Some of Sex Matters’ team of staff, volunteers and consultants: Left to right, back row – Nicole Jones, Helen Joyce, Sally Parkin, Jo Payton, Maya Forstater, Lucy Forbes, Beck Laxton; front row – Fiona McAnena, Helen Staniland and Emma Moore

The past few days have been some of the busiest for the Sex Matters team since the week of the For Women Scotland judgment.

Last Thursday, 8th October, the team took time out from furious activity to spend the day together preparing, plotting and planning for the year ahead. We are a human-rights charity, with a mission, a board and absolute clarity about what we are doing and why, and we were pleased to be welcomed at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations’ “Society Building” for our team meeting.

We talked about how government departments have been kicking the can down the road following the Supreme Court judgment, and about the actions we and others are taking to make sure they understand and implement the law. Finally this week, on 15th October, NHS England produced its updated policy on single-sex wards, and civil-service departments began releasing their updated workplace policies. They are all clear that single sex means single sex. But the civil-service policies remain bound up with gender-identity language and the unrealistic idea that people aren’t able to tell what sex their colleagues are.

I spent much of this week talking with our various legal teams and writing witness statements for cases we are bringing which seek to make sure that the clarity of the For Women Scotland judgment and the Equality Act’s protections for everyone’s rights are put into practice. Our case against the City of London on the Hampstead Ponds is in court on 3rd and 4th November, and there has been lots to do, including work on opposing the Good Law Project’s application to intervene.

On Thursday we got the good news that GLP had been turned down in its application to appeal against its lack of standing to challenge the EHRC interim guidance (a case we intervened in). This is one more nailed-down decision emphasising that the law is clear, and that the courts do not need to keep digging up the idea that gender self-ID replaces sex to check if it is still dead.

The parliamentary committee that is carrying out pre-legislative scrutiny of the Conversion Practices Bill for England and Wales began meeting this week. The bill is the most dangerous attack on freedom of speech, clarity about sex and protection of children and vulnerable people from gender ideology that we now face. If it becomes law, it will harm the very people it seeks to protect, and roll back the gains from Forstater and FWS. We, together with others such as LGB Alliance, Bayswater Group, the Gay Men’s Network, CAN-SG and the gender-critical political-party groups, are ready to fight it. We are asking questions, marshalling evidence and producing briefings to try to convince parliamentarians and the government to think again about this bill.

On Thursday I joined the Charity Commission’s annual public meeting to ask a question about whether the commission will act to make sure that charities understand and follow the Equality Act. While the chair of the commission said good things about the need for pluralism and for regulators to follow the law, my question was held in electronic limbo and was never asked. Two other charity leaders told me their questions on sex and the law were also swerved. I have written to the chair of the Charity Commission to complain.

This week we said goodbye to one of the longest-standing contributors to Sex Matters’ work, Beck Laxton, who has managed our publications and website for nearly five years. I am grateful for all Beck’s hard work (much of it created by me and my unerring ability to mis-spell names and put hyphens in the wrong place), and we wish her well in her next endeavours.

Several of the Sex Matters team will be at Battle of Ideas this weekend. If you are there, be sure to visit our stall to say hello, and pick up our new materials on the Conversion Practices Bill.

Find out more

Read our briefing on the bill and the pre-legislative scrutiny process.

Scrutiny starts on the Conversion Practices Bill

Media coverage

Trans people should use hospital spaces according to biological sex, NHS England says

“NHS patient data is a mess, with potentially thousands of trans-identifying people recorded as the opposite sex.” - Maya Forstater

Alison Holt, James Melley • BBC News

Trans women no longer to be placed on female-only wards under new NHS England guidance

Jessica Murray for The Guardian quotes Maya Forstater on the NHS single-sex guidance: the policies “represent a momentous shift back to reality”.

Jessica Murray • The Guardian

NHS bosses finally tell hospitals to stop letting trans women onto female wards 18 months after landmark court ruling

“Today’s new guidelines are very welcome… the policies themselves represent a momentous shift back to reality”. - Maya Forstater

Shaun Wooller, Martin Beckford • Daily Mail

NHS England tells hospitals to bar trans women from female wards

“A year and a half ago, the government said NHS England’s new policy would be out within ‘weeks’. In that time, female NHS employees have had to fight court battles to keep men out of their changing rooms, while female patients on single-sex wards have suffered the indignity and safety risk of having trans-identifying men accommodated with them.” - Maya Forstater

Eleanor Hayward • The Times

NHS finally bans trans women from female spaces

“After a decade of policies based on self-ID and the influence of trans activist campaigners, many NHS trusts have embedded a culture of gender ideology…. NHS England must now follow up with a clear directive to reverse trans ideology within trusts.” - Maya Forstater

Daniel Martin • The Telegraph

Parent of detransitioner warns against planned law

What the Conversion Practices Bill would mean for families

In this episode, Helen Joyce speaks to Sarah,* the mother of a daughter who identified as trans for seven years and has since desisted.

Sarah explains how her daughter’s identity took hold in early adolescence, influenced by bullying, undiagnosed autism, peer groups and online communities, and how those around the family affirmed it.

She explains what she believes helped her daughter find her way back to comfort with her biological sex, and warns that proposed conversion-practices legislation could result in families like hers facing criminal charges, simply for doing what is in their children’s interests in very difficult circumstances.

*To protect the family’s privacy, all names have been changed and Sarah’s identity has been obscured.

In other news

Girls’ school head donated to teacher’s ‘sex-change’ surgery fund

“The school must be very careful not to glorify surgical interventions for trans-identifying people, as we know that transgender ideation is contagious.” - Helen Joyce

Janet Murray • [Un]Captured

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Bridget Phillipson, minister for women and equalities, says the draft Conversion Practices Bill will not catch parents who have difficult conversations with their children. But there is nothing on the face of the bill that protects those parents.

In an article in The Independent on Sunday 18th October, the minister wrote that the draft bill “will not impinge on” people’s freedom of expression, religious practice or decisions about how to parent, and that this is so because “the legal bar set is high”.

She claimed that the bill is designed to ensure that conversations between parents and children, such as “refusing to accept a child’s identity or use preferred pronouns”, would not be caught by the legislation.

But a criminal court will apply the words of the act, not a newspaper article written by a minister. And the words of the bill do not say what Phillipson says they do.

We wrote to Bridget Phillipson.

The bill has no exemption for parents, other family members, friends, teachers or social workers. Nor does it make provision for schools that follow the latest Keeping children safe in education guidance.

The definition of “abusive” is left open, and the bill says courts should consider, among other things, whether the conduct involves “economic pressure” or “psychological or emotional pressure”. Parents frequently apply such pressure to children, and doing so may be necessary to keep children safe.

Conflicts between children and parents are an ordinary part of family life, as parents seek to instil their beliefs, values and rules, and try to protect their children from harm. This is not the same as a coercive or controlling relationship between adults. A husband who took his wife’s phone away to control her conversations is doing something wrong; a parent who does this to stop a child talking to strangers they have met online, or to stop them from sourcing cross-sex hormones from street dealers or on the internet is being loving and responsible. It is not the role of the state to protect a child’s “freedom” from the boundaries that their parents choose and enforce.

The harm test is much lower than the minister claims. Phillipson says that conduct must reach the level of causing “serious physical or psychological harm” in order to trigger prosecution. But the bill gives a second, lower option of “serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”.

If a child becomes convinced that a parent’s attempt to stop them presenting as the opposite sex, or being referred to as the opposite sex is harming their day-to-day activities, that could prompt a criminal investigation of the parents, and of anyone who supports them. The chilling effect is clear.

Protection orders have no stated limits. The bill would let courts issue “conversion practice protection orders” containing “such prohibitions, restrictions or requirements” as they consider appropriate. There is nothing to say courts won’t make orders telling a parent to use particular names or pronouns. Breaching an order without “reasonable excuse”could lead to up to two years in prison.

Bayswater Support Group made a similar point on X. It said the minister’s assurance is contradicted by the bill itself.

“An op-ed by a politician will be scant consolation when a parent is facing a criminal claim or a protection order that will destroy their relationship with their child.”

What mental-health professionals told us

Along with the letter, we sent the minister a short summary of Criminalising conversations, a recent report for Sex Matters’ by social-science researcher Matilda Gosling, based on in-depth interviews with 30 mental-health professionals.

Read Criminalising conversations – summary

Many of those therapists work with young people who are distressed about their sex, and all of them expressed serious concerns about the proposed law. What concerned them most was the lack of protection for parents. One clinical psychologist put it this way:

“A conversation around the kitchen table could put you in jail.”

We sent her the anonymous interview we broadcast on 16th October, featuring a mother of a daughter who identified as trans for seven years and has since desisted. She warns that families like hers could face criminal charges simply for doing what is in their children’s interests in very difficult circumstances.

“If you’re trying to kind of encourage them to explore those very important underlying questions, then arguably, you know, you could be accused of psychological pressure and coercion.”

What we have asked the minister

We have asked the minister to write to the joint committee raising the importance of ensuring that parents are not captured by the legislation and asking her to commit to amending the bill to make sure that parents are not captured.

The minister says that parents should not be caught. If that is the aim, the protection belongs in the bill, where a court can read it – not in a newspaper article.

Related content

Scrutiny starts on the draft Conversion Practices Bill

Read our briefing on the Conversion Practices Bill

This week several civil-service departments finally released new policies on trans-identifying civil servants, and on 15th October NHS England also released a new policy on single-sex hospital wards. These replace trans-activist influenced policies that were out of line with both the Equality Act and other people’s rights.

The civil-service policies will directly affect around 500,000 civil servants, as well as 185,000 military personnel and are likely to have a wider impact on decision-making by government bodies and regulators. The policies we have seen restore single-sex spaces but retain unclear and worrying gender-identity language, and suggest impractical constraints on the recognition of sex.

Single-sex wards

The NHS constitution for England promises that “if you are admitted to hospital, you will not have to share sleeping accommodation with patients of the opposite sex, except where appropriate”. The handbook to the constitution sets out further details. Patients should not have to share sleeping accommodation with people of the opposite sex and should have access to segregated bathroom and toilet facilities. Patients should not have to pass through opposite-sex areas to reach their own facilities. Women in mental-health units should have access to women-only day spaces. Accident and emergency and children’s wards are mixed sex.

NHS England has adopted revised guidance on privacy, dignity and safety in hospital accommodation, which covers same-sex accommodation for patients and guidance on NHS staff facilities. It makes clear that separate accommodation on the basis of sex means biological sex. It says:

“To maintain hospital accommodation as single sex under the Equality Act 2010, trans people and others with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment should be accommodated in line with their biological sex.”

A breach of the same-sex accommodation guidance occurs at the point when one (or more) of the following principles is not met:

• Women should not have to share sleeping accommodation with men. Men should not have to share sleeping accommodation with women.

• Women should not have to share toilet or bathroom facilities with men. Men should not have to share toilet or bathroom facilities with women.

• Women should not have to walk through an area occupied by men to reach toilets or bathrooms, excluding corridors. Men should not have to walk through an area occupied by women to reach toilets or bathrooms, excluding corridors.

• Women-only day rooms should be provided in mental-health inpatient units.

The guidance on NHS staff facilities makes clear that single-sex facilities are provided on the basis of sex, and employers should ensure they provide enough facilities so that no one is left without a suitable one.

The guidance on patients says that where it would not be clinically appropriate to deliver care to a trans patient on a ward or bay that aligns with their biological sex, providers should identify alternative arrangements, and where clinical needs and same-sex accommodation requirements cannot both be met clinical needs are the priority.

The same-sex wards guidance follows changes to NHS data standards made in July 2026 to record biological sex accurately.

Departmental policies and guidance

Government departments and agencies have released their own policies and guidance for staff, based on a common model produced by the Cabinet Office. This has not yet been published. The departmental versions we have seen including from the Department for Work and Pensions, HMRC, Ministry of Defence, Government Legal Department and Office for National Statistics say that trans-identifying civil servants and service personnel are not permitted to use single-sex facilities or accommodation for the opposite sex, and that a gender-recognition certificate does not alter a person’s sex for the purposes of accessing single-sex facilities. This is in line with the judgment in For Women Scotland.

However the guidance documents also say that the words “he” and “she” refer to gender, not sex, and define “misgendering” as a term used to describe the use of a word “that does not correctly reflect the gender with which they identify”. For example, “it may be misgendering to use the terms man or woman when referencing a trans colleague if this refers to their sex at birth.”

Several versions of the guidance say a deliberate attempt to “deny” or “invalidate” a person’s trans identity is unacceptable behaviour and could result in disciplinary action. But at the same time they say that “there are occasions when it may be legitimate to refer to a person’s sex, for example, in a discussion about access to single-sex spaces.”

The HMRC guidance says terms “transman” and “transwoman” (without a space) are described as offensive and its staff are told not to use them. It warns that “terms that were once accepted can quickly become outdated and offensive”.

Several versions of the guidance also continue to say (we think wrongly) that a person’s “gender history” is special-category data, and that a person does not have to disclose their sex at work.

Guidance says that when an individual informs their line manager or commander of their intention to transition they should be advised that “accommodating their needs will need to be balanced with those of their colleagues and the business”.

If colleagues are concerned about someone using the wrong facilities they are told they should raise a concern by speaking to a manager and “not confronting or challenging the colleague directly”. While this is good advice for avoiding conflicts between employees, it will only work to ensure compliance if management acts promptly and firmly in response to complaints. Examples such as the case of Eleanor Frances, who says she was subjected to a sustained pattern of unfair treatment at the DCMS after she complained about an unlawful policy, show just how far government departments have to go in fixing their culture in order to implement these policies.

Single-sex facilities must be based on sex

These policies are a significant step forward. NHS England’s previous same-sex accommodation policy operated on the basis of gender self-identification, set out in “Annex B” to the NHS constitution. This told hospitals that they must allow trans and non-binary people to choose opposite-sex wards. The previous civil-service policy said staff may “use any appropriate single-sex toilets and other facilities” based on “gender identity and expression”.

Pressure not to bring these policies in line with the law has been strong, with LGBT+ networks arguing that preventing trans-identifying civil servants from accessing single-sex facilities for the opposite sex was “transphobic” and “completely unacceptable”. However the law is clear and it is high time that the civil service was required to accept and respect it.

These changes come after months of delay. In January 2026 the chief operating officer of the civil service wrote to us that the Cabinet Office was “reviewing the 2019 policy to ensure it remains legally compliant”. It clearly wasn’t, as it has now been replaced.

This should not be done quietly, but clearly and openly, with the model policy and departmental policies published, and with an apology for getting it so wrong for so long.

Related content

• Civil service must return to impartiality and protection for all

• Withdraw this unlawful civil-service policy

• NHS hospitals: “single-sex” accommodation cannot be mixed sex

The Court of Appeal has refused permission to the Good Law Project (GLP) to continue to challenge to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s interim guidance on single-sex facilities.

In February the High Court refused GLP permission to bring its claim for because it lacked “sufficient interest” to standing, and rejected a claim brought by the three individual claimants that the EHRC’s update was unlawful. It upheld the lawfulness of the EHRC’s interim update. Sex Matters intervened in the case in support of the EHRC.

Lady Justice Andrews has now refused Good Law Project (GLP) permission to appeal and adjourned the three individual claimants’ application to an oral permission hearing.

Read our briefing on this case.

What the Court of Appeal decided about GLP

Lady Justice Andrews held that an appeal against the decision on standing has “no reasonable prospect of success”, and that there is no other compelling reason for the Court of Appeal to hear it.

She gave several reasons. Whether GLP had a sufficient interest was a value judgment for the High Court judge, of a kind an appeal court will rarely disturb. He applied the correct legal test, and he was entitled to conclude that a campaigning body not directly affected by the guidance did not have a sufficient interest. And the presence of three directly affected claimants, who were able to bring the challenge and did, reinforced his conclusion.

The order notes that a refusal of permission on the papers is final. GLP’s appeal is over.

The case brought by the three individual claimants

The three individual claimants were given permission for judicial review, but their claim was dismissed on every ground. They are appealing this.

In the High Court Mr Justice Swift in February 2026 held that none of the following points in the EHRC update misstated the law:

Workplaces

(i) Single-sex lavatories must be provided in workplaces.

Services

(ii) So far as concerns provisions on services in EA 2010, there is no requirement to provide single-sex lavatories.

(iii) Provision of a single-sex lavatory is permitted by the EA 2010 if that is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

(iv) Failing to provide a female single-sex lavatory could comprise indirect sex discrimination against women.

Workplaces and services

(v) Single-sex lavatories will cease to be single-sex if transsexual persons are permitted to use them other than in accordance with their biological sex.

(vi) If trans women are permitted to use a single-sex female lavatory, all biological males must be permitted to use that lavatory.

(vii) In some circumstances equality law may permit transsexual persons to be excluded from single-sex lavatories that correspond to their biological sex.

(viii) Lavatories in lockable rooms used one person at a time can be used by anyone.

(ix) If you provide single-sex lavatories do not fail to make provision for transsexual persons.

(x) If you provide single-sex lavatories (or other facilities), where possible also provide a mixed-sex facility.

Lady Justice Andrews has adjourned the application for an appeal to an oral hearing, which she expects to take no more than half a day. The hearing will decide only whether permission is given.

Lady Justice Andrews said she was not currently persuaded that any ground of appeal has a real prospect of success, and that the judge’s reasoning, particularly at paragraph 79, appeared compelling. Paragraph 79 said “A requirement to state the law accurately is not the same as a requirement to give a comprehensive statement – to include everything that could possibly be said.” It ended:

“The guidance in the Interim Update was directed to the provision of single-sex facilities. This was the matter that the judgment in For Women Scotland had affected and the EHRC did not act unlawfully by addressing only this in the Interim Update rather than more general issues relating to the gender reassignment protected characteristic.”

In the interests of fairness and open justice, she said the applicants should have the chance to persuade the court orally.

She also raised a question about whether the case merits the Court of Appeal’s time at all. The interim guidance was removed from the EHRC’s website before the High Court heard the claim, and the new statutory Services Code of Practice came into force on 5th August 2026. If, as the claimants suggest, the alleged errors have been carried into the Code, she said, the correct course is to challenge the Code rather than debate guidance that has been superseded. GLP is supporting a legal challenge to the Code by a trans person and an organisation, who have sent a pre-action letter to the government and the EHRC.

What this means for single-sex services

The High Court’s judgment that the interim guidance stated the law accurately remains in place. Among other things, Mr Justice Swift held that a single-sex lavatory stops being single-sex if people of the opposite sex are permitted to use it. He also held that an employer who provides separate facilities for men and women, and in good faith applies a policy that they are used by people of that sex, does what the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require.

Sex Matters produced an easy-read version of the interim update which remains useful although it has overtaken by the statutory Services Code of Practice.

The oral hearing of the three anonymous claimants is still to come. But employers and service providers do not need to wait for another round of litigation. The law on single-sex spaces rests on a Supreme Court judgment, and they are required to follow it.

Related content

• High Court rules: EHRC guidance lawful

• Sex Matters intervenes on single-sex services guidance

• Good Law Project’s failed legal challenge against the Equality and Human Rights Commission – a briefing

Sarah explains how her daughter’s identity took hold in early adolescence, influenced by bullying, undiagnosed autism, peer groups and online communities, and how those around the family affirmed it.

She explains what she believes helped her daughter find her way back to comfort with her biological sex, and warns that proposed conversion-practices legislation could result in families like hers facing criminal charges, simply for doing what is in their children’s interests in very difficult circumstances.

*To protect the family’s privacy, all names have been changed and Sarah’s identity has been obscured.

Read our briefing on the draft Conversion Practices Bill.

Donate

The parliamentary committee that is scrutinising the draft Conversion Practices Bill started today.

It is made up of MPs Olivia Bailey, Alex Barros-Curtis, Danny Beales, Marie Goldman, Naz Shah, and Sir Jeremy Wright and peers Lord Scriven, Baroness Brown of Silvertown, Baroness Browning, Lord Hope of Craighead, Lord Isaac, and Baroness Prentis of Banbury. The committee’s 12 members have 12 weeks to consider the draft bill, during which they will call for and consider written evidence, hear from witnesses in person and produce a report with recommendations for the government.

You can read our briefing on the Conversion Practices Bill.

We hope that this process of scrutiny will expose the big problems with the bill. There will be opportunities for lawyers, parents, teachers, clinicians and others to submit written evidence and for some to give oral evidence, and for the media to shine a light on a government plan that could criminalise ordinary conversations.

When they hear “conversion therapy”, most people think of historical attempts to “cure” gay men and lesbians, such as electric shocks, nausea-inducing drugs or “corrective” rape. These were abhorrent. But today the perpetrators could be prosecuted for assault, grievous bodily harm or rape.

The government has produced no evidence that there are people suffering such abuses in the UK today who are unable to get justice. Instead it has adopted the framing of campaigners who have extended the term to cover the vaguer “conversion practices” and not just sexual orientation but gender self-identification.

If the bill becomes law it will bring police into ordinary disagreements between parents and their children, for example over “preferred pronouns” or whether a young teenage girl is allowed to wear a breast binder. While the bill’s proponents say it aims to punish abuse, it is drafted so broadly that it would leave vulnerable young people who are questioning their gender identity with less access to high-quality, ethical professional help, and would expose parents, therapists, teachers and charities to criminal investigation for ordinary, lawful and often protective conduct. We think the proposed criminal ban will harm the very people it seeks to protect.

The eight biggest problems with the bill

1. It intrudes unacceptably into family life. There is no protection for parents who, in good faith, do not agree to a child’s social or medical transition. It creates wide new “protection orders” which could be used to compel parents to affirm their child’s gender transition, under threat of imprisonment.

2. Protection orders are open-ended. Courts may impose any “prohibitions, restrictions or requirements” they consider appropriate, without notice and on application by anyone with the court’s leave. This could include requiring a parent to use a chosen name, support social transition or fund medical transition.

3. It would drive skilled therapists away from vulnerable young people. The healthcare exemption does not work in practice. Research published by Sex Matters about the impact the planned new law would have on therapists provides ample evidence of this.

4. It would harm young lesbians and gay men. Many gender-distressed young people are same-sex attracted. Lesbian and gay clinicians told us that in their opinion affirming a gender non-conforming gay teenager as the opposite sex is closer to conversion.

5. It conflicts with schools’ legal safeguarding duties. A school following statutory safeguarding guidance could be accused of a conversion practice, with governors held personally liable.

6. Its key terms are vague or open-ended. “Abuse” is left for courts to decide case by case, and “transgender identity” has no stable meaning.

7. It is open to misuse, and the case for it has not been made. Anyone can bring a private prosecution without the consent of the Attorney General or the Director of Public Prosecutions. Violence, sexual abuse, threats and coercive control are already crimes. The government’s own notes say the new ground is mostly “verbal or non-violent” conduct, which is very widely drawn indeed.

8. It is an attack on free speech. A bill which enables protection orders requiring affirmation of a belief — that a person is “transgender”, or is a woman in a male body, or any other variation of transgender belief — is incompatible with protecting freedom of belief and freedom of expression. Protection against belief discrimination in the Equality Act 2010 includes “gender-critical belief”, that is, saying that no one can change sex, and that it is important to be able to say so.

What will happen in the committee

The committee cannot amend the bill. It takes evidence and publishes a report with recommendations, which can include suggested drafting.

The government normally responds to such reports within about two months and decides what to change before formally introducing the bill.

What the draft bill does

• Defines “conversion practice” widely as “any conduct” towards a person intended to make them have, or not have, or believe they have or do not have, a sexual orientation or a “transgender identity”.

• Creates a criminal offence which hinges on an undefined term. The offence of carrying out an “abusive” conversion practice can apply to anything that causes serious harm to physical or mental health, or serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse effect on day-to-day activities. The maximum sentence is five years.

• Creates “conversion practice protection orders”, which could be used to compel a parent to use particular names or pronouns, to affirm a gender identity or to support medicalisation of their child, with breach punishable by up to two years in prison.

• Creates an offence of encouraging or assisting such a practice abroad.

• Puts a target on organisations that do not support affirmation. Makes company directors, charity trustees and similar officers personally liable if they fail to “take all reasonable steps to prevent” an offence by their organisation.

What the government says

The government argues that existing laws on domestic abuse, coercive control and communications do not cover all conversion practices, and that a clear and broad legal definition will help the police. It says the threshold is high: the explanatory notes equate “serious harm” with actual bodily harm or psychiatric injury. It says the bill does not criminalise beliefs or “explorative conversations”.

However, these assurances are not in the bill itself. A criminal court will apply the words of the act, not ministers’ statements or explanatory notes. The bill contains very few safeguards.

We think the bill should not go forward in its current form.

Read our briefing on the bill and the pre-legislative scrutiny process.

Related content

When parents become suspects

Conversion Practices Bill threatens ethical therapy

Conversion therapy: still not legal – or still not happening?

“No, you can’t wear a breast binder.” “No, I won’t call you by a new name.” These are reasonable things for a responsible parent to say to a gender-distressed 13-year-old. Under the government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, they could become the basis of a criminal complaint, which could be brought by anyone.

These sorts of scenarios are described in Criminalising conversations, new research for Sex Matters by social scientist Matilda Gosling. Gosling interviewed 30 psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and counsellors about the bill, which is about to start a 12-week process of pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee of MPs and peers. In the latest Sex Matters podcast, she talks to Helen Joyce about what they told her.

Six points stand out.

There is nothing left to ban but conversation. The abuses people picture when they hear “conversion therapy”, such as electric shocks and aversion therapy, are already unlawful. They are also almost entirely a thing of the past: interviewees saw little or no evidence of anything like them happening today. What the bill adds is an offence defined by its intention (to change someone’s transgender identity) and its effect, including “serious alarm or distress”. As Gosling puts it: “If you were to say something to me that hurt my feelings, I could say, actually, I feel severe distress…. And then that could fall under the definition of harm.” The maximum sentence is five years.

An exemption for healthcare providers offers no real protection. Therapists are supposedly exempt from prosecution unless they fall “far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position”. But there is no clarity on what those standards are. Interviewees expected them to be set by the professional bodies that signed the Memorandum of understanding 2, which they said has already made exploratory therapy risky. “It seems very likely that the organisations that will set the standards are the organisations that have already signed up very, very firmly to an affirmative model,” says Gosling – in other words, which say that when a client or patient expresses a transgender identity, mental-health professionals should simply take it at face value, rather than exploring what might lie behind it. Parents, teachers, social workers and clinical supervisors do not have even that threadbare protection.

Chilling effect

Laws like this work without prosecutions. Gosling also interviewed mental-health professionals in California, Illinois, Philadelphia, Canada and South Australia, all of which have similar laws. In none could she find evidence of anyone being convicted or disciplined. Yet in each, therapists described self-censorship, silence among colleagues and withdrawal from this work. As she says: “It is entirely the threat of that happening that has caused all of these negative consequences.”

Supporters of the bill may point to the absence of prosecutions as proof that such laws are narrow and harmless. That misses their hidden harms: a complaint can take years to resolve, and nobody wants to be the test case. “Someone will be the first,” a Canadian psychotherapist told Gosling. “We don’t know who it’s going to be.”

Experienced professionals would walk away. Almost half the UK interviewees said they would stop working with trans-identifying clients, or consider doing so, if the bill passed. Several have already stopped. Those who stay, Gosling says, would be “less present in the room… because they’re always thinking, okay, what can I say?” What makes this particularly disastrous is that this group is particularly complex and vulnerable. Interviewees described young people arriving with trauma, autism, anxiety and difficult family backgrounds, including teenage girls who want to identify out of their sex after sexual abuse. Detransitioners, already poorly served, would find even fewer therapists willing to work with them, perhaps for fear that someone who has already changed their mind about their identity might do so again, and then reinterpret what was said in good faith in the therapy room.

A ban on gender-identity conversion could be gay conversion in disguise. As Gosling points out, many young people referred to gender clinics are same-sex attracted, or grow up to be. The result is a paradox at the heart of the bill: on its face, it protects people on the basis of sexual orientation, but would make it more likely that people who would otherwise have grown up gay grow up to be “straight”, based on their self-identified gender identity rather than their sex. “It is encouraging gay people to go down a lifetime of medication,” one interviewee told Gosling. Another recalled the “dark jokes” at the former Tavistock gender clinic that soon there would be “no gay kids left”.

Families in crisis

Families would pay the greatest price. Parents get no exemption, yet parenting means saying No. “Parents have authority for good reason. They are responsible for their children,” Gosling says. She describes two ways in which the bill would destroy their authority. The first is quiet: parents “are worried about being reported… so they’re checking themselves and they’re checking their language”. The other is overt: a child who says, in effect, affirm me or I’ll report you. Both these situations harm children because children need boundaries to feel safe.

The worst potential outcome would be family breakdown. Some interviewees said they had already seen parents’ denied contact with their children because they would not affirm a child’s gender identity. “I do not understand how, in law, the desires, interests, motivations and viewpoints of a child at 13 become more legally defensible than those of the parent,” said a clinical psychologist.

The bill could hand a way for a man who transitions later in life to exert coercive control over his wife. “A man who takes on an identity as a woman can say to his partner, unless you affirm me as a woman, then I can report you for conversion practices,” says Gosling. “It potentially stops her from leaving the relationship.” Interviewees also expect some unrelated family conflicts, such as an affair or a divorce, to be fought on the territory of accusations about conversion practices, with the criminal law to hand.

The joint committee now has to decide whether this bill solves a real problem or creates new ones for the very people it claims to protect. Gosling’s interviewees are in little doubt.

Related content

Read our report Criminalising conversations

Watch Matilda Gosling on the Conversion Practices Bill

The £360,000 helpline that didn’t ring

I was on leave last week. While I was away, I visited a women’s centre that supports women who are subject to, or at risk of, sexual exploitation. It runs drop-ins, takes referrals and does outreach on the streets of the city’s so-called red-light district. At the centre’s request, I’m not naming it.

I met the centre’s chief executive and its chair. I also talked to a member of staff and to a woman who uses the service.

It’s based in a city-centre building with a peaceful enclosed garden. The team has made the space homely and welcoming, with handmade blankets and sofas where women sometimes just curl up and sleep. It is women only, and it takes this seriously. Apart from the occasional workman, who will always be escorted, no men come into the building. Many of the women who come here have been abused and exploited by men. The centre gives them somewhere they feel safe enough to talk and gain confidence to take control of their own lives.

On the wall of a meeting room I spotted the “sisterhood agreement” to which women attending groups sign up. “This group is a safe space where women can learn, heal, grow, and support one another,” it begins. It asks women to keep private what is shared in the room, to listen without judgement and to “create trust, safety and respect”. It reminds them: “You are the expert on your own experience.”

That kind of trust depends on honesty. It couldn’t work if women were expected to pretend that a man in the room is a woman.

I spoke to one woman who uses the service and also volunteers for it. She was passionate and clear about this. She told me she knows young women who identify as men, often as an escape from trauma: “They are still one of us, they have still been through what we’ve been through.” About men who identify as women, she was in no doubt: “They might be transitioning to women but they are still male. So many women will be triggered. You have to feel safe. We share all sorts here. It’s just not the same. I’ve nothing against them, but they cannot be here.”

Before the For Women Scotland judgment this centre was one of very few women’s centres which were clear and explicit that woman means female. Many other centres felt pressured by funders, commissioners and staff to say that they were “trans inclusive”, even when this undermined their core mission and made women feel unsafe and unsupported.

The centre’s chief executive told me how difficult it was to hold the line in the face of internal and external pressures. She had expected that after the Supreme Court judgment in April 2025, other women’s organisations would welcome the legal clarity. Instead, the surprising response has often been: how can we get around this?

There was no reason not to act quickly. On 21st July the Charity Commission told charities that they “do not need to wait for the Commission’s guidance to comply with the Act and the Code”.

The law, as clarified by the Supreme Court, is clear that a women-only service is lawful where it is a proportionate way of achieving a legitimate aim, and that if such a service admits men who identify as women it is no longer single sex. The big change in understanding provided by the For Women Scotland judgment is that there is no need for case-by-case assessment to exclude a trans-identifying man, but there is such a need if you are considering excluding a woman who identifies as a man, or redirecting her from group to one-to-one-support.

We talked about how Sex Matters might support the centre and leaders of other women’s organisations to find the confidence and clarity to prioritise women and to do so without fear of backlash.

One of the things I promised was that we would update our model policy for single-sex services, which we first published in 2021. Here is a draft updated version. If you are involved in women’s services, please get in touch with any comments or suggestions.

If you work or volunteer for a charity and think sex matters, you are not alone. Find likeminded others through Third Sector SEEN.

This week

Campaigners at the Hampstead Ponds in 2022. Photo: Lily Maynard

Hampstead ponds: what we will argue in the High Court

On Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th November, the High Court will hear Sex Matters’ judicial review of the City of London Corporation’s admissions rules for the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond and the Highgate Men’s Pond on Hampstead Heath. The hearing is...

^{7th October 2026}

When parents become suspects

“No, you can’t wear a breast binder.” “No, I won’t call you by a new name.” These are reasonable things for a responsible parent to say to a gender-distressed 13-year-old. Under the government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, they could become...

^{7th October 2026}

Sex Matters shortlisted for in-house PR team of the year

Sex Matters has been shortlisted for in-house team of the year at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) UK Awards 2026. The other finalists are Cancer Research UK, Marie Curie and NHS Property Services. We are proud to be...

^{6th October 2026}

In other news

Cambridge is gorging on social justice foolery, and destroying its reputation

Zoe Strimpel for The Telegraph writes on how social-justice orthodoxies have taken hold at Cambridge University and the students refusing to go along with them. She highlights Thea Sewell, who began speaking out after hearing Helen Joyce... - Helen Joyce

Zoe Strimpel • The Telegraph

Schools refer parents to police and social services for questioning their children’s demands to change sex and refusing to buy puberty blockers

Janet Murray and Nick Pyke for the Daily Mail write on our new report, Criminalising conversations, for which social-science researcher Matilda Gosling interviewed 30 mental-health professionals.

Janet Murray, Nicholas Pyke • Daily Mail

How Sandie Peggie union denied being ‘steeped in gender ideology’

Sandie Peggie’s hearing against RCN has provided a “stark case study of the failure of unions to support female members who are discriminated against by their employers simply for demanding their sex-based rights.” - Helen Joyce

Georgia Edkins • The Times

Sex Matters at the Battle of Ideas

The Battle of Ideas Festival is next weekend – but it’s not too late to book for the Battle of Ideas using the code SEXMATTERS26 to get 20% off.

Helen Joyce, Fiona McAnena and Matilda Gosling are all on panels on Sunday 18th October: Helen for Conversion Practices Bill: criminalising parents, teachers and priests? and Assisted death to sexual freedom: autonomy and its discontents; Fiona for Post-trans mania: the future for women in sport and Matilda for Techlash: blaming social media for everything.

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Without it, we simply wouldn’t exist.

Sex Matters can deliver essential research and analysis, help shape the debate, and empower people with clear, published guidance on their rights – but only with your support. Please contribute what you can to keep us going.

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Campaigners at the Hampstead Ponds in 2022. Photo: Lily Maynard

On Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th November, the High Court will hear Sex Matters’ judicial review of the City of London Corporation’s admissions rules for the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond and the Highgate Men’s Pond on Hampstead Heath. The hearing is at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

We have now filed expert evidence from Professor Jo Phoenix. The Good Law Project and TransLucent have applied to intervene.

We are challenging the decision by the City of London Corporation that men who identify as women may use the Ladies’ Pond, including its communal changing room and showers, and that women who identify as men may use the Men’s Pond. We say that operating the facility in this way is unlawful sex discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. We are asking the court to declare the decisions unlawful and quash them.

This post sets out what has happened since our last update, and the arguments we will put to the court.

How we got here

We filed our claim on 19th August 2025, after the City decided to carry on admitting trans-identifying men to the Ladies’ Pond following the Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16.

In January 2026 the High Court refused permission for the claim to go ahead. We appealed. On 17th March 2026 Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing in the Court of Appeal granted permission, finding that each of our grounds was arguable and that “expert charities” have standing to bring claims like this one.

The City then asked for the case to be paused while it finished its own review. The court refused. On 12th May and 4th June 2026, two City committees voted to keep the ponds as “trans-inclusive spaces as currently operated”, and to spend up to £1 million on improving the changing areas.

We amended our grounds to challenge those decisions too. The City served its full defence and evidence on 10th August 2026. On 24th September we applied for permission to rely on evidence in reply.

You can read our amended statement of facts and grounds and Maya Forstater’s third witness statement.

What the rules say

The City’s access policy says:

“The Men’s Pond is open to biological men and trans men … The Ladies’ Pond is open to biological women and trans women.”

It defines a “trans woman” as “a person who was at birth of the male sex, but who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment under the Equality Act 2010”.

The gate still says “Women Only: Men not allowed beyond this point”. A smaller sign, among others, says that “those who identify as women are welcome”.

The Ladies’ Pond has a communal changing area and communal showers, with an open-sided outdoor shower and a meadow where women sunbathe topless. Many women change in the open and shower naked, in what they are told is a women-only space.

Our first argument: excluding people because of their sex

Our case is making a careful set of legal arguments which are based on the way the Equality Act is constructed.

The Equality Act says a service provider must not discriminate against a person by refusing them a service because of a protected characteristic (s29(1) with s13). Sex is a protected characteristic, and it means biological sex.

A woman who wants to swim at the Men’s Pond will be turned away. A man in exactly the same circumstances would be let in. She is refused because she is a woman. The same is true, the other way round, for a man who wants to swim at the Ladies’ Pond.

That is direct sex discrimination. Even if some men (who identify as women) are admitted to the Ladies’ Pond, excluding other men is still sex discrimination. The law has long been clear that direct discrimination need not affect everyone who shares the characteristic to be unlawful.

In the Equality Act direct discrimination, unlike indirect discrimination, cannot be justified, apart from where there is a statutory exception. This means that the only way to lawfully run separate services for men and women is by relying on one of the exceptions, such as the exception for separate-sex and single-sex services in Schedule 3 of the Equality Act (paras 26 and 27). The Supreme Court gave “segregated swimming areas” as an example of what those exceptions are for (For Women Scotland, para 211).

But the exceptions only work if the service is separated by sex. The City accepts this. In July 2025 it told us it was “expressly not seeking to rely on the exceptions”. Its position is that the ponds are not single-sex services at all.

We say that answers the question. If the ponds are not single-sex, nothing in the act permits the City to turn people away because of their sex.

The Highgate pond and the Kenwood pond are two separate and distinct services.

Why would a woman want to swim at the Highgate pond? Why not? It is more than twice as big, with a diving board and a long circuit suited to training. Why might a man want to swim at the Kenwood pond? Why not? It is beautiful, enclosed by trees, with a meadow and warm showers.

These are not hypothetical questions. Our evidence includes witness statements from a man who would like to swim in the Kenwood pond, and two women who would like to swim in the Highgate pond, including one who asked to use the bigger pond once a week so she could swim long distances, and was refused.

As Maya Forstater says in her witness statement, if the City labelled Parliament Hill Café “Men only” and the Golders Hill Park Café “Women only”, nobody would think the question “Why would a woman want a cup of tea at Parliament Hill?” was an answer to a discrimination claim relating to these rules.

None of this means we want the ponds to be mixed. It means the City has to choose a lawful model: single-sex ponds alongside the mixed pond, or three mixed-sex ponds. What it cannot do is keep the signs that say “men” and “women” while redefining those words.

Our second argument: women bear the greater detriment

The act also says a service provider must not discriminate in the way it provides a service, including by subjecting someone to a detriment (s29(2)).

A woman at the Ladies’ Pond may find herself undressing or showering beside a man. Many trans-identifying men have not had genital surgery, and the definition of gender reassignment does not require it. We say the risk that a woman’s privacy, dignity or safety will be compromised is greater than the equivalent risk for a man at the Men’s Pond, and that this is less favourable treatment of women because of their sex.

The Court of Appeal accepted in R (Al Hijrah School) v HM Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills [2017] EWCA Civ 1426 that rules which look the same for both sexes can still result in direct sex discrimination.

Women’s accounts show what this means in practice. The author Amanda Craig has written in The Telegraph about encountering a large naked man in the showers. Other women have told us about leaving the meadow, covering up or no longer going at all. The City’s own consultation report records respondents who described “feeling violated, sexually harassed, triggered, or uncomfortable due to encounters with males in changing rooms or pond areas”.

The City’s own staff recognise the issue: when a man comes on site to take water samples, lifeguards ring a bell, make an announcement and close the changing-room doors.

Our third argument: indirect discrimination against women

In the alternative, we say the rules are indirect sex discrimination (s19). They put women as a group at a particular disadvantage compared with men, and the City cannot show they are a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

Professor Jo Phoenix, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Reading, has written an expert report for the court. She concludes that the detriment to women is “generated by the rules of the space rather than by events within it”. It takes four forms: self-exclusion, modified use, sustained hypervigilance and acute distress on encounter. It operates whether or not a man is present on any given day. Her conclusion is that “the detriment to women is greater in intensity, wider in incidence and different in kind” than for men. Some groups feel it more intensely: Muslim, Orthodox Jewish and other observant women, survivors of male sexual violence, older women, lesbians and girls.

Tribunals have reached similar conclusions. In Hutchison and others v County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust (the Darlington nurses’ case), an employment tribunal held that requiring women to share changing rooms with a man put women at a particular disadvantage.

What the City says, and our answers

The City says the ponds are welcoming, “trans-inclusive” spaces with a long history of diversity.

We agree the ponds should welcome everyone who is entitled to use them: older and younger swimmers, disabled swimmers, people of every religion and sexual orientation, and people who identify as trans or non-binary using the pond for their own sex. Separate services for each sex are not against inclusion. They are often how different groups are included.

No one would be forced into a space they do not want to use. Before the City’s policy, there was a choice of single-sex ponds for men and for women, as well as the Mixed Pond and the Lido. That choice would still exist.

The consultation. The City relies on a survey in which around 86 percent of 38,742 respondents backed “trans-inclusive” ponds. But it was self-selecting, and it was promoted online as a call to action by groups campaigning for that outcome. Earlier surveys of pond users drew between 600 and 2,000 responses. At a committee meeting in January 2026, the City’s deputy director of natural environment said: “We knew there was the potential for it to get hijacked.”

Professor Phoenix says the survey “establishes the balance of expressed preference among those who chose to respond” and “cannot establish that the arrangements cause no disadvantage”. Discrimination law exists to protect people from exactly the kind of rule a majority might vote for.

The building works. The City plans more cubicles. But cubicles do not change who is allowed in. The Ladies’ Pond is a communal, outdoor space: the meadow, the deck, the outdoor showers. Unless every woman is required to change in a cubicle, nothing stops a man undressing in the open.

Enforcement. The City suggests a rule based on sex would be hard to enforce. Sex-based rules are enforced every day, in workplaces, schools and leisure centres, by clear signs and the expectation that people follow them. Hampstead Heath’s own byelaws already reserve some areas for women and children. By contrast, a rule based on gender reassignment is unworkable: no steward can see whether someone has that characteristic.

What happens next

The hearing will take place on 3rd and 4th November.

The City of London has a lawful option open to it: run the Ladies’ Pond for women, the Men’s Pond for men and the Mixed Pond for both sexes. It has chosen not to. We will ask the court to hold it to the law.

Related content

Hampstead ponds: judicial review going ahead

Sex Matters set to challenge City’s unlawful ponds policy

Campaign: Keep the women’s pond for women

Sex Matters has been shortlisted for in-house team of the year at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) UK Awards 2026. The other finalists are Cancer Research UK, Marie Curie and NHS Property Services. We are proud to be in that company, and to have our communications work judged by the PR profession on its merits.

A small team on a contested subject

Our entry covered Sex Matters’ first financial year as a charity, from 1st July 2024 to 30th June 2025.

The core press team is two people: head of PR Sally Parkin, and director of advocacy Helen Joyce. They are supported by the head of creative and social media, Nicole Jones. Our chief executive, Maya Forstater, and director of campaigns, Fiona McAnena, act as spokespeople alongside Helen.

High quality, high volume

In that year, according to our media monitoring, we were:

• featured in, or wrote, 2,322 print and online articles in the UK press: 431 national and 1,891 local, regional and specialist

• featured in one regional and four national front-page stories

• mentioned 781 times in UK broadcast coverage, including 132 interviews on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky News, Times Radio, LBC, GB News and TalkTV, among others

• covered by media in 42 countries, reaching an estimated audience of 76.3 million.

See our press coverage.

More than half of that coverage concerned our work on the Equality Act 2010. 2025 was the year in which the Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex. On that day, we told PA Media that the court had given “the right answer: the protected characteristic of sex – male and female – refers to reality, not to paperwork”.

Helping journalists get it right

Much of our work is about helping journalists report accurately, often under time pressure, on subjects that are legally and scientifically complex. During the Paris Olympics in August 2024, sports journalists told us they were struggling to follow the science behind the row over eligibility in women’s boxing. We held a media briefing on sex in sport, chaired by Fiona McAnena, with biologist Dr Emma Hilton and former Olympians Sharron Davies and Mara Yamauchi. It was viewed 14,000 times in the week after it was broadcast.

We also give journalists legal briefings on major cases, and on-the-day analysis when guidance or judgments are published.

Our media handbook on sex and gender explains when and why it is right for journalists to report people’s sex.

Communication is central to our work

The PRCA has recently published a new definition of public relations. It describes PR as “the strategic management discipline that builds trust, enhances reputation and helps leaders interpret complexity and manage volatility”. Among its 10 underlying principles are “earned credibility as the primary currency” and being “grounded in insight and evidence”.

That is close to how we see our own press work. Sex Matters exists to promote clarity about sex in law, policy and language. The law protects people only if those who run services, write policies and make decisions understand what it says. Most of them learn about it not from judgments or statutory guidance, but from what they read, watch and hear.

So accurate reporting is not an add-on to our charitable work; it is one of the main ways we do it. Our approach is to be a reliable source: to explain complex cases and guidance plainly, to stick to the evidence and to be available when journalists need us. Credibility earned that way has to be earned again with every story, which is why we take care over every statement we put out.

By and large, UK national newspapers have been robust and often fearless in their coverage of sex and gender in the past several years, but some areas have been deemed too risky to cover plainly and with accurate language. This problem is easing a little at a time.

Bias within mainstream broadcasters regarding coverage of sex and gender, particularly at the BBC, has been well documented. But we think that, even within the broadcast media, there has been noticeable improvement. Increasingly, sex-based rights are reported as what they are: mainstream questions of law, policy, fairness and safety, for which accurate information matters.

We think being shortlisted alongside some of the UK’s best-known charities and an NHS body reflects that change. It’s also recognition of the work of a very small team that answers several press queries a day while pitching its own stories.

Sally Parkin said:

“I’m truly delighted that Sex Matters has been shortlisted for in-house team of the year at the PRCA awards, alongside some of the UK’s leading charities.

“This nod from PRCA is a heartening sign, especially coming after For Women Scotland received an award for public campaign of the year in Holyrood last year. It would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago that an organisation advocating for sex-based rights would receive such recognition.”

Thank you to the journalists who have come to us for clear, accurate information. Our press office is at sex-matters.org/about-us/press.

From left: Sue Evans, Matilda Gosling and Fiona McAnena in 2025

This week we’ve been gearing up to engage with the draft Conversion Practices Bill. When Parliament returns after recess on 12th October, a joint committee of peers and MPs will start to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny. It’s vital that this committee hears the arguments against the proposals and probes the claims of their supporters.

To kick off, on Thursday we published Criminalising conversations, a report by social-science researcher Matilda Gosling based on in-depth interviews with mental-health professionals who have concerns about the bill. (Matilda is pictured above with Sue Evans, a former mental-health nurse who started raising the alarm about poor practice at the Tavistock gender clinic in 2005, and my colleague Fiona, at the launch of Fiona’s book, Terf Island.)

Plans for a ban on conversion practices have been mooted for several years, and a growing number of other jurisdictions already have similar laws. But explaining why they are so pernicious isn’t easy, because they sound like something nobody opposes.

As one of Matilda’s interviewees, a clinical psychologist, said: “What comes into everyone’s heads when they talk about conversion therapy is conservative Christian groups in the United States using aversive practices with men such as gay porn with electric shocks. These are barbaric and non-therapeutic practices. What they are actually banning is being able to ask really basic questions like, ‘I wonder why you feel that way?’”

Unlike similar laws elsewhere, the draft bill contains an exemption for health professionals who are working to expected standards. But as several interviewees pointed out, thresholds for prosecution are likely to be set by licensing and membership bodies, almost all of which already insist transgender identities should always be unquestioningly affirmed. Almost half the interviewees based in the UK said they would stop, or consider stopping, working in this area if the bill passed for fear of unfounded complaints and prosecutions. Several had already stopped taking referrals for gender issues.

Before I settled down to read Matilda’s report, I thought I knew a great deal about the harms caused by banning so-called “conversion practices” – in reality, criminalising ordinary, ethical, evidence-based therapy. I knew there would be a serious impact on what mental-health professionals could discuss with their patients, and that it would drive many away from engaging with gender-distressed patients altogether.

But it hadn’t occurred to me that whatever threadbare protection the healthcare exemption offers doesn’t cover other vital activities carried out by mental-health professionals, such as training, supervision and research.

And the knock-on impacts outside therapy are so much worse than I had realised. There are no exemptions for anyone else: not parents, friends, teachers, social workers or researchers. I knew that it would make responsible parenting harder by potentially criminalising straightforward statements of disbelief in the possibility that girls can become boys or vice versa, or simple facts about the two sexes. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would potentially throw a new, incendiary element into family breakdowns and perhaps even increase family estrangement, as warring couples throw accusations of “conversion practices” against each other and gender-distressed children are told online that parents who don’t “affirm” them must hate them and want them dead.

We have commissioned Matilda before: her 2024 report for us, Women’s services: a sector silenced, was cited by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland judgment. We hope her latest work will help change the weather in the same way.

Read the report

Find out more

Draft Conversion Practices Bill threatens parents with jail time

Conversion therapy: still not legal – or still not happening?

Media coverage

Labour’s ban on trans conversion therapy ‘will undermine parents’

“Our report is the first of its kind, documenting the serious problems foreseen by experienced therapists who work with gender-distressed young people.” - Helen Joyce

Daniel Martin • The Telegraph

Criminalising conversations

Matilda Gosling on the Conversion Practices Bill

In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce is joined by Matilda Gosling to talk about her research, which documents the serious problems with the planned new law foreseen by experienced therapists who work with gender-distressed young people.

To get our podcasts in your inbox, subscribe to our Substack.

NSPCC tweaks guidance after complaints

NSPCC fixes some flaws in latest schools guidance

After Sex Matters wrote to complain, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Chris Sherwood, has written to us saying the charity has revised its schools briefing on safeguarding considerations in changing...

28th September 2026

In other news

Rape victims should never be forced to use their attackers’ pronouns

Victoria Smith wrote for Unherd on our case against CPS and the news that revised guidance will no longer tell prosecutors to call trans-identifying rapists “female”.

Victoria Smith • Unherd

Trans rape suspects can be called men, prosecutors told

“The CPS guidance conflates the reality of sex with the idea of ‘gender identity’, which has serious consequences for charging decisions.” - Maya Forstater

Fiona Parker • The Telegraph

Prison service accused of ‘cover-up’ on trans sex offender stats

“Female sex offenders are very rare. Yet SPS has decided to publish data on women, but not on men calling themselves women, who are guilty of sex offences.” - Fiona McAnena

George Mair • The Times

Girl Guides divided into ‘team boy’ and ‘team girl’ to discuss non-binary identities

“Now that Girlguiding has finally stopped admitting boys who say they are girls, it must work urgently to remove resources for leaders that are based on the ideological and regressive idea that ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are gender identities rather than... - Helen Joyce

Janet Murray • The Telegraph

High Court dismisses challenge over guidance on consent and gender identity

London Daily reported on the High Court deciding against our case concerning deception as to sex, in which we argued that CPS guidance conflates the concepts of sex and gender identity.

London Daily News

Sex Matters v DPP: Divisional Court dismisses challenge to CPS deception as to sex guidance

Solicitors Journal reported on the High Court ruling against our challenge to CPS guidance on deception and consent in sexual offences.

Solicitors Journal

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Sign up

Sex Matters survives on your support.
Without it, we simply wouldn’t exist.

Sex Matters can deliver essential research and analysis, help shape the debate, and empower people with clear, published guidance on their rights – but only with your support. Please contribute what you can to keep us going.

Donate

Read the report

Left to right: Janet Farrell, Sarah Vine KC, Maya and Chris Knight KC at the High Court in July

This week has been full-on with legal work. We filed our submissions and evidence for the next stage of the Hampstead Ponds case. The Good Law Project and TransLucent have also applied to intervene.

And today we received the judgment in our case against the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) over guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service on deception as to sex.

Although the judgment stopped short of ruling that the CPS guidance was unlawful, it delivered stinging criticism of the guidance’s sympathetic presentation of transgender rape suspects, commenting that the CPS describes them “as if they were vulnerable persons rather than suspects facing criminal allegations”. It said that the CPS should remember that this document is not intended to be an equalities policy.

The CPS guidance is one of many pieces of government guidance that has been influenced by years of transactivist lobbying, and as a result is a confusing mess. It uses phrases such as “sex and/or gender identity” 23 times, even though the law treats these two concepts differently.

The CPS has already agreed to update the guidance, and we have written to ask how it intends to respond to the court’s criticism.

The judgment recognised that Sex Matters had standing as an expert charity and thanked our legal team, Sarah Vine KC and Chris Knight KC, for the “very high quality of the submissions”. To that I would add thanks to our solicitor, Janet Farrell at Bhatt Murphy, and to Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network, who provided a witness statement in relation to gay men as victims of “stealthing” by trans-identifying women.

Most of all, thank you for supporting us. Sex Matters has been working on challenging the CPS guidance since 2022. Challenging confusion and institutional capture is difficult. We bring hard cases and we know we won’t always win. But we will keep going.

Find out more

Judgment in our case about guidance on sexual consent

Judgment in R (Sex Matters) v Director of Public Prosecutions

Sex, lies and statistics

Why does it matter whether we collect data on sex? In this episode, Helen Joyce talks to sociologist Professor Alice Sullivan of University College London about her forthcoming book Sex, lies and statistics, due out in November.

Alice explains why sex has always been an essential statistical variable, and how conflating it with “gender identity” conceals differences in health, crime and life outcomes. They discuss preference falsification: how the vilification of the commonplace understanding of sex as real and biological has led many people to conceal their true views. They look at how public and private organisations, from the Office for National Statistics to sports governing bodies, came to adopt fringe ideas that few people share, and why so many institutions have treated people who raise concerns as the problem.

Finally, Alice discusses the need for stronger free-speech protections and an end to the culture of impunity if sex-based data and evidence-based policy-making are to be restored.

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In other news

Cambridge college labels lavatories as ‘cubicles’ and ‘cubicles/urinals’

“It looks like King’s College is trying to wriggle around simple separate-sex facilities by making the toilets worse for everyone.” - Helen Joyce

Tom Jeffreys • The Telegraph

Lib Dems vote against single-sex spaces | Maya Forstater on LBC London

Nick Ferrari • LBC Radio

Left-wing parties are accused of plotting to ‘undermine’ hard-won women’s rights

“Next week Green Party members may go even further in the wrong direction by voting for a motion that would grant privileges to trans-identifying people, while at the same time taking protections away from women.” - Helen Joyce

Sam Merriman, David Wilcock • Daily Mail

Lib Dem cowardice on women’s rights

Writing on a Lib Dem conference motion that undermines sex-based rights, The Telegraph cites Sex Matters polling which found that the vast majority of people prefer straightforward single-sex facilities in workplaces and public spaces, including Lib Dem voters.

Telegraph View • The Telegraph

Sandie Peggie: ‘My nursing union is blinded by trans activists’

Nick Wallis for The Times interviews Sandie Peggie ahead of the hearing in Dundee this week in her case against the Royal College of Nursing. Sandie is taking legal action alleging discrimination after the RCN failed to advise her following... - Maya Forstater

Nick Wallis • The Times

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After Sex Matters wrote to complain, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Chris Sherwood, has written to us saying the charity has revised its schools briefing on safeguarding considerations in changing rooms. The guidance now says that, wherever possible, staff supervising children changing should be the same sex as them. That is welcome. But the NSPCC should not have needed reminding of basic safeguarding.

In his response, dated 25th September, to our letter, Sherwood responded to each of our concerns.

• The revised briefing now says that, wherever possible, staff supervising children changing should be the same sex as them.

• It also says plainly that having children of both sexes in the same changing area becomes less appropriate as they get older.

• It quotes Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), the statutory safeguarding guidance for schools in England, which says that children aged 11 and over must not undress in front of the opposite sex, and refers to KCSIE’s guidance on “gender-questioning” children.

We welcome these changes, but the charity has declined two of our requests, and we think schools still deserve clearer direction on what they should and shouldn’t do.

What the NSPCC has changed

Same-sex supervision. For years the NSPCC told schools that where possible, adults supervising children getting changed “should be of the same gender as them”. “Gender” was initially a synonym for sex, but it has since become used to mean “gender identity”. Rather than correcting the word to make the meaning clear following the Supreme Court judgment of April 2025, the NSPCC removed the advice altogether, leaving schools with no guidance on who should supervise children while they change.

The NSPCC’s letter says that it dropped the advice because the September 2026 update of KCSIE does not address the sex of adults supervising changing rooms.

This is a poor excuse. The charity now accepts that it did not need to wait for government guidance, and its revised briefing says: “Wherever possible staff supervising children changing should be the same sex as them.”

Mixed changing areas. The 2024 briefing said “mixed gender changing areas” become less appropriate as children get older. The August update changed this to “mixed changing areas”, which could mean mixed by age, with members of the public or by gender identity. The revised briefing now says mixed changing areas are less appropriate as children get older, “whether that be mixed by age, or by sex”.

Gender-questioning children. The revised briefing now reflects the KCSIE guidance that, if a gender-questioning child does not want to use the changing room designated for their sex, the school should consider an alternative, such as an enclosed room for one child at a time or a different changing time. This replaces the 2024 NSPCC advice that schools should support “transgender and non-binary” children to use the changing rooms they “feel comfortable with”.

The NSPCC leaves out an important safeguarding point in the KCSIE guidance that says: “When responding to a request to support any degree of social transition, a school must not allow a child access to changing rooms designated for the opposite sex” (emphasis added).

This omission is particularly concerning because the charity’s own previous advice contradicted this safeguard, and schools following that guidance were risking the safety, comfort, privacy or dignity of children by not maintaining separate-sex privacy.

Our view is that schools should make every effort to ensure that the correct-sex changing rooms are safe and welcoming for all children, and not move children out because they identify as “trans” or “gender questioning”. Safe alternative spaces and times will not always be available, and subjecting children to lower standards of care because they identify as trans could, in our view, amount to gender-reassignment discrimination.

Staff data. We also raised the NSPCC’s practice of reporting data on its trustees, staff and volunteers as “male (including transgender men)” and “female (including transgender women)”. The NSPCC says this data is historic and that it plans to change its categories when it publishes 2026 figures. We hope the new categories will record sex accurately.

What the NSPCC has not changed

The 2024 briefing told schools to “consider how to support transgender and non-binary young people to use the changing rooms that they feel comfortable with”. That advice has gone, which we welcome.

But neither the revised briefing nor the webpage tells schools that it was wrong, and the NSPCC has declined to do so. Silently removing a sentence does not tell anyone that the policy it previously supported was wrong and should be revisited.

A section once headed “Separating children of different genders” is now titled “Guidance and legislation around toilets and changing facilities in schools”. The NSPCC says this signposts the content clearly. We still think “Separating children by sex” would say more plainly what schools should do. This is a smaller point, but clear headings help busy staff find the rule they need.

The law is not in doubt. School-premises regulations in each part of the UK require separate toilet or washroom provision for boys and girls, and maintaining clear rules and boundaries was always a basic principle of safeguarding.

The NSPCC says it would welcome greater clarity on adult supervision in both KCSIE and the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s forthcoming technical guidance for schools. We think this is passing the buck. The job of the equality regulator is to explain the Equality Act. The Equality Act doesn’t say how schools should run changing rooms. There is nothing to wait for. And the NSPCC should know that.

Same-sex supervision was good practice long before the Supreme Court ruled or KCSIE was updated. The NSPCC is the country’s best-known child-protection charity, and schools rely on its guidance. We are glad it has listened to us on the most important point. We hope it will take the next step and make clear that schools following its previous guidance should revise their policies.

What happens next

We are considering whether to appeal the NSPCC’s decision not to issue a correction to its 2024 advice.

Schools do not need to wait. If your school’s changing-room policy was based on the 2024 NSPCC briefing, now is the time to review it. Sex Matters has produced a whole-school model policy for schools in England that is in line with KCSIE and the Equality Act.

Related content

NSPCC’s changing-room guidance fails girls

An alliance of charities is undermining safeguarding in schools

Letter to the NSPCC

Alice explains why sex has always been an essential statistical variable, and how conflating it with “gender identity” conceals differences in health, crime and life outcomes. They discuss preference falsification: how the vilification of the commonplace understanding of sex as real and biological has led many people to conceal their true views. They look at how public and private organisations, from the Office for National Statistics to sports governing bodies, came to adopt fringe ideas that few people share, and why so many institutions have treated people who raise concerns as the problem.

Finally, Alice discusses the need for stronger free-speech protections and an end to the culture of impunity if sex-based data and evidence-based policy-making are to be restored.

Donate

Sex Matters recently challenged the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in the High Court over Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) legal guidance on deception as to sex. Deceiving a partner about biological sex can mean there is no legally valid consent. But this guidance (which was previously called “deception as to gender”) conflates the concepts of sex and gender identity.

The case was heard by the President of the King’s Bench Division, Dame Victoria Sharp DBE, and the Honourable Mrs Justice Heather Williams. On 25th September 2026 the High Court handed down its judgment dismissing our claim, but making stinging criticism of the CPS guidance.

The CPS guidance is one of many pieces of government guidance that has been influenced by years of transactivist lobbying. Sex (being male or female) is an objective fact that matters when it comes to sexual consent. We think that “gender identity”, which is a subjective feeling or the performance of an identity, does not.

We brought this case to ensure that prosecution guidelines do not undermine justice and that public authorities understand that the reality of sex and the idea of gender are not interchangeable.

Whatever happens next, our action has already gone a significant way towards ironing out confusion and making clear that the DPP must stop taking dictation from transactivists.

Key takeaways

• Important revisions: After we initiated legal action, the DPP agreed to amend and update its guidance.

• CPS guidance criticised: The judges called sections of the guidance that the DPP defended “surprising”, and overly sympathetic towards rape suspects, noting that the text presented suspects as if they were vulnerable persons rather than suspects facing criminal allegations.

• Consent is legally complex: The High Court stopped short of declaring the guidance unlawful, but the judges acknowledged that the criminal law concerning consent obtained by deception remains complex.

• Judicial review appropriate: The High Court rejected the DPP’s argument that the drafting of the Rape and Sexual Offences prosecution guidance was not the kind of thing that could be challenged by judicial review.

• Standing confirmed: The court recognised Sex Matters’ legal standing to bring this challenge, noted our expertise on the legal boundaries of sex and gender and thanked our legal team, Sarah Vine KC and Chris Knight KC (as well as the other side’s legal team) for the “very high quality of the submissions”.

Our challenge focused on two legal issues. The first was that the guidance appears to encourage prosecutors to consider a trans identity as a potential “get out of jail free” card in a case of consent obtained by deception about the suspect’s sex. The second was that it claims that deceiving a sexual partner about “gender identity” could, in itself, negate consent, even when the person is honest about their sex.

The outcomes were:

• The court strongly criticised the guidance for the way that it presents trans identity as a potential mitigation in a case of sex by deception. But it did not think this bad drafting was enough to make the guidance unlawful.

• The court disagreed with us on the legal question of whether deception about gender identity could vitiate consent (it said this couldn’t be ruled out).

Guidance to be improved

Although the court dismissed our challenge, by bringing the case Sex Matters forced the DPP to make changes to the CPS guidance. As the court noted, our pre-action correspondence led to the DPP conceding several points and agreeing to drop some statements from the guidance rather than defend them. The DPP is due to publish a new version of the guidance following our action.

The currently published guidance says “prosecutors should address trans victims, witnesses, suspects and defendants according to their affirmed gender and name, using that gender and related pronouns in all documentation and in the courtroom.”

We said that this erodes legal protections for victims of sexual assault and may result in unfairness.

The DPP accepted this and pledged to amend the guidance to say that preferred pronouns should be used “save where to do so would lead to unfairness and, if in doubt, the matter should be raised with the Court in the absence of the jury”.

The guidance included under its list of factors to be considered:

• Whether the suspect’s gender identity was different to their sex at the time of the alleged offence.

• Whether the suspect had concerns over any potential adverse impacts of revealing their sex.

• Evidence that the complainant was exploring their own sexuality at the time of the alleged offending, if it is consistent with them being aware of the suspect’s sex, gender identity or both.

The DPP agreed to remove these irrelevant considerations when we challenged them. It also agreed to edit a section that suggested that having a gender-recognition certificate might be relevant to whether a crime was committed.

It said that following the For Women Scotland judgment it would change all references to sex to “biological sex” and add new text making clear that the Gender Recognition Act should not be read as imposing recognition of a person’s acquired gender in private, non-legal contexts.

You can see the edits already agreed in this exhibit from the case.

Judgment criticises CPS sympathy for rape suspects

In relation to whether a declared trans identity could help someone avoid prosecution for deception as to sex, the judgment is sharply critical of the guidance. It agrees with our criticism of a particular passage as unusually sympathetic for a document of its kind, which concerns suspects in a rape case.

The guidance appears to encourage prosecutors to consider that a trans person’s belief in the authenticity of their identity is a relevant point against charging them in a case of sex by deception.

The court said this section was “surprising” given that the guidance is intended for prosecutors considering whether a suspect should be charged with a crime, and suggested that “the DPP may wish to reconsider” it:

“The document is not intended to be an equalities policy or a social commentary on difficulties that may be faced by trans or non-binary persons. We doubt the relevance of the inclusion of this section, at least in this form. The effect is that the passage reads as though its subject were a vulnerable person in need of protection, rather than a suspect whose conduct is under scrutiny.”

The judgment, while stopping short of declaring the guidance unlawful, sends a clear message that a trans identity is not a loophole that can be used to excuse abuse of consent. We have written to the DPP to ask how it intends to respond to the court’s criticism.

Deception as to gender identity

Although the court was critical of parts of the guidance, it said that it couldn’t rule out that deception about gender identity could itself vitiate consent.

The legal test depends on whether a deception is closely connected to the nature or purpose of the sexual activity, or whether it is part of the “broader circumstances” around the relationship.

The case of Justine McNally, in which a woman posed as a man to get another woman into bed, established that honesty about a person’s sex matters to consent.

In the “SpyCops” case of Monica, an undercover police officer who lied to a woman he was surveilling, posing as a fellow environmental activist throughout a six-month relationship, was found not guilty of sex by deception. In the case of Lawrence, in which a man lied about having undergone vasectomy, the courts said no crime was committed. Undisclosed HIV status has also been found not to vitiate consent.

No appellate court has so far considered deception in relation to gender identity.

During the case the DPP raised the example of R v H, a first-instance case in which the defendant, a woman who had claimed to be “living as a man”, but was actually a lesbian pleaded guilty. The DPP said this was a case where deception as to gender identity had negated consent. We said it was a wrongful conviction and illustrated a concerning risk of over-prosecution of trans-identifying and gender questioning people.

R v H

JH is a woman who pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault of another woman (for oral sex) and one count of assault by penetration. She was sentenced in September 2021 to 24 months’ imprisonment suspended for two years.

JH and GF had a brief relationship, which began online. GF identifies as heterosexual. JH sent GF photographs in which she presented as male in appearance and suggested she was a post-operative “female-to-male” transsexual.

On two occasions JH performed cunnilingus on GF and on one occasion they also had penetrative sex with JH entering GF from behind. GF believed she was being penetrated by a constructed penis. It subsequently emerged that JH had not had surgery, was still living as a woman and was probably using her fingers. GF said she would never have had a sexual relationship at all had she known the true situation and that she felt betrayed and violated.

JH pleaded guilty (we presume advised by a legal representative who had read the CPS guidance). We argued that while JH was rightly convicted of the offence of assault by penetration because she had penetrated GF with something other than the promised pseudo-penis, JH had been wrongly convicted in relation to giving oral sex. In this case GF knew both the physical nature of the sexual act and the sex of the person performing it. We said that there was no failure to gain consent here.

However the court said that our distinction between the two acts was “highly artificial and unduly technical” and that JH’s “gender identity” mattered to GF’s consent.

R v H is not an authority from a higher court. But High Court in our case said: “Nonetheless, it provides a useful example of how a deception as to gender identity could negate the complainant’s consent.”

We think this is wrong in law. Gender identity is not close enough in purpose or nature to the sexual act to vitiate consent. It is subjective and can be fluid, and may be understood differently by different people, including judges.

The court confirmed that Sex Matters is a charity that “has a genuine interest in and particular experience in relation to the boundaries of sex and gender”. It said that the law on consent is an area “that would benefit considerably from consideration by the Supreme Court in an appropriate case”.

We are considering our next steps with our legal team.

For me, this week has been all about charities, both being chief executive of a tiny one and seeing how some of the big ones have lost sight of their mission and their core principles.

I have just completed the third and final in-person session at a course for new charity chief executives run by the Bayes Business School at City St George’s, University of London. It has been clear that some of the other chief executives experienced my presence viscerally. They regarded my presence as a category error. Others were friendlier, and I learned a lot.

The Charity Commission has clearly been receiving a stream of complaints about charities resisting complying with the Equality Act, and has just sent a series of responses, including to complaints about Stonewall, Amnesty International UK and Southwark Bridge (previously the YWCA – it runs a “women-only” gym along gender self-ID lines).

The commission said it was giving these charities “regulatory advice”. This means their trustees will receive tailored instructions and recommendations on how to improve governance and administration. The trustees will need to respond.

It has also promised to publish general advice to charities imminently. It is important that this doesn’t just repeat what the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s recent guidance on single-sex services says, but addresses the charity sector’s specific pattern of confusion, misdirection and harm.

Charities don’t only provide services (often to the most vulnerable people): they also try to influence culture, norms and public policy. They benefit from public trust and moral force, and are not disciplined – as profit-making enterprises are – by their customers’ freedom to choose. Instead, they are bound to act for the public good. And it is the responsibility of their trustees to make sure they don’t go off course.

But when it comes to people who exhibit gender non-conforming behaviour or appearance, charities have systematically misunderstood what “inclusion” means, with the result that they have lost their way. The sector is one of the most hostile places to be publicly gender critical. This is not just a problem of following bad guidance but a culture and governance problem. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and Amnesty International are just two of the many big established charities that have allowed fringe ideas about gender to divert them from what should be their main focus – in their cases, child safeguarding and human rights.

Charities need to understand that true inclusion of “LGBTQ+” people, in particular gender-questioning children, in services and in public life means recognising their sex, and applying lawful sex-based rules and risk assessments clearly and fairly. Anything else is likely to be gender-reassignment discrimination and could be unlawful.

The other big thing I have been doing this week, together with Sex Matters’ trustees – Emma Hilton, our chair, and Michael Biggs, Rebecca Bull, Simon Knapp and Anya Palmer – is shortlisting applications for new trustees to join our board.

We have been blown away by the breadth and quality of applications. 53 people applied, including senior charity chief executives and NHS clinicians, City lawyers and barristers, professors, a former government minister, senior bankers and technologists – people who have spent decades running organisations, sitting on boards and leading in their fields, putting themselves forward to help govern this small charity.

Charities are difficult to govern, and Sex Matters is more difficult than most. It says a lot that some of the most accomplished people in their professions want to give us their time and do so publicly because they believe the work matters, and because they believe we have built something worthy of their time, trust, reputation and hard work. That trust has been built by everyone who has backed us along the way – so thank you.

The charity sector’s safeguarding problem

Without clear sex-based rules, children are at risk

This week, Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena explain the key role charities have played in allowing misunderstandings of the Equality Act 2010 to undermine safeguarding in schools.

They look at recent NSPCC guidance on changing rooms, which could allow male teachers to supervise female pupils while they get changed, counter to essential safeguarding principles.

They discuss the charity sector’s opposition to Keeping children safe in education, statutory guidance for schools that was recently updated to emphasise the importance of clear sex-based rules.

They argue that schools should reject advice from charities that are unwilling to state and act on risk factors related to sex. Secrecy, lies and evasion about sex put children at risk of abuse, exploitation and harm.

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Find out more

An alliance of charities is undermining safeguarding in schools

NSPCC’s changing-room guidance fails girls

Media coverage

Male teachers can supervise girls in changing rooms, says NSPCC

“It is cowardly, weak and hypocritical of the NSPCC to try to pass the buck for setting detailed, practical guidance on running safe school changing rooms to the equalities regulator. This simply isn’t the EHRC’s job.” - Maya Forstater

Tom McArdle, Daniel Martin • The Telegraph

NSPCC cuts guidance on who can supervise pupil changing rooms

“While removing some of the worst elements of the previous version, it introduced new ambiguity, leaving schools without the clear, lawful advice they need.” - Maya Forstater

Georgia Lambert • The Times

NSPCC’s changing-room guidance fails girls | Fiona McAnena on GB news

Martin Daubney • GB News

Fury as NSPCC say male teachers can supervise girls in changing rooms

“As the leading UK body for the safeguarding of children, what is the NSPCC for if not to do its utmost to protect children? It appears instead to have decided that the safer route is to avoid offending trans activists,... - Maya Forstater

Sam Merriman • Daily Mail

In other news

Civil servants revolt over trans lavatory ban

“It’s bordering on hostile for women, at a time when government departments are keen to get more people back into the office. This is not very welcoming if you’re a female civil servant.” - Fiona McAnena

Daniel Martin • The Telegraph

Burnham must rewrite Equality Act to support trans rights, union activists say

“The only direction this can go is to dismantle vital protections for the sex-based rights of women and girls.” - Maya Forstater

Genevieve Holl-Allen • The Telegraph

Conference discounts for Sex Matters’ supporters

Helen Joyce is speaking on two panels on Sunday 18th October at the Battle of Ideas Festival: one on conversion practices and one titled “Assisted death to sexual freedom: autonomy and its discontents”. Find out more and book using the code SEXMATTERS26 to get an extra 20% off.

Human Gay Male’s interactive one-day Gay Men’s Conference will bring gay men together to explore the issues that matter to them and help shape advocacy based on biological sex and sexual orientation. Book using the code SM20 to get 20 percent off standard passes.

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

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Without it, we simply wouldn’t exist.

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Over the past 15 years, a misunderstanding of the Equality Act 2010 has been allowed to undermine safeguarding in schools. Charities have played a key role.

When Stonewall was established in 1989, it was one of a handful of civil-society organisations focused on sexual orientation. By 2015, the legal battles for gay rights had been won, and it started to campaign in the new field of transgender identity. In 2017, it published findings of an online survey of 11- to 19-year-olds which found that homophobic bullying in schools was decreasing, but children who identified as transgender were more likely to say they were being bullied than gay children were.

The government of the day provided millions of pounds of funding and endorsement for programmes to tackle “homophobic, biphobic and transphobic” bullying in primary and secondary schools, with the money being given to Stonewall and other LGBT charities. The charities offered schools advice, which they said was backed by the Equality Act, such as “people should always be referred to by the pronoun which matches their gender identity” and “young people have the right to access the toilet that corresponds to their gender identity”. By 2025, over 2,000 LGBT civil-society organisations were promoting a similar message.

Their message was also taken up by mainstream children’s charities. Human-rights charities also became convinced that children could be “born in the wrong body” and should be facilitated to transition while at school. Amnesty International and Liberty advocated for children to be given puberty blockers. The NSPCC published advice that schools should allow “transgender and non-binary children and young people” to “use the toilets and changing rooms that they feel comfortable with”.

As the number of children identifying as transgender and non-binary in school and seeking referrals to gender clinics skyrocketed, people began to ask questions about whether all this was really safe, fair or wise.

The charitable sector banded together to coordinate a defence. In 2021, 33 organisations, including Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, LGBT Consortium and Diversity Role Models, criticised the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for supporting the legal case that “gender critical” beliefs are worthy of respect in a democratic society and should be allowed to be expressed. In 2022, after the EHRC had published a cautious position about the then government’s plan to ban “conversion therapy”, a coalition of charities including Liberty, Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, Galop, LGBT Consortium, LGBT Foundation and LGBT Youth Scotland demanded that the regulator’s status as a National Human Rights Institution be downgraded. In 2023, another group of charities tried again.

In 2023, a charity fundraiser called Kevin Taylor-McKnight launched the “I Stand with Trans” campaign. On social media, the campaign declared that “It is not lawful to ACT on gender critical* (*transphobic) views in the workplace – ANY workplace, and we should have zero tolerance of hate in our sector”. Another post warned that “we hear it on good authority that people with gender critical beliefs are trying to infiltrate particular charities by becoming trustees, with the intent to influence policy. Be sure to do your due diligence when recruiting new trustees.” A total of 280 charity leaders signed the pledge against what the campaign called a “transphobic movement” of hate.

In December 2023, LGBT charities objected when the government released guidance for schools in England that took a step back from encouraging schools to enable children to “socially transition”. Mermaids said it found it “difficult to understand” how aspects of the draft guidance were compatible with equality law, including “automatically excluding trans pupils from facilities” [for the opposite sex], “sport bans” [excluding children from sports for the opposite sex] and “allowing students to be misgendered” [referring to their sex]. It told teachers to “disregard these discriminatory guidelines”. It said the approach was “unworkable, out of touch and absurd”. Stonewall said the draft guidance was “not fit for purpose”, “legally unworkable and contrary to existing equality law” and against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Equality Act 2010.

A group of 77 organisations, including Amnesty International, Liberty, Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, Gendered Intelligence, Galop, GIRES, the National Education Union and the Good Law Project, joined with Mermaids in May 2024 to launch the “Supportive Schools Campaign” objecting to the guidance, saying it was “exclusionary and unhelpful”. They complained that it would “seek to deny the existence of transgender pupils”, discourage those children from coming out as “their authentic selves” and lead them to “being forcibly outed to parents and teachers”.

Like the campaigns that preceded it, this extraordinary statement betrays a total disregard for the basic principles of safeguarding, and sets the signatories in opposition to the current statutory safeguarding guidance for schools.

Encouraging secrecy, undermining safeguarding

Parents have primary responsibility for their children. If a child is being encouraged (for example by talking to adults on the internet) to believe that being their “authentic self” requires them to deny their sex, seek to access facilities for the opposite sex, take off-label drugs, bind their breasts or aspire to be castrated, it is essential that their parents are told.

The LGBT charity campaigners view parents as “supportive” only if they support transition. By the notion of “forcibly outing” children, they mean two different things. In the first scenario, a child discloses something in relation to ideas about trans identity, and a staff member tells a parent. The second envisages a scenario where the parents and the school have agreed that the child will attend school presenting as the opposite sex and somebody reveals their actual sex to their teachers and peers.

Secrecy, lies and evasion about sex puts children at risk of abuse, exploitation and harm. This happens when an individual child’s sex is obscured or made unmentionable; it is also true when individuals and organisations are unwilling to clearly state and act on risk factors related to sex. This is not only about decisions on sleepovers or changing rooms: it is also about children and adults keeping secrets and engaging in inappropriate conversations.

Rather than challenge the approach of treating children who identify as trans differently, the chief executives of the major children’s charities – Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) – put out their own statement, which said vaguely: “We support an inclusive model of education that values difference and challenges all types of discrimination and bullying.”

The NSPCC’s guidance on safeguarding LGBTQ+ children and young people references three different Stonewall reports but does not reference the Cass Review.

Piling on international pressure

There were more howls of disapproval from the charity sector in 2024 when the Department for Education updated the statutory safeguarding guidance Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE) to say that “caution is necessary for children questioning their gender as there remain many unknowns about the impact of social transition”. The updated version highlighted vulnerabilities that may co-occur in a child questioning their gender, including mental-health issues, autism and ADHD.

This time international LGBT coalitions stepped in. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth and Student Organisation, IGLYO (whose UK members include Just Like Us, Mermaids, LGBT Youth Scotland and Diversity Role Models), issued a statement together with ILGA-Europe and Transgender Europe that described the guidance a “deeply worrying march toward the attack against trans people in the UK”. It called on the UK government to discard what it said were “dangerous changes” to the statutory safeguarding guidance.

But both the previous Conservative government and the current Labour government appear to have recognised that they should not bow to pressure from activists to abandon safeguarding principles.

The Supreme Court has now made clear that the charities were wrong about the Equality Act. Following the For Women Scotland judgment in April 2025, which confirmed that the Equality Act did not support the charities’ prescriptions, the government updated KCSIE, incorporating the approach of the draft guidance to which the charities objected, and finally giving schools in England official guidance. We recognised this as a big step forward. The guidance now makes clear that no child may be allowed to use opposite-sex toilets, changing rooms or dormitories, and that children seeking to attend school “in stealth” as the opposite sex are a safeguarding concern. This guidance is now mandatory.

Stonewall, meanwhile, had quietly closed its “Diversity Champions” programme for schools.

Defying KCSIE

Despite legal clarity and the unambiguous guidance in KCSIE, some charities have again doubled down, this time forming the Supportive Schools Campaign. Over the summer, they called on the government to “rethink its approach, and amend the KCSIE guidance”. They said that the new guidance is unacceptable because it:

• treats “being trans+” as a problem to be managed rather than an identity to be respected

• requires schools to involve parents by default whenever a child questions their gender, with a narrow exception only where doing so risks harm

• mandates biological sex-based access to toilets and changing rooms with no exceptions “even for pupils who have socially transitioned in every other way”.

Treating safeguarding concerns as “an identity to be respected”, excluding parents and allowing ad hoc exceptions to rules are all indicative of institutional safeguarding failures.

After Girlguiding and the Women’s Institute returned to being female-only organisations earlier this year, a charity governance consultant called Kevin Taylor-McKnight launched a new campaign called Third Sector Against Transphobia. The campaign website says it is “a growing movement of charity professionals, volunteers, community organisations”. Its membership, said to be around 700 people, is secret and access is closely guarded.

The charities that are part of the Supportive Schools Campaign recommend that schools follow a model policy produced by an organisation called Trans and Non Binary Education, which says it is a “charitable trust”. TNB Education does not appear to be registered as a charity, or indeed incorporated at all. It is a small anonymous group of “trans, non-binary, and gender diverse” educators and their allies.

TNB Education’s model policy says that a pupil identifying as trans+ “is not inherently a safeguarding concern on its own”, but suggests that a parent “misgendering” a child is. The group says: “No teacher should be encouraged to automatically disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents, as doing so poses a significant safeguarding risk.”

Safeguarding guidance highlights potential areas of concern to determine an adult’s suitability to work with children. These include attitudes such as:

1. implying that adults and children are equal

2. lack of recognition or understanding of the vulnerability of children, or both

3. inappropriate idealisation of children

4. inadequate understanding of appropriate boundaries between adults and children

5. indicators of negative safeguarding behaviours.

The materials produced by this group of anonymous educators and endorsed by the Supportive Schools Campaign raise concerns in all of these areas.

Larger charities such as the NSPCC should be admitting they made serious mistakes and warning against schools adopting fringe ideas from unregulated, anonymous groups. Instead, the NSPCC has simply updated its guidance on “LGBTQ+ children” and on changing rooms by quietly deleting sections that previously told schools to allow children to use opposite-sex facilities. There is nothing in the NSPCC’s guidance that makes clear that schools must not allow children to use opposite-sex facilities or be recorded or treated as the opposite sex at school.

Diversity Role Models, one of the smaller charities that works with schools, has been absorbed by Stonewall as part of a new approach to influencing schools: not to engage with school leaders by claiming to know how the law works, but to bring charismatic young influencers into schools to work directly with children and tell them to be “allies against unkindness”.

Conversion therapy and the charity complex

Instead of addressing the sector’s safeguarding problem, the charities have shifted their attention to campaigning to criminalise “conversion practices”. The government has published a draft bill which would target parents, teachers and therapists that do not affirm a child’s asserted gender identity. The evidence upon which the government relies to support the draft bill comes from online surveys from Stonewall and Galop.

TNB Education, however, describes conversion practices as including “misgendering”, confiscating or controlling access to pupil’s belongings, controlling and monitoring a pupil’s movements and restricting access to medicines. Thus it casts as abusive the behaviour of a protective parent who refuses to go along with a child’s asserted gender identity, such as monitoring online activity, confiscating a breast binder or hormones bought on the internet or preventing the child from associating with inappropriate groups of adults.

In July, Amnesty International published a report that smeared gender-critical groups as “anti-rights” and accused organisations that take a cautious approach to psychological care of undertaking conversion therapy. It later, under pressure, apologised and called this an “isolated error”.

The last time a UK government committed to ban what the activists call “conversion therapy”, in 2022, it engineered an external deadline by announcing an international conference called Safe to be me. When concerns about the impact on vulnerable children later led it to backtrack on the proposals for a ban, 100 LGBT+ charities threatened to boycott the summit, and it was cancelled.

The 2024 Labour government repeated the same move, committing itself (and now Andy Burnham’s government) to provide £21 million for charities promoting LGBT rights internationally, and committing the UK to hold a European LGBT+ summit in May 2027. The prospect of receiving some of this funding creates an incentive for charities to stick together, and the summit is a mechanism for government-funded charities to provide pressure to get the bill through Parliament. All of this creates a strong incentive not to look too closely at the charity sector’s promotion of practices that undermine safeguarding.

The Charity Commission has urged charities to follow the EHRC code of practice on the Equality Act 2010, but shows no sign of understanding the systematic safeguarding failure that was enabled by misunderstanding the act.

Organisations that tell schools to ignore statutory safeguarding guidance and principles have no place in schools. Any charity that does this should be reported to the Charity Commission. Any school that takes advice from such a charity should be reported to Ofsted.

Related content

NSPCC’s changing-room guidance fails girls

They look at recent NSPCC guidance on changing rooms, which could allow male teachers to supervise female pupils while they get changed, counter to essential safeguarding principles.

They discuss the charity sector’s opposition to Keeping children safe in education, statutory guidance for schools that was recently updated to emphasise the importance of clear sex-based rules.

They argue that schools should reject advice from charities that are unwilling to state and act on risk factors related to sex. Secrecy, lies and evasion about sex put children at risk of abuse, exploitation and harm.

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Maya in Westminster Hall, March 2026. Photo: Belinda Jiao

I was in Parliament this Monday for a cross-party briefing on the draft Conversion Practices Bill, which targets parents, teachers, therapists and religious bodies in England and Wales. The meeting was well attended by gender-critical peers and MPs who wanted to understand how to challenge it, and its prospects of becoming law.

The panel consisted of lawyers and campaigners. The most heart-breaking testimony was from the mother of a trans-identifying child. She described ordinary parents already facing police investigations and threats of prison over their gender-distressed children. “It takes us backwards to the pre-Cass era because it makes unquestioning affirmation of a child’s cross-sex identity the safest option,” she said, adding that it “casts suspicion on any parents who don’t go along with the idea that their child has some kind of mind-body mismatch that might require fixing via hormones and surgery.”

A conversion-therapy ban was first promised in 2018 by Theresa May’s government. But the stage of a draft bill being published has only now been reached. Next month that bill will go to a parliamentary committee for pre-legislative scrutiny.

In the eight years politicians have been talking about the urgent need for this new law, said one speaker at the event, no one has produced a single case of a genuine victim of abuse being failed by police or the courts under existing law. The gap the bill claims to fix simply hasn’t been shown to exist.

Its promoters say the bill is carefully targeted, but the lawyers in the room highlighted its extremely broad scope. Ordinary, careful parenting, for example withdrawing a child from a school “Pride Club”, limiting internet access, declining an immediate referral to gender services or continuing to use a child’s birth name, is likely to fit the bill’s definitions of controlling behaviour, psychological pressure and economic pressure.

Behind the narrow-seeming criminal offence are “protection orders”, which will be used to target ordinary speech and loving parenting. These are granted on the civil standard of proof – “more likely than not” – rather than the criminal standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”. They are generally easy to get as courts aren’t keen on making it hard to protect someone. Their terms aren’t meaningfully limited: a court can order anything, including compelling or restricting language. And if you breach a protection order, you may face prison time.

Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, a private member’s bill is being used to push forward a similar conversion-practices bill with all the same problems. An online consultation closes on Thursday 1st October. My colleague Fiona McAnena will speak at an event in Belfast on 25th September, organised by Genspect and the Free Speech Union, about the threat the bill poses to free speech. At least plans for a separate conversion-practices ban in Scotland have been shelved for now.

We and our allies are continuing to work hard to fight these draconian, unnecessary and harmful plans. LGB Alliance organised a mass lobby in Westminster on 1st September and a drop-in briefing for MPs on 8th September, both highlighting how the bill harms rather than helps gay people. Bin the Bill, a new grassroots campaign focused on opposing the bill, launched over the summer. Give them a follow.

At the event on Monday, the panel made a case that Sex Matters will keep pressing as this bill moves forward: that “conversion practices” legislation rests on a shaky evidence base, offers almost no protection to the people it will be used against, and risks criminalising conscientious parenting, prayer and plain speech. A formal call for written evidence is expected shortly, and we will be providing guidance on writing to MPs later in the process.

Find out more

Testing the evidence on conversion practices

Our report examines the government-funded helpline, research from Galop and other evidence cited in support of the draft Conversion Practices Bill, and concludes that the case for new legislation is not supported by the facts.

Fixing unlawful “trans inclusion” policies

Tanya de Grunwald on sex and gender at work

In this week’s episode, Fiona McAnena is joined by Tanya de Grunwald, host of the This isn’t Working podcast and founder of the This is Working network, to discuss how employers should navigate the sex and gender debate.

Widespread misunderstanding of the law over the past decade has resulted in workplace policies that now urgently need to be put right. Fiona and Tanya explore why some employers are correcting these policy mistakes while others remain stuck, the cost of ignoring these issues and why open, professional conversations in the workplace are the way back to reality.

Exclusive discount

Human Gay Male is offering Sex Matters’ supporters 20 percent off standard passes to its annual conference: use the code SM20. This interactive one-day event will bring gay men together to explore the issues that matter to them and help shape advocacy based on biological sex and sexual orientation.

In other news

‘Woman is a dirty word’: The trans culture of fear plaguing the NHS

“It’s like life under a repressive regime. Most people disagree with the policy but no one dares to object, because no one knows who the informers are. Everyone has to bite their tongue and play along. You wear your pronoun... - Fiona McAnena

Janet Murray • The Telegraph

Single-sex spaces in the NHS | Helen Joyce on Talk TV

Duncan Barkes • Talk TV

Trans in the City ‘misleading employers’ with company guidelines, campaigners claim

Ali Lyon for City AM reports on our letter asking the EHRC to take urgent action over guidance published by Trans in the City that is wrong in law and misleads employers about their legal obligations.

Ali Lyon • City AM

Girlguiding is for girls | Fiona McAnena debates a trans activist on BBC Radio 5

Stephen Nolan • BBC Radio 5

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