist on using the Ladies’ Pond instead of accepting the “amicable” solution of the mixed pond. Fiona says:

“I think there are a number of answers to that. Some people would say that this is a voyeurs’ charter. If any man can declare he’s a woman, it’s not the nice, decent, respectful men who are going to come into the Ladies’ Pond. It’s a different kind of man. There may be some men who genuinely think that what they feel makes them like a woman. But we can’t see their thoughts or their feelings. All we can see is their bodies and their behaviour. Some women would say it is an intentional act of violation of women’s boundaries, and that those men enjoy it. I couldn’t say. All I know is that, as you say, they have a choice. They could be respectful. They could allow us all our privacy, and they’re making a conscious choice not to.”

GLP included in its complaint a personal interview of barrister Naomi Cunningham in Holyrood magazine while she was chair of Sex Matters, which Sex Matters’ CEO had promoted. In the personal and moving interview she talks about her journey and what motivated her to get involved in legal work in this area. Naomi said:

“Rage does still fuel me because there are so many things to be profoundly angry about: the grooming of children into mental ill-health and physical mutilation; the gas-lighting; the bullying and silencing and cancelling; the corruption of so many of our institutions; the sheer waste of time, money and energy on dealing with such obvious nonsense.”

And GLP complained about a quote from Helen about Girlguiding in an article in The Telegraph:

“By thinking it could redefine sex and make up its own rules, Girlguiding UK showed no concern or understanding for girls’ rights and boundaries. But it also failed to think clearly about what boys confused about their sex really need, which isn’t validation in a falsehood. This shameful episode of harming children in the name of ‘inclusion’ went on for far too long, but at least it is now drawing to an end.”

It also complained about an interview on Talk TV in which Helen said it was wicked to lie to children and to subject them to sterilising medical treatment:

“You don’t put people in boxes just because of what sex they are, but you do not lie to them either. So these people committed real human rights abuse against vulnerable children. And now that they’re really dragging their feet on admitting that fact. Children need honesty, and they need boundaries from the adults around them. They need adults to keep the world safe and accurate for them. To tell them what’s what, to make sure that they grow up safe and secure and confident.”

GLP complained about an article on Helen’s personal Substack about schools too. Helen wrote:

“In this issue I’m going to pick up the question of how to stop schools spreading genderism. Schools are by no means the only place children are picking up this neo-religion, and I don’t underestimate the difficulty – teachers have been indoctrinated in it for at least a decade, and in some countries for much longer. But the education system is the main vector of infection that is, at least theoretically, under the direction of authorities and open to the influence of parents and voters.”

Sex Matters is proud of its work

The governing document of Sex Matters commits it to three aims:

1. to promote human rights where they relate to biological sex

2. to advance education about sex and the law

3. to promote the sound administration of the law in relation to sex and equality in the law.

We take our charitable purpose and the human-rights framework seriously. We don’t say things to be offensive but to raise awareness of harms and of human-rights issues. We hope the Charity Commission watches and reads our output.

There is nothing in the clips and quotes we have seen from GLP that we are not proud of saying. We believe that lying to children and vulnerable people about sex undermines safeguarding, that subjecting them to sterilising treatment based on a false promise of changing sex is a grave human-rights abuse, and that allowing men who wish they were women to use women-only services undermines women’s human rights to fairness, safety and dignity.

We set this all out in our human-rights framework, which we submitted to the regulator when we applied to be a charity. As we explained:

“These abuses of human rights and patterns of discrimination often arise from misunderstandings and misrepresentations of human rights and equality frameworks themselves. For example any recognition of the sex of a person who identifies as transgender is labelled as ‘harassment’.

“In order to resolve conflicts between the rights of women and those of transgender people, these conflicts need to be identified and discussed openly and clearly. Where conflicts or rights are ignored or made unspeakable, rights may be undermined.”

We explained why clarity about sex matters for human rights again in the Supreme Court in 2025, when we intervened in support of For Women Scotland:

“For example, in the case of a rape crisis service, it is self-evident that women using the service would want and reasonably expect to find a female-only space. The presence of a biological man in such a situation effectively destroys the purpose of such a service and, worse still, can serve to retraumatise the very women for whom the service is intended to be provided. The impact on women of facing (or hearing) male individuals in women’s refuges or counselling services can be devastating. Many women self-exclude from the services, or are compelled to pretend that men are women, at great cost to their mental health.”

Our arguments were accepted by the Supreme Court, and we were specifically thanked for making them.

And we are preparing to make the case again in November 2026 when the Hampstead Ponds case comes back to court.

We have published long-form legal analysis explaining why the Supreme Court judgment does not remove, diminish or breach the rights and protections of trans people, and an illustrated easy-reading version of the law. We have produced a model policy for schools in line with statutory safeguarding guidance, as well as guidance for the media on reporting on sex and gender identity. Every week we discuss issues on our podcast and we answer hundreds of email queries every month.

GLP says we have ignored our responsibility to serve the general public. We think that what it actually objects to is that we have done too much.

Donate to support Sex Matters

Last week I was in Birmingham at the global summit run by the International Working Group on Women and Sport, which is held every four years in a different location. Several hundred women and some men spent three days discussing participation and representation of women in all levels of sport and everything sport-related, including coaching, media and management.

On the first morning, a panel host I’d never heard of called Michelle Moore said in her introduction: “When I talk about women I include trans and DSD athletes in that, just to make that clear.” There was a smattering of loud applause.

Two of the most powerful people in sport, Kirsty Coventry, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and Lord Coe, chair of World Athletics, separately addressed the conference and both mentioned the importance of protecting the female category. Coe said: “Gender cannot trump biology.”

That should have given attendees courage, but the mood was more “don’t ask, don’t tell”. When I told people about the work of Sex Matters, a few said they agreed. Others said, variously, that it was complicated, that of course transwomen should not be in elite sport but… and that trans people have difficult lives so…. The implication was that women should make room for trans-identifying men, regardless of the impact on women. This was a hall full of sports specialists, who know about sex differences in sport and sexism in sport. They were supposedly advocating for women. But still they couldn’t put women first. They couldn’t even name the elephant in the room.

Someone who was at the previous event, in New Zealand in 2022, told me that transgender inclusion had been a major agenda item, with a big push to make everything more trans-inclusive. This time it was not mentioned, although I had lobbied the organisers for months to get it onto the agenda.

Eventually, as the programme was being finalised, Dr Emma Hilton was invited to be on the panel for a workshop called “Tested to compete: the science, the politics and the price”. This was about sex testing in sport, though that was not obvious from the name; it could have been about anti-doping.

Emma explained where male advantage comes from, and the other three speakers argued that there is no evidence it exists. The researcher said that more research is needed; the sociologist said transwomen are women.

A woman in the workshop audience asked how “we” can oppose the new IOC policy, which restricts the female category to those who pass a sex screen – this means undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime cheek swab to show they are female. A speaker said: “We must fight it together.” No one said that maybe protecting the female category is a good thing. Neither Emma nor I had the opportunity to comment.

I went to the conference to advocate for male-free sport for women and girls. Some people I spoke to there quietly agreed, but overall the subject was still treated as taboo. More than one woman told me that the Sport England staffers are afraid of us. It’s hard to know what they’re afraid of.

I asked a couple of senior people from Sport England about their transgender guidance but didn’t get a straight answer. I can’t help thinking that anyone who was confident of their position would be willing and able to speak to me about it. These people were not.

I think this shows that everyone knows that it is not fair to allow male participants in a female category, but despite the clarity from the IOC they can’t speak the truth. Maybe they have spent so long pretending it’s complicated that they can’t believe it never was. Perhaps they can’t let go of the image of themselves as virtuous people who advocate for the most marginalised – and that doesn’t mean women and girls.

There can be no doubt that we are winning the argument: in global sports policy from the IOC down, in the US and UK Supreme Courts, and in public opinion. Who’d have thought the last people to get the message would be those advocating for women and girls? When you’ve denied the obvious for years and called it “the right side of history”, how do you find your way back to reality? We still have work to do.

The action we need to see is spelled out in our new sport report, Getting back on track, which I handed out to anyone who showed an interest. I’ve come back from the event with new contacts and as determined as ever to keep pressing for those in authority to restore fair policies.

Podcast

The Amnesty report

The charity is in trouble for defaming gender-critical organisations

A major row has erupted after Amnesty International UK published — and then quickly withdrew — a report labeling more than 100 organisations as “anti-rights”, including women’s rights groups, charities, support services, and campaigning organisations. Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena talk about the parlous state of democratic debate on human rights, when organisations are branded as threats simply for advocating sex-based rights. Amnesty is now facing demands for answers, calls for apologies and potential legal action.

Amnesty must answer

Amnesty is facing growing pressure after publishing a report branding organisations defending sex-based rights as “anti-rights”. This week, we joined 40 organisations targeted by Amnesty International in calling on the Charity Commission to uphold the Equality Act and end the culture of intolerance towards gender-critical views.

Find out more

Amnesty faces backlash

The Charity Commission must act

Media coverage

Amnesty International UK came under heavy criticism for branding Sex Matters and other organisations defending sex-based rights as part of an “anti-rights movement”. The Times (Alex Massie) and The Telegraph (Suzanne Moore) argued that the groups named had instead challenged unlawful claims and helped secure clarity that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex. Helen discussed the report on GB News’s Free Speech Nation with Josh Howie. Amnesty’s hasty retraction of the report was covered by The Telegraph (Jacob Freedland), GB News (Dan McDonald) and the Scottish Daily Mail (Dan Barker, print only).

The Telegraph (Jacob Freedland) reported on the joint letter from Sex Matters and others calling to the Charity Commission. The Times (Aaliyah Ahmed) and the Daily Mail (Dan Barker and Tom Gordon) confirmed that the commission is assessing concerns about Amnesty International and that its charitable trust has submitted a serious incident report. The Times (Aaliyah Ahmed) also drew attention to a second report portraying gender-critical people as opposed to LGBT rights. Maya said this showed a longstanding pattern of misrepresenting and denigrating those who recognise the biological and legal importance of the two sexes.

In other news

The Telegraph (Sabrina Miller) reported that the Green Party is considering adopting a policy to oppose sex-based exclusions in sport and support “trans-inclusive” sporting projects. Fiona said that, in practice, this means allowing men into the female category and denying women and girls fair competition, and that the party is once again prioritising the feelings of trans-identifying men over women’s rights.

The Telegraph (Janet Murray) revealed, with follow-up coverage in the Daily Mail (Shaun Wooller), that South East Coast Ambulance Service issued a policy allowing trans-identifying staff to use single-sex facilities according to gender identity since the Supreme Court ruling. Fiona said the trust was breaking the law by denying female paramedics privacy from men.

Calls for the Scottish Government to introduce a broader ban on conversion practices than proposed in England and Wales were covered by the Scottish Daily Express (Ben Borland). The article referred to our warning that the draft Conversion Practices Bill could lead to parents, teachers and therapists being investigated by police for lawful, loving actions such as telling a child they will not pay for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

The Telegraph (Daniel Martin) wrote about the EHRC’s long-delayed code of practice for service providers, which has finally been laid before Parliament.. Maya welcomed the fact that organisations can no longer use the lack of guidance as an excuse for failing to bring their policies in line with the law.

If you’d like this memo in your inbox every Friday at 5pm, join our mailing list now.

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Read the letters to Amnesty.
Read our letter to the Charity Commission.

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Sex Matters, together with forty of the organisations targeted by Amnesty International, has written to Dame Julia Unwin, chair of the Charity Commission, calling for a reset on the culture of intolerance towards gender-critical views in the sector. Charities should be leading the way in upholding human rights and the law, not smearing those who do.

The Charity Commission should clarify that every charity must follow the Equality Act and ensure that trustees have an accurate, lawful understanding of its purposes as set out in its governing document. This includes where that refers to women and girls or men and boys, to sex or sexual orientation, and to equality and human rights.

Read our letter to the Charity Commission

Dear Dame Julia Unwin,

On 8th July Amnesty International UK, together with Amnesty International UK Section Charitable Trust, published a report entitled A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK. This presented 117 organisations and grassroots groups as an “organised anti-rights movement targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people”. After widespread criticism Amnesty has withdrawn the report for review, but it has not apologised. A sister report, Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK (May 2026), made similar accusations. That remains live (with a list of organisations included in the technical annex).

The impugned organisations include several charities, as well as other groups defending the rights of women, girls, children and gay, lesbian and bisexual people; charities and organisations concerned more broadly with human rights; Christian charities and organisations; organisations of parents and clinicians concerned about paediatric transition; grassroots women’s-rights organisations doing vital work domestically and internationally with vulnerable women and children; and a rape crisis centre and support service for female survivors of male violence.

The characteristic that unites them all is that they are associated with the “gender critical” belief that there are two sexes, that human beings cannot change sex and that sex matters.

Smearing groups as “anti-rights” because of their philosophical or religious beliefs, as Amnesty does, paints a target on those groups. Calling for the Charity Commission, funders and the media to subject them to less favourable treatment because of their beliefs – as the most recent report does – is an explicit call for these groups to be subjected to unlawful discrimination.

Discrimination and disadvantage experienced by women and girls is persistent, endemic, and deeply entrenched. It ought to be shocking that one of the country’s most respected human-rights charities is openly campaigning for systematic unlawful discrimination against groups that stand up for women’s rights. But the prejudice displayed in Amnesty’s report is ubiquitous in the charity sector.

The Like a snowball report openly laments that the application of the Equality Act has “contributed to the normalisation of all manifestations of gender critical belief”. The Amnesty employees who wrote it and signed it off, and those who have been giving interviews, making conference presentations and producing social-media content with the same discriminatory message, may not have thought they were doing anything wrong because this form of unlawful discrimination is the norm in large parts of the sector. Anyone who speaks out about this discrimination is risking their career or position on a charity board.

As you have set out in your speeches and to Parliament, charities may hold different and sometimes competing views, and the role of the Commission is to ensure that they are well governed, operate within their remit, pursue their agenda appropriately and do so in a civil way.

But charities that have adopted a discriminatory approach to individuals with gender-critical beliefs, stereotyping those individuals as harmful or hateful, are acting unlawfully, as shown in the cases of Forstater v Centre for Global Development and Adams v Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Charities that refuse to comply with the law are not well-governed. And a sector that systematically misunderstands the law is a problem for its regulator.

While other sectors are getting on with complying with the Equality Act following the For Women Scotland judgment, senior leaders and trustees across the charity sector have been acting as if the law does not apply to them.

Amnesty International UK, which explicitly described itself as a registered charity in its application to intervene in the For Women Scotland case, tested its proposed interpretation of the law with the highest court in the land. It was found by the Supreme Court not to be inclusive, but rather to be incompatible with a “workable” and “coherent” legal system for protecting women, gay, lesbian and bisexual people and transgender people from discrimination.

The court agreed with For Women Scotland, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance and the other lesbian interveners that the terms “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to sex, not self-declared gender identity or paperwork, and that services provided only for women or only for men must be provided on the basis of sex. Transgender people remain protected from discrimination and harassment in work, education, service provision, premises and associations, on the basis of both sex and gender reassignment. The new EHRC guidance provides detailed explanations of how mixed-sex and single-sex services can be provided lawfully in a way that treats everyone with respect.

In human-rights terms, although rights are universal, the rights to freedom of expression and to privacy, to freedom of association and to manifest beliefs are qualified and may be constrained by lawful mechanisms in a democratic society.

Debates over how to reconcile women’s rights and transgender people’s rights are debates of this kind.

Does Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects private life, mean that men who wish they were women have the right to undress in women’s changing rooms? Or does it mean that women and girls have the right to change in female-only spaces?

Is describing someone as a man when he wishes to be referred to as a woman a breach of dignity and of rights? Or is it simply stating ordinary facts that must be recognised in order to protect the dignity, privacy and autonomy of women and girls?

The Equality Act 2010 represents the settled, democratically agreed balance of rights in Britain. It recognises that men who identify as “trans women” remain men for the purpose of the law concerning sex discrimination, and therefore for the provision of lawful separate sex services, including by charities.

Amnesty’s longstanding argument that “trans women are women” and that there should be no debate about this is in opposition to the law and other people’s human rights.

The trustees of Amnesty International UK Section Charitable Trust are far from alone in allowing intolerance, prejudice, ideological fervour, fear of being blacklisted in the sector and conflicts of loyalty between their duty to their charity and the principle of trans allyship or trans-identifying friends and family to take hold in the charities they govern. There have been several instances of charities and their leaders publicly smearing those with gender-critical beliefs and advocating that they be excluded from the sector and from society:

• On 21st April 2021, around the time when LGB Alliance was awarded charitable status, the then chief executive of NCVO said: “This step will be painful and dangerous for transgender people harmed by the views and actions of the Alliance.” NCVO later rejected applications from both LGB Alliance and Sex Matters for membership, and admitted us only when we issued a discrimination claim against it.

• In June 2021 leaders of LGBTQ+ charities, including Stonewall, Mermaids, LGBT Foundation, LGBT Consortium and Gendered Intelligence, published an open letter expressing frustration and disappointment at the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s intervention in the Forstater case to say that “gender critical” beliefs are a protected philosophical belief.

• On 3rd July 2023 the “I Stand with Trans” pledge, which referred to gender-critical beliefs as “anti-trans hate” and called on charity leaders to “stand united together against this hate”, was signed by chief executives of several major charities and many smaller ones. The signatories included the chief executives of NCVO, Co-op Foundation, Teenage Cancer Trust, LGBT Foundation, Young Trustees Movement, the Children’s Society, Alzheimer’s Society, Samaritans and Charity Finance Group as well as several major charity recruiters.

• On 3rd December 2025 15 mental-health charities, including the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, Mental Health Foundation, Mental Health Matters, Mental Health UK, MHFA England and Mind, wrote to the Minister for Women and Equalities arguing against the protection of single-sex services on the basis of sex, and instead for the inclusion of people on the basis of gender identity. They called for the government to halt the EHRC guidance.

• In January 2026 a group called Third Sector Against Transphobia published an open letter describing those who want to see single-sex charities pursue their objects “transphobic groups and individuals”.

It is now 15 months since the Supreme Court clarified that sex in law means what it always did, and that this interpretation is essential for protecting women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights. But the boards and senior leadership teams of many charities are still professing to be confused. Others are frightened of being blacklisted in the sector if they acknowledge that the law is clear and stand up for fairness and dignity for women and girls. The result is that across a range of services and activities, charities whose purpose is to benefit women, are using resources to benefit men who identify as women (see Murray Blackburn Mackenzie’s report).

Penny Wilson, writing on behalf of Third Sector Against Transphobia, recently wrote to the Charity Commission claiming that charities do not know how to comply with the law, and calling for more time and for charity-specific guidance.

There is no need for more detailed guidance. The charity sector is not above the law. If a service or facility is provided only for women, only for men or for both sexes, this has the same meaning whether that service is being provided by the public, private or voluntary sectors. Employees, service users and other individuals all have the same human rights. The charity sector needs to understand that the individuals and groups it has derided as “transphobes” and tried to exclude from public life are simply expressing a view that is in line with the Equality Act.

This is not a case of “both sides” needing to disagree well, but of systematic discrimination and harassment by some of the country’s most powerful and respected charities. It is happening openly and under the nose of the regulator.

We call on you to show leadership and reset expectations across the sector by making a statement. The Charity Commission needs to clarify that every charity must follow the Equality Act and ensure that its trustees have an accurate, lawful understanding of its purposes as set out in its governing document. This includes where that refers to women and girls or men and boys, to sex or sexual orientation, and to equality and human rights.

The commission should stand up against the culture of intolerance and discrimination towards people who express ordinary, lawful beliefs that has taken hold across the sector, and which has been demonstrated in the Amnesty reports.

It is unacceptable for a charity to call people or other organisations transphobes, bigots or anti-rights for using clear sex-based language, asking that the Equality Act be respected, raising concerns about safeguarding or medical evidence, being Christians or adhering to religious sexual ethics, just as it would be to commit unlawful discrimination and harassment on the basis of any other protected characteristic.

It does no favours to individuals who identify as transgender or to children exploring their identity to encourage them to think that the law does not apply to them or that they can disregard other people’s rights.

Yours sincerely,

LGB Alliance
FiLiA
Sex Matters
For Women Scotland
CAN SG
Genspect
Thoughtful Therapists
Children of Transitioners
Get the L Out UK
Gender Critical Greens
Labour Women’s Declaration
Legal Feminist
Lesbian Strength
Merched Cymru
OBJECT – Women Not Sex Objects!
Older Feminist Network
Protect and Teach
Trans Widows’ Voices
Virago Women’s Workshop
LGB Alliance Cymru
Conservatives for Women
Fair Play For Women
Gay Men’s Network
Let Women Speak (formerly Standing for Women)
The Lesbian Project
Transgender Trend
Women’s Declaration International (WDI)
Murray Blackburn Mackenzie
Women’s Rights Network (WRN)
LGB Christians
Liberal Voice for Women
ScotPAG Scottish Professionals Advising on Gender
SEEN in HR
SEEN in STEM
SEEN in Journalism
SEEN in Sport
SEEN in Health
TU SEEN
SEEN in Publishing
Third Sector SEEN

Related content

Amnesty faces backlash

Amnesty International UK has hastily withdrawn its report A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK – which smeared gender-critical charities, grassroots volunteer networks, evidence-based medicine associations and victim-support groups as “anti-rights” – saying that it is under review.

Published on 8th July 2026, and removed just days later on 10th July, the Growing threat report is a new low for a once-great organisation founded on the rigorous gathering of evidence and the defence of free expression.

A sister report Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK, published in May 2026, remains live online and bemoans the normalisation of “all manifestations of GC belief, including misgendering and talking about trans people with reference to their ‘biological sex’ and trans women as ‘biological males’.”

Amnesty’s public expressions of animosity and unevidenced slurs towards those with gender-critical views not only harm the reputation of gender-critical groups but also create a hostile environment for its own gender-critical staff, and set the organisation in opposition to its own charitable objects.

Amnesty made a submission in the 2025 case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers: its proposed interpretation of the Equality Act was rejected by the Supreme Court, which judged that it would undermine the protection of rights, making the legal protections against sex discrimination, sexual-orientation discrimination and gender-reassignment discrimination “incoherent” and “unworkable”.

Rather than admit that its approach took a wrong turn, Amnesty has doubled down.

The Growing threat and Like a snowball reports present gender-critical views as “transphobia” and groups such as the Gay Men’s Network and Beira’s Place rape crisis centre as shady, nefarious and driven by misogyny and homophobia.

Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend received a British Empire Medal for services to children for her work exposing the harms of unevidenced gender medicine. For Women Scotland won the Scottish Herald’s Public Campaign of the Year and the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize given by the Centre for Women’s Justice. LGB Alliance, Sex Matters and FiLia are registered charities, recognised as pursuing goals in the public interest.

Following Mermaids’ failed attempt to have LGB Alliance struck off the charity register, the Charity Commission explicitly warned:

“Demonising and undermining those who think differently is not acceptable behaviour from any charity on our register.”

The affected organisations are not letting the matter drop with a quiet deletion. Amnesty’s postbag is full of letters and its board members are facing calls to:

• provide the specific evidential basis relied upon for these classifications, or admit that none exists

• withdraw both reports in their entirety

• issue a public apologies to the individual groups smeared, as well as to its own gender-critical staff and supporters

• commit to comprehensive training for staff and trustees on UK equality and discrimination law.

It is time for Amnesty’s leadership to look honestly at legal reality, respect the pluralism of human rights advocacy, and engage in constructive dialogue rather than defamation.

What the letters said

Children of Transitioners and Trans Widows’ Voices said:

“The inclusion of small, grassroots victim-support organisations such as ours within a report describing an ‘anti-rights movement’ risks serious reputational harm, may deter vulnerable women and children from seeking support, and creates the impression that the experiences and human rights of the people we support have been discounted.”

For Women Scotland said:

“On page 2 of your report, however, you claim that the ruling has contributed to a “significant decline in protections for LGBT+ rights” with no reference to the fact that the Judges considered lesbian, gay and bisexual rights as well as the rights of those covered by gender reassignment and concluded that a certificated sex interpretation would be hugely damaging to these groups.”

Gay Men’s Network said:

“We consider that your report is a deeply silly and malicious piece of low politics designed to ‘evidence launder’ a list of undesirable gay and lesbian organisations and actors such that it can be quoted by those who seek, (like you) to control gay and lesbian free speech and open discourse.”

LGB Alliance said:

“Having lost the argument at the UK Supreme Court, Amnesty has now taken the extraordinary step of branding LGB Alliance (along with For Women Scotland and numerous other organisations) part of an ‘anti-rights’ movement. It somehow neglected to add the Supreme Court.”

Sex Matters said:

“Allowing individual staff, campaigning teams or activists to use Amnesty’s name to launch campaigns that are not based on a solid understanding of human rights and the Equality Act is a reckless approach to governance and reputational, regulatory and legal risk, and a diversion from your mission.”

JK Rowling said:

“Beira’s Place hasn’t sent anything. Yet.”

Read all the letters

• Beira’s Place statement

• CAN-SG

• Children of Transitioners and Trans Widows’ Voices

• For Women Scotland

• Gay Men’s Network

• Genspect

• Keep Prisons Single Sex

• Labour Women’s Declaration

• LGB Alliance

• Liberal Voice for Women

• Murray Blackburn Mackenzie

• ScotPAG

• SEEN in Health

• SEEN in Journalism

• SEEN in Publishing

• Sex Matters

• Third Sector SEEN

• Thoughtful Therapists

• Transgender Trend

• Women’s Rights Network

The government has published the final version of the statutory safeguarding guidance for schools in England, Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), which will come into force in September 2026. There were very few changes from the version published for consultation in February.

It includes sections on single-sex spaces (paragraphs 105–116) and single-sex sports (paragraphs 95–98), as well as a long section on “children questioning their gender” (paragraphs 252–282).

In December 2023, under the previous government, the Department for Education published draft guidance on “gender questioning” children, to which we gave a score of 76 percent based on our published scoring framework.

We said it should:

1. support schools in line with the law

2. provide coherent, consistent guidance across the education system

3. direct schools to collect sex-based data

4. uphold the Admissions Code

5. uphold single-sex spaces

6. uphold single-sex sports

7. avoid undermining safeguarding

8. rule out full social transition in school

9. uphold freedom of belief and speech

10. support clear sex-based rules and consideration for gender non-conforming children.

We have applied the same scoring framework to the new guidance and it comes in at 79 percent, with the improvement largely due to it being brought into the statutory safeguarding framework and having been made shorter and clearer.

There are, however, still some concerning aspects. Although the guidance is in line with the Equality Act in making clear that separate-sex facilities are not negotiable – no child may be permitted to use spaces designated for the opposite sex, no matter how that child identifies – it tries to reconcile this firm principle with the idea of “social transition” at school.

It defines this as facilitating “the child presenting as the opposite biological sex”, despite ruling out steps such as using opposite-sex facilities or being recorded as being the opposite sex. But by raising the possibility of “social transition” in school, it opens the door to negotiation and pressure, even though any school that works through the guidance accurately will inevitably conclude that the only fair and safe way to set policies that differentiate between girls and boys is to be clear who the girls are and who the boys are.

Helpfully, KCSIE says that schools should not initiate social transition, which should stop activist teachers promoting it. But it still leaves schools having to negotiate with activist parents who want their child to “socially transition” at school, and who may be highly motivated.

1. Support schools in line with the law

7/10 – The guidance has been put on a statutory footing and ties into existing sex-based laws and regulations, including the Equality Act and regulations concerning school premises. It says that school governing bodies and proprietors:

“must have regard to this guidance, ensuring policies, procedures and training in their schools or colleges are effective and comply with the law at all times.”

By putting the advice about use of single-sex facilities within KCSIE, the government has placed compliance within the remit of school inspections. The result will help clamp down on activist teachers promoting transition.

The new gender-related material within KCSIE is shorter and clearer than the previous draft guidance, but it suggests that children may in rare instances be able to undertake “social transition” in school, which it defines as facilitating “the child presenting as the opposite biological sex”.

2. Provide coherent, consistent guidance across the education system

7/10 –The guidance is clear that schools cannot allow children of any age to use opposite-sex toilets and changing facilities, or (in most situations) to play sports designated for the opposite sex. It applies to all schools, both state and independent, and will be covered by the inspection regime.

It also makes clear where the Equality Act and regulations concerning school premises apply differently to 16–19 academies that are outside the “further education” sector. It says that these colleges may be covered by part 3 or 5 of the Equality Act 2010 and still need to comply with the law.

The guidance will form part of the inspection of safeguarding, where leaders are expected to “take an effective, whole-school approach”. However, while in practice it rules out many aspects of “social transition”, it still suggests that children may (rarely) transition at school, including what it calls “full social transition” at primary school. It does not explain how this can be consistent with the rest of the guidance.

3. Direct schools to collect sex-based data

10/10 – The guidance is clear that no child can change their sex at school, and under the section on “correct information” it states that:

“schools and colleges are legally required to record a child’s biological sex accurately wherever it is recorded.”

4. Uphold the school admissions code

7/10 – The guidance does not mention admission to single-sex schools (the previous version made clear that schools are not required to admit a girl “as a boy” to a boys’ school or a boy “as a girl” to a girls’ school). It should be obvious that it is not possible to safeguard a girl in a boys’ school or a boy in a girls’ school while pretending that child is the opposite sex.

The guidance does address the question of children already “in stealth” at school. It says:

“Schools and colleges should be particularly conscious of the vulnerabilities of children who have fully socially transitioned from an early age and may be living in stealth (that is, school or college friends/staff may be unaware of their biological sex). The Cass Review emphasised that these children are likely to approach puberty in a fearful and anxious state. Schools and colleges should involve the designated safeguarding lead in these cases.”

The idea that a child can be admitted to school “in stealth” as the opposite sex is not consistent with the legal requirement that all children’s sex must be correctly recorded wherever sex is recorded (such as in the admissions register and school information system).

5. Uphold single-sex spaces

10/10 – The guidance has a clear, dedicated section on the law on school premises in relation to toilets, changing rooms and residential accommodation, which it ties into the safeguarding inspection framework:

“In line with the responsibilities of schools and colleges to adhere to the highest standards of safeguarding for the children and young people in their care, alongside obligations under the School Premises (England) Regulations 2012 and the Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014, schools must not allow pupils into toilets, changing rooms, or boarding or residential accommodation designated for the opposite sex, with no exceptions. Colleges to which part 6 of the Equality Act 2010 applies should follow the same principles.”

6. Uphold single-sex sports

7/10 – The guidance correctly says:

“Where schools have implemented single-sex sports as being necessary for safety reasons, there should be no exceptions and pupils must not be allowed to participate in sports designated for the opposite sex. Colleges should follow the same principles.”

But it also says:

“Where there are no safety concerns and a child makes a request relating to how they participate, schools and colleges will need to consider the request in light of the advice on ‘considering requests for support with social transition’. This means that the school or college would need to take into account all the relevant factors, including whether supporting social transition is overall in the best interests of the child, as well as considering the impact on other children and the aim of creating safe and fair environments for children to participate in PE.”

We don’t think there is any basis for this. Whether for fairness, safety or the encouragement of girls in sport, single-sex sports should be single sex. Gender non-conforming children should not be discriminated against or harassed in participating in sport with their own sex.

While there is a general principle that decisions about children should be made with the child’s best interests paramount, this part of the guidance appears to consider making complex clinical decisions in the context of deciding which PE team a child can play on.

The guidance does recognise (at paragraph 275) that both fairness and safety are legitimate aims for separate-sex sports.

7. Avoid undermining safeguarding

8/10 – Putting the guidance into the statutory safeguarding framework is a big step forward. However, including the possibility of “social transition” and the concept of “gender” is inconsistent with the parts of the guidance that are clear about sex. It will provide opportunities for organisations to continue to undermine safeguarding by encouraging children and their families to think that children may be able to “present as the opposite sex” during their school career.

The guidance also misses the opportunity to underline that gender identity should not undermine sex-based rules and behaviour codes in other parts of the guidance, such as harmful sexual behaviour – harassment, coercion or sex by deception – by trans-identifying pupils, and those children’s vulnerability to online harms and radicalisation. Any child disclosing that they are considering adopting or have adopted a cross-sex identity is disclosing a safeguarding risk.

It does not mention other safeguarding risks such as children breast-binding and taking off-label banned drugs or “DIY” cross-sex hormones.

8. Rule out full social transition in school

7/10 – The guidance rules out large parts of what is commonly included under that label, such as recording a child as the opposite sex, allowing them to use opposite-sex facilities and letting them participate in most sports with children of the opposite sex.

But it uses the term “social transition” 31 times, and leaves the door open for other, undefined, aspects of social transition to be negotiated. This presumably means pronouns and uniform, although they are not covered in any detail.

Paragraph 275 explains that schools and colleges should consider how their policies affect children with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, both when developing policies and when considering requests to be exempted from following them. When a rule or policy places a gender-questioning child (and other gender-questioning children) at a disadvantage compared with those who are not gender-questioning, the school or college should consider:

(1) Does the policy have a legitimate aim, for example, safeguarding or fairness in sport?

(2) Is the policy a proportionate means of achieving that legitimate aim? This will involve considering:

• whether there is another way of achieving the same aim. Might a policy be adopted or an exception made that still achieves that aim?

• the impact of the rule, or of making (or not making) an exception on the child themselves and anyone else affected. The school or college should balance the impact of agreeing to the child’s request against the impact of refusing their request, taking into account all the relevant factors. This will include taking into account the school or college’s judgment about whether supporting social transition is in the child’s best interests and the best interests of other children.

In practice, if schools refer to children by words used for the other sex or allow them to wear the opposite sex’s uniform it will be difficult to maintain clear expectations and rules.

9. Uphold freedom of belief and speech

7/10 – The guidance says:

“The school or college should also make sure that children and their families are aware that while the school or college will appropriately sanction any cases of bullying or harassment, and take a strong stand against bullying, the school or college must also be conscious of the rights of pupils and staff in relation to their religion or belief. However, schools and colleges supporting social transition might consider discussing options with pupils and staff such as using names instead of pronouns.”

This is the only mention of pronouns in the guidance.

10. Support clear sex-based rules and consideration for gender non-conforming children

9/10 – The guidance says that:

“schools and colleges should consider adopting policies across school and college life that maintain flexibility and avoid rigid rules based on gender stereotypes.”

Avoiding gender stereotypes is a good principle. But encouraging “flexibility” while suggesting that children may be able to undertake social transition creates ambiguity and room to negotiate.

Total 79%

Related content

Guidance released on “gender-questioning” children (February 2026)

What guidance from the Department for Education needs to say (January 2023)

Sex Matters is bringing a judicial review against the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for its unlawful guidance on sex by deception.

The guidance concerns the rare cases of sexual assault involving deception as to sex. We say the guidance is unlawful because it conflates the concept of subjective gender identity with objective sex and is confusing and incoherent.

The CPS asserts that “questions of deception and consent may involve more complex issues where the suspect is trans or non-binary”. This is wrong in law and could lead to both over-prosecution and under-prosecution, as well as encouraging young people to believe that their asserted gender identity overrides their sex in relation to other people’s sexual consent and sexual orientation.

That the CPS is defending its guidance is perhaps not surprising when you realise how deeply embedded in CPS policies and guidance is the idea of keeping trans people’s sex a secret and forcing others to pretend they have changed sex.

Twenty years ago the police and CPS were still willing to recognise the role of sexual fetish in cross-dressing and transgenderism. As guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers said in 2005:

“Not every male or female that dresses as the opposite gender (transvestite) do so because they wish to permanently be defined in the opposite gender (e.g. transgender). Some do it as a fetish or for sexual gratification, some are simply driven by an unexplained urge to dress as a woman and are considered to be transvestites, but will have no desire to change their gender.”

The criminal justice system then embarked on a long process of forgetting, offence-taking, confusing itself with ever-changing terminology and ignoring the law.

An institution loses its way

In 2007 the CPS published its Policy for Prosecuting Cases of Homophobic and Transphobic Hate Crime. It defined “transphobic” as:

“A fear of or a dislike directed towards trans people, or a fear of or dislike directed towards their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics, whether or not any specific trans person has that lifestyle or characteristic. The dislike does not have to be so severe as hatred. It is enough that people do something or abstain from doing something because they do not like trans people.”

It defined a transphobic incident as:

“Any incident which is perceived to be transphobic by the victim or by any other person.”

The CPS did not consider that women might rationally fear men who overstep boundaries, or that people might be free to “do something or abstain from doing something” because of a person’s sex, not because of a generalised dislike of trans people.

In 2013 the McNally case established that deception as to sex could vitiate sexual consent. But the CPS was too busy taking directions from trans organisations to be clear about the law.

In 2014 it published the CPS Transgender Equality Management Guidance which drew on advice from the civil service trans and intersex network “a:gender”, and the lobbying groups GIRES, Press for Change and Mermaids.

This document wrongly said:

“Under this legislation [the Data Protection Act 1998], data relating to an individual’s gender reassignment (which includes a change of gender status and name) is classed as ‘sensitive information’, and therefore attracts a higher degree of protection than usual, especially when a Gender Recognition Certificate is held (see Gender Recognition Act below).”

This is the same mistake the EHRC has made in its new draft code for service providers this year.

In its Guidance on Prosecuting Cases of Homophobic and Transphobic Crime (which included guidance on cases with transgender suspects), the CPS said:

“Whether the trans person is a victim, witness or defendant, the CPS’ policy is that the person will be addressed in terms that reflect his or her present gender status. So, a trans woman, although having a birth certificate that shows her to have been born a male, should be addressed and charged and/or indicted, if appropriate, as a woman.”

In July 2019 the CPS published a Trans Equality Statement, the aim of which it said was to “sustain the confidence of communities”. It boasted that:

“The CPS has worked for a number of years with a wide range of Trans organisations nationally and locally.”

and stated that:

“Prosecutors should address Trans victims, witnesses and defendants according to their affirmed gender and name, using that gender and related pronouns in all documentation and in the courtroom.”

The Trans Equality Statement says that “misgendering” is a potential basis for a transphobic hate crime. And the prosecution guidance on homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime says that the police and CPS “have agreed to treat unauthorised breaches under s22 Gender Recognition Act 2004 as potential hate crimes if the alleged victim or any other person perceives them as such”. That means that simply referring to a trans person’s sex is viewed as a potential “hate crime” by the CPS and police.

In 2020 the CPS produced an education pack for secondary schools, which promoted the idea that “wearing anti-LGBT+ badges or symbols” and “showing or distributing anti-LGBT+ leaflets, comics or other propaganda” could be hate crime. The pack had been developed with Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence.

One of the teaching exercises featured a video scenario where an adult male wearing women’s clothing goes into the women’s toilets. Two young women at the sinks whisper their discomfort: “What’s he doing in here? This is the Ladies.”

The class discussion guidance says:

“Ask the students what happened in the clip. Thinking about how the girl in the clip was treated, can the class understand why she might have felt hesitant about going into the toilets?” [By “girl”, it means the adult man.]

The worksheet for school children asks:

“Can you say why the person went into the ladies’ toilets and not the mens’ toilets? How did the women behave towards her? How did that make her feel?”

The guidance was only withdrawn after a 14-year-old girl brought a legal claim.

In 2021 the CPS published guidance for prosecutors on same-sex sexual violence and sexual violence involving a trans complainant or suspect/defendant, in which it said that the idea that “trans women” are men who want to deceive straight men into having sex “is part of a wider transphobic myth that trans women are ‘dangerous’”.

It also says:

“It is not uncommon for men who identify as heterosexual who engage in sexual activity with a trans woman to feel disgusted with themselves, and they may then react with violence towards the trans woman or to accuse her of rape. Gay men who have sex with trans men can also become violent and aggressive, and sexual violence can occur as a result.”

In 2022, when the CPS appointed Sophie Cook as its “speak out champion”, concerns were raised that he had a history of derogatory statements towards gender-critical women.

In 2022 the CPS updated its legal guidance on domestic abuse. It gave “withholding money for transitioning” and “refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun” as examples of domestic abuse against transgender individuals.

In 2024 these two statements were dropped in an update of the guidance, after the think-tank Policy Exchange pointed out that they do not constitute criminal offences. Instead the guidance now says that it might be a crime to refuse to use a family member’s preferred name “with the intention of causing emotional or psychological distress, particularly where the victim has obtained a recognised Gender Recognition Certificate”.

Of course a gender-recognition certificate does not direct how family members think and talk about a person.

Despite the documented instances of crimes with transgender perpetrators (including a disproportionate number of sexual offences), the experiences of “trans widows” and children of transitioners, which can include domestic abuse, and the fact that transgender perpetrators of homicide outnumber transgender victims, the CPS does not have any guidance that recognises clearly that “trans women” are men and “trans men” are women, and that transgender individuals may be perpetrators of crime.

There is increasing attention on non-contact deviant sexual behaviour as a risk factor for offending. But when recast as an expression of gender identity it may be overlooked or even celebrated, and those concerned by it cast as “transphobic”.

In 2022 Lionel Idan, CPS Hate Crimes Lead, told Pink News about gaining a sympathetic understanding of the behaviour of a man stealing women’s underwear:

“I remember one of my early experiences, it must have been 2006, I met with the chair of my local transgender advocacy group. She really made me think about the way we do things in a different light. She said, ‘Lionel, back when I was younger, I couldn’t walk into a shop and buy women’s lingerie. And so I used to have to steal items off of clotheslines’ … I said, ‘Of course, I’d have prosecuted you.’ And she said, ‘There you go. Now, you know the context. I had to steal, not because I’m a thief, but because I couldn’t buy what I needed for my identity.’ ... That was one of the moments where I realised, in the job I do, that to better understand lived experience is absolutely crucial.”

The frightening experience of a woman whose underwear was stolen off the line did not seem to trouble Idan.

Sex by deception

Individuals who lie about their sex online or in person in order to encourage another into a sexual act are disregarding consent, whether their victims are male or female, gay, straight or bisexual.

That the CPS can’t or won’t see this from the victim’s point of view is the result of 20 years of training itself to forget what it once knew about sexual fetish and deviant behaviour, to view “gender identity” as equivalent to sex, and to view gender-critical (that is, truthful) speech as a hateful act.