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.

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

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

Conference discounts for our 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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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

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.

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

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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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

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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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

This week’s memo is a back-to-school special.

Over the summer I went to the archives at the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London. I delved into the records of 20 years of behind-the-scenes lobbying by organisations such as GIRES, Press for Change, Mermaids and Stonewall as they juggled from transsexuals to transgender to trans, and from adults to children.

On 1st September the Department of Education’s new statutory guidance for schools and colleges in England, Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE), came into effect. It is a significant step in pushing back against these long-embedded language games.

It makes clear that schools must not allow pupils into toilets, changing rooms or residential accommodation designated for the opposite sex and that every child’s sex must be recorded accurately wherever sex is recorded. (Northern Ireland has a short, simple policy to the same effect; Scottish guidance has been updated following For Women Scotland but still has a long way to go; and there is no statutory guidance in Wales.)

Mermaids said of the KCSIE guidance: “Much of the language around trans children… is confusing and contradictory.” It isn’t as long as you recognise that children are boys or girls, and that it is not safe, fair or practical for a school to try to mislead staff or other pupils about what sex any child is.

Mermaids continues to promote the idea that “not all staff and pupils should know about a trans child or young person’s sex assigned at birth”. This attempt to wriggle around the guidance shows why the language needs to be absolutely clear.

At the beginning of the summer the Equality and Human Rights Commission released new draft technical guidance on the Equality Act for schools in England, Scotland and Wales which seems to want to rewind back to the past.

In the EHRC’s world, children are not “gender questioning” but “trans boys” and “trans girls”. A boy’s school might have a policy for admitting “trans boys” (girls), and a mixed school might deem it appropriate for a boy who identifies as a girl to be banished to a teachers’ changing room instead of being included in the boys’ changing room.

This gets the Equality Act backwards. The EHRC draft guidance promotes discrimination by telling schools that it is okay to affirm that children are not welcome in facilities for their own sex because they are perceived to have a protected characteristic.

If you have a child at school in England, you can send your school our model policy, which is in line with KSCIE and the Equality Act.

Your homework this week is to think about responding to the EHRC consultation before the 30th September deadline. You don’t need to be a lawyer, teacher or expert to respond (though all these perspectives are welcome). The EHRC also wants to hear from parents and young people.

Read our analysis of the EHRC technical guidance (and watch this week’s podcast). We will publish more about the consultation next week.

Find out more

EHRC technical schools guidance is not fit for purpose

Analysis of EHRC draft technical guidance for schools

Safeguarding and trans identification in schools

KCSIE and EHRC technical guidance

As the autumn term begins, Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena discuss statutory safeguarding guidance, as well as draft technical guidance on equality law for schools from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

Disappointingly, the EHRC’s guidance is riddled with serious legal errors. Unless it is significantly revised, it will mislead schools about their legal duties and what they must do in order to treat all pupils fairly and safely.

This draft guidance is open for consultation until Wednesday 30th September. It’s an important opportunity for parents, teachers and others concerned about protecting children from gender ideology to ensure that the equality regulator hears what they have to say.

In other news

Hospital ask schoolboy, 13, if he is PREGNANT before allowing X-ray as ‘ridiculous gender nonsense’ exposed

“Of course that clinician knew that the patient was a boy.” - Fiona McAnena

Mark McLaughlin • The Sun

Parkrun fury as transgender runners keep winning women’s category

“The message to women and girls is this: your achievements don’t matter. We put these men’s feelings ahead of yours.” - Fiona McAnena

Richard Ashmore • Daily Express

Women demand transgender Parkrun competitors born male are barred from female event – including one who has ‘finished first 100 times’

“The law is clear: when a sporting event offers a female category, that is a category for women. It shouldn’t include some men.” - Fiona McAnena

Janet Murray, Nicholas Pyke • Daily Mail

Events

Banned in Belfast? The Free Speech Union and Genspect are discussing conversion therapy, free speech and the new Northern Ireland in Belfast on Friday 25th September. Find out more or buy a ticket now.

The Battle of Ideas Festival is on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th October in London. Helen Joyce is speaking on conversion practices on the Sunday. Find out more and book using the code SEXMATTERS26 to get an extra 20% off.

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

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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

“You must be sick of talking about this.” That’s what Steve N. Allen said to me on the Free Speech Nation show on GB News on Sunday night. He was talking about the latest rebellion against the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s revised code of practice that had come into force on 5th August.

The fight to make the Equality Act clear was won when the Supreme Court gave judgment in favour of grassroots campaigners For Women Scotland. But it seems like every week brings a new report of formerly law-abiding organisations declaring that women who want male-free spaces for any reason are hateful and bigoted. They claim that the law and EHRC guidance are complicated and unworkable – but also that these are clear enough to be actively flouted, and that they plan to do just that.

Six London councils have vowed to disobey the law. So have trade unions representing millions of workers. Next month the TUC will vote on a motion to “oppose the EHRC code of practice”. Meanwhile students (and a handful of staff) at Oxford University have demanded that the university use “its money, prestige, and power” to resist the EHRC code and to challenge its interpretation of the law.

But look beyond the news stories highlighting such shameless grandstanding and you will see a more positive story, one of quiet compliance. Organisations amending flawed policies tend not to shout about it, but the shift from two years ago, before the Supreme Court judgment, is massive.

As our sports timeline shows, the judgment precipitated a speedy shift in sport policy in the UK, restoring fairness for women in football, netball, cricket and others within weeks. Many other organisations claimed they were waiting for the EHRC code before deciding what to do. This feeble excuse was frustrating, but when the code finally came into force it triggered another round of policy updates.

A particularly good example is clear guidance from UK Active, the industry body for the leisure sector. Published earlier this month, it tells gym and swimming-pool operators that single-sex changing rooms are best, and must be run lawfully.

As more and more organisations come into line, the fightback by transactivists is getting more desperate. We are seeing disinformation spread by activist organisations and a handful of trans-identifying men who claim expertise. Their websites and LinkedIn pages provide “advice” that is simply wrong. Any employer or service provider following this advice is surely doing so because it’s what they want to believe. Inevitably, more legal challenges will follow.

So, yes, I am sick of it. I imagine we all are. It’s infuriating that we have to keep talking about something that should have been settled long ago. But the more we talk, the more change we see, and it’s only going in the right direction. The incoherent position promoted by transactivists looks shakier by the day.

Find out more

The councils and unions flouting the law

We’ve updated our guide, Providing single-sex services with confidence.

Media coverage

Female union members deserve better | Fiona McAnena on Talk TV

Duncan Barkes • Talk TV

Oxford staff and students rebel over single-sex space rules

“It’s worrying that some of the UK’s brightest minds can’t get their heads around the simple fact that the EHRC doesn’t make the law, but merely advises organisations on how to follow it.” - Helen Joyce

Bill Curtis • The Times

Trade unions vow to fight against single-sex spaces

“The mad rush by unions to prioritise the feelings of trans-identifying men over the rights of women to safety and dignity in the workplace is a shocking scandal.” - Fiona McAnena

Francine Wolfisz • Daily Mail

Conversion Practices Bill threatens ethical therapy

Proposed new law will drive away therapists and criminalise responsible parents

In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce speaks to psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, founder and director of Genspect, about how the government’s plans to criminalise so-called “conversion practices” would harm families and therapists.

Good therapy requires open, trusting conversations, Stella points out. But the planned law risks making discussions about trans identification taboo, and driving therapists away from working with gender-distressed young people, who will be left without support. Stella also explains how conversion-practices bans elsewhere have silenced parents and prevented them from giving their children honest, loving guidance.

Watch Stella’s conversation with Canadian writer Peter Gajdics about surviving abusive conversion therapy and why he now believes conversion-therapy bans are a Trojan horse.

Catch up on our conversation with non-practising barrister Dennis Kavanagh on the flaws of the draft Conversion Practices Bill.

Read our briefing on the bill.

In other news

Conflicting ideas of fairness in women’s sports fuel transgender participation debate

“If you have male pattern development, you shouldn’t be in women’s sport … That’s the only way it can exist as the category.” Emma Hilton

Reuters • Devdiscourse

Amnesty has been captured by a pernicious form of progressivism

An editorial in The Times said that Amnesty International had strayed from its founding human-rights principles by branding Sex Matters, For Women Scotland and other organisations defending sex-based rights as “anti-rights”. It added that a worryingly naive worldview has taken...

The Times View • The Times

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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

Maya with Professor Jo Phoenix at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please donate

Women in Northern Ireland speak up

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

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

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

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

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

In other news

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

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

Fintan Starkey • GB News

Unions pledge to resist EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces

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

Bill Curtis • The Times

The British institutions defying the Supreme Court’s trans ruling

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

Jill Foster • The Telegraph

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

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

Sophia Sleigh • The Sun

Amnesty claims against Sex Matters ‘no isolated error’

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

Sanchez Manning • The Times

City giants tighten trans policies

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

Ali Lyon • City AM

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

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

It isn’t over yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we’re continuing this legal fight

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

Media coverage

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

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

Breaking news

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Supreme Court ruling means for charities

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

In other news

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

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

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

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Maya on a visit to Belfast in 2024

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

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

This is belief discrimination and it is unlawful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

46 reasons to keep going

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

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

• Helen on sex, gender identity and human rights

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

Media coverage

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

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

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

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

Keeping children safe in education

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

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

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

Send a school our model policy

In other news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast

The Amnesty report

The charity is in trouble for defaming gender-critical organisations

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

Amnesty must answer

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

Find out more

Amnesty faces backlash

The Charity Commission must act

Media coverage

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

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

In other news

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Dr Emma Hilton (chair), Maya Forstater (chief executive) and board members Anya Palmer, Professor Michael Biggs, Simon Knapp and Rebecca Bull at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations offices

Last week Sex Matters’ board (who are my collective bosses and have fiduciary duty for the charity and responsibility for making sure it stays on mission) met to talk governance. As for every charity, it is the board’s role to approve strategy in line with our charitable purposes, scrutinise and agree the budget, think about risk, ensure there are policies and systems in place to manage it, and support the team and me to deliver our strategy.

As a young organisation in an extremely challenging environment, we have had to do a lot of learning about the nuts and bolts of being an organisation while also working at top speed. The expression “building the plane as we are flying it” is one we often use.

The board thanked Charlotte Cadden, who has been elected as a Conservative Councillor in Bolton and will therefore be stepping down. Charlotte has been a huge asset to Sex Matters, bringing to the board her calm, curious and pragmatic style, and frontline experience from her role as a police officer for 30 years in Greater Manchester Police.

The trustees agreed on Dr Emma Hilton as permanent chair. Emma has been on Sex Matters’ board since the organisation was founded. She is an expert on biology and sports and is frequently consulted for her expertise. Since December 2025 she has been interim chair, and she is principled, open, careful and collaborative in that role. It has been a pleasure working with her over the past six months and I look forward to continuing to work with her.

The board also welcomed Simon Knapp, our new treasurer.

In the coming weeks Sex Matters will be seeking new applicants to join the board of trustees. The board would particularly like to hear from you if you have experience as a charity trustee or chief executive, or as a non-executive director on the board of a mission-driven business or social enterprise (read Sex Matters’ annual report and look out for a separate email with details of how to apply).

This weekend I am looking forward to speaking at the Women’s Rights Network national conference in London. I am on a panel with Professor Jo Phoenix, Akua Reindorf KC and Susan Smith of For Women Scotland. Our session is on Women and the law: Is the social contract between women and the state broken? Unfortunately Naomi Cunningham, who was supposed to be on the same panel, can’t make it as she is tied up with the ongoing Tempest v DEFRA tribunal concerning the gender-critical SEEN civil-service network.

Among the other speakers are Julie Bindel, Rosie Duffield, Tracy Edwards MBE, Maeve Halligan, Dr Emma Hilton, Cathy Larkman and Connie Shaw. Down the road will be the CAN-SG conference Rethinking youth gender medicine, which runs on to Monday. Among the expert speakers are Professor Alice Sullivan, Zhenya Abbruzzese, Dr David Bell, Sex Matters board member Professor Michael Biggs, Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend, Dr Anna Hutchinson and Dr Stella O’Malley of Genspect.

Helen Joyce will be at the CAN-SG conference both days; Fiona McAnena is splitting her time between the two events. We are looking forward to seeing so many brilliant friends, and making new ones. Do come up and say hello if you’re attending.

Sex Matters is one of a band of organisations in the UK and internationally that have bootstrapped themselves into existence in order to combat the harm and injustice caused by gender ideology. We have gone about it in different ways, with different strategies, focusing on different aspects: medicine, children, LGB people, free speech, feminism, the law, the civil service, sport and more.

Sex Matters is a single-issue, non-partisan human-rights charity. We campaign for clarity about sex in law and policy in the UK. We do this because sex matters for fairness and safety for women, for children to grow up secure in their bodies and for institutions to work for us all. We think it is important for people to be able to talk about the two sexes so they can argue about what the social contract should be (that’s what being “worthy of respect in a democratic society” is about). My job is to lead in shaping our strategy and building a team that can deliver it. Thank you for your support: we couldn’t do without it.

Conversion Practices Bill targets parents

Draft bill threatens families, free speech and religious rights

In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce speaks to Dennis Kavanagh, director at the Gay Men’s Network and non-practising barrister, about the legal minefield that is the draft Conversion Practices Bill.

Dennis examines the low threshold for criminality in Clause 1 of the bill, which states that “any conduct” can be a conversion practice and risks putting parenting on trial and breaching human rights.

Helen and Dennis speak about the potential for transactivists to use the bill to suppress discussion of trans ideology and the harms of gender-affirming care.

Victory in the US Supreme Court

Those fighting to protect sport for women and girls in the USA won a major victory on 30th June when the Supreme Court declared, in a robust and thorough judgment, that state laws restricting female sport to those born female are lawful. The verdict on this point was unanimous: 9–0. A separate legal argument on whether transgender identity should be nominated for special consideration (by being granted “equal protection” status under the constitution) was rejected 6–3.

Sex Matters provided input – “amicus curiae” briefs are the US equivalent of intervening in the case.

Find out more

• Our written explainer on the cases

• Podcast – Helen and Fiona discuss the case when it was heard in January

• Sex Matters on the significance of the interpretation of sex in the Equality Act

• Dr Emma Hilton, Sex Matters chair, on sex testing in sport.

Media coverage

Helen joined Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV to discuss the news.

Debunking fantastical claims about conversion therapy

The government launched its draft conversion-therapy bill saying it has found evidence that 75,000–93,000 people each year experience abusive conversion practices each year in England and Wales.

It suggests this can be stopped at minimal cost (45 minutes of familiarisation for each police officer, social worker and other public-sector worker who needs to know about the new law), and that the ban would prevent tens of thousands of cases of clinical depression.

Every piece of this reasoning (which starts with taking seriously a Stonewall survey that found there are some 25,000 gay exorcisms each year) is fantastical.

In 2022 the Government Equalities Office established a national conversion-therapy helpline which ran for three years at a cost of £360,000. It has released no details of how many (or few) calls it received. A report published by LGBT charity Galop, which operated the service, appears to suggest that no more than a handful of callers reported conversion practices each year.

Find out more

• Read our blog post on the £360,000 helpline that didn’t ring

• Read our report examining the lack of evidence

• Watch Baroness Cash, shadow minister for equalities, raise our analysis in the House of Lords.

Media coverage

The Telegraph (Daniel Martin) quoted analysis by Sex Matters showing that most of the cases presented by LGBT charity Galop to back its claim that a law against conversion practices is needed concerned actions that are either already criminal or else concern private and family life, such as a parent refusing to use a child’s “preferred pronouns”.

In other news

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has told army chiefs to assess whether trans-identifying soldiers can use opposite-sex facilities on a “case-by-case basis” while a new policy is being developed following the Supreme Court ruling. The Sunday Telegraph (Sabrina Miller) quoted Maya as saying that the MoD is exposing female service personnel to an officially endorsed policy of harassment and discrimination by allowing male soldiers into women’s showers.

West London NHS Trust has told patients that they can use single-sex facilities based on their “legal gender”, meaning that hospitals will still allow men to use female-only wards and toilets more than a year after the Supreme Court ruling. The Telegraph (Michael Searles) quoted Fiona as saying that the term “legal gender” has no basis in law or medicine.

Two much-anticipated reports into NHS maternity failings by Baroness Amos and Donna Ockenden came under criticism this week by referring to “birthing people” rather than “women”. The Daily Mail (Shaun Wooller) and Daily Express (Hanna Geissler) quoted Fiona as saying that shoehorning “birthing people” into both reports, presumably so as not to offend the trans lobby, shows shameful disregard for the mothers and babies let down by NHS trusts across the UK.

A GCSE revision guide by Pearson instructs Spanish language students using phrases about how they “follow/admire” someone who “fights/fought for transgender rights”. The Telegraph (Albert Tait) quoted Helen as saying that this example reveals how extensive and subtle the indoctrination of children in schools is.

Queen Camilla’s meeting with JK Rowling was criticised by transactivists. Maya was interviewed by Nana Akua on GB News and Helen was interviewed by Mark Dolan on Talk TV.

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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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Lobby day on 10th March to protest about the puberty-blocker trial. Photo: Belinda Jiao

Following For Women Scotland’s latest legal win, this week the Scottish Government finally accepted that forcing female prisoners to share accommodation with transgender males was unlawful and indefensible, and Scottish women’s prisons are once more women-only.

But meanwhile the government in Westminster has published a “conversion practices” bill for England and Wales that threatens parents with jail if they don’t affirm a child who declares a transgender identity. We also heard this week that the puberty-blocker trial is moving again (subject to legal challenge).

The previous week we had met Olivia Bailey, the minister who is leading on this topic, and told her both in person and in writing afterwards that the proposed law would harm those it sets out to protect. She said that there would be safeguards to protect exploratory therapy. But the bill only conceives of exploration based on the idea that some people are “born in the wrong body”, and that the way to resolve that is to try to live as the opposite sex, perhaps with extreme medical intervention, and certainly without consideration that other people have rights.

Like many of you, I am deeply disappointed that Baroness Cass is supporting the puberty-blocker trial. It’s hard to overstate the importance and influence of the review she led, which laid bare the scandal of the lack of evidence underpinning “gender-affirmative” treatment. But the report had limitations, most seriously – as we said at the time – its failure to tackle the school-to-clinic pipeline and its endorsement of the idea of a puberty-blocker trial.

We met Baroness Cass twice when she was undertaking her review, and we said to her what we said to Olivia Bailey last week, and will keep saying: transitioning children is not consistent with safeguarding or preparing them for a healthy adult life in a world which recognises that sex is real and immutable.

For 15 years the NHS has subjected children to ideologically driven, evidence-free treatment based on the belief that others can be forced to accept them as the opposite sex. This was a promise doctors had no business making.

It is completely unethical to damage the health of more children in pursuit of this fantasy, or to expose parents, teachers and others to threats of investigation and even jail for resisting it.

Neither the puberty-blocker trial nor the conversion-therapy bill makes any sense. They are solutions looking for a problem. What they are trying to solve is the conundrum that adult transsexualism requires others to engage in extreme societal accommodation. The Supreme Court has already said No to that.

The puberty-blocker trial is going to court, and the conversion-therapy bill is going to Parliament (for pre-legislative scrutiny). We will be working in both arenas to attack the indefensible.

Find out more

Baroness Cass is wrong about the puberty-blocker trial

Draft conversion-practices bill threatens parents with jail time

Media coverage

In The Telegraph (Daniel Martin) and GB News (Alice Tomlinson), Maya was quoted as saying that this is a dangerous proposal which will harm the people it purports to protect, and that it is reckless for the government to push on with this when it’s well known that many young people who adopt a transgender identity as children or teenagers grow up to be gay instead.

Sex, gender and free speech on campus

Trans ideology in British universities

In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce and Fiona McAnena discuss the current climate of free speech and gender ideology within British universities.

Helen reflects on her recent talk to students at Durham Union – you can read her account of the event on her Substack.

Read our recent report, Getting back on track, which explains how the legislative framework can enable and protect sport at a university level.

In other news

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is moving ahead with the widely condemned puberty-blocker trial following an unsuccessful legal challenge. It was covered in the Daily Mail (Shaun Wooller), The Times (Eleanor Hayward), The Sun (Sam Blanchard) and The Telegraph (Laura Donnelly). Helen was quoted as saying that gender ideology has broken yet another institution, as the MHRA’s mission is supposedly to “put patients first” in everything it does, yet it is signing off on a trial that does the opposite.

Later in the week, Baroness Cass backed the puberty-blocker trial in an interview with BBC News in which she said the trial will help “reduce harm”. The Telegraph (Michael Searles) quoted Maya as saying that it was grossly irresponsible of Cass to put children at grave risk by making misleading and unevidenced remarks in support of a trial of puberty blockers.

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On Wednesday 10th June, it was five years since I won my employment appeal tribunal, with a judgment that gender-critical beliefs are “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. It was also five years since we launched the Sex Matters memo to update people who helped our fledgling organisation get off the ground. Thank you to everyone who has supported us.

I marked the anniversary with an interview (and cake!) with Mr Menno. We talked about why a belief-discrimination case was the right test case to bring, the change it created, how Sex Matters started and how the Gender Wars might end. So much has happened during those five years, in part because of the legal precedent but much more because of the public and political actions enabled by the growing freedom to speak. But at the top of institutions, wilful inertia remains the rule.

Menno and I talked about the phone call in which the boss of the Center for Global Development, Masood Ahmed, told me I had lost my job. “We recognise sex-slash-gender,” he told me. “That’s not the law,” I replied. “In the UK, sex is a protected characteristic.” Losing my job simply for stating a personal characteristic that is supposed to attract legal protection was bewildering at first – and then maddening.

It’s now beyond doubt that sex means sex in the Equality Act. But it remains bewildering and maddening that leaders of powerful institutions have failed even to acknowledge that their legal misunderstandings were a serious mistake. More than that, many are still trying to find ways around the law, meaning that we are still having to keep saying: “That’s not the law.”

The latest victory was the excellent news that For Women Scotland has won its challenge against the Scottish Government’s cruel policy of placing trans-identifying male prisoners alongside female prisoners in women’s jails. The court said this policy was never lawful, and that the Scottish Government could not simply keep going in the hope that individual prisoners won’t bring discrimination claims.

To quote from the ruling: “service-providers and those who exercise public functions must make sure that the ways in which they carry out those responsibilities are lawful.” This applies whether you’re a private company like Marks & Spencer, which claims to have single-sex changing rooms but in reality doesn’t, or whether you’re a public body or indeed a national government.

But even as we were celebrating this win, we also heard that the MHRA is pushing ahead for a dangerous, unnecessary medical trial of puberty blockers for gender-confused children. James Esses, Keira Bell and the Bayswater Group of parents will be seeking an emergency injunction.

On 16th June Sex Matters was back in court for our own judicial review, which is against the National Police Chiefs’ Council and British Transport Police. Like For Women Scotland in the Scottish prisons case, we were arguing against a public authority that seeks to operate outside the law. Our case is against official guidance for police forces that they can sidestep the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the law that governs how they detain suspects and collect evidence. PACE is absolutely clear that strip-searching must be carried out by an officer of the same sex as the detainee. And yet the NPCC and BTP claim that in certain circumstances that essential legal safeguard can be ignored.

Left to right: Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena outside the Royal Courts of Justice on 16th June 2026 (Picture: Belinda Jiao)

It is an essential characteristic of democracies that they do not operate shadow regimes outside what the law specifies. The power to search individuals and collect evidence that might be used to deprive them of their liberty is among the state’s most coercive, and should be especially carefully controlled. As the judge said in the case of campaigner Harry Miller, who successfully fought against the recording of a non-crime hate incident against his name because of some rather banal tweets: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

The policy we are challenging was put in place after the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland. It tries to find a way around the law by saying opposite-sex searches can be carried out “consensually”. We were in court with Cathy Larkman, who is a retired police superintendent and the policing lead for the Women’s Rights Network, and with Rachel Fletcher, the chair of the Police SEEN network of serving officers who have bravely spoken up.

Cathy Larkman of WRN (left) and Rachel Fletcher of Police SEEN

Cathy and I had provided witness statements. Cathy’s drew on her more than 30 years of experience as a police officer. Mine included material from interviews with serving officers. Some were women who told us how humiliating it would be for them to search male detainees – including men who have committed violent and sexual crimes against women. Some were men who told us how wrong it would be for them to strip-search confused teenage girls on the basis that they “identify” as boys.

It is bewildering and maddening that we are still having to bring cases like this against public bodies, fighting policies and guidance produced by public servants and allowed to stand by ministers, all of them too cowardly to do their job of following the law and protecting our democracy, but still willing to draw their salaries from it. But as long as they continue to flout the law, we will keep going.

Thank you to everyone who supported me in my case and all these other important cases. Thank you too to everyone who has supported Sex Matters in our work, and who has found a way to use their voice. You changed everything!

Find out more

Maya’s employment appeal tribunal

Media coverage

Our judicial review against NPCC and BTP was covered in the news by Police Oracle, Policing Insight and Danny Halpin for PA Media, whose story was published by regional news outlets across the UK including Nation Cymru. Counsel for Sex Matters, Tim Owen KC, was quoted as saying that the law governing police searching expressly stated that all searches beyond outer clothing must be carried out by someone of the same sex as the detainee, and a shadow “consensual” searching regime was simply unlawful.

Donate to our legal challenge

Abusive strip-searching rules: our legal challenge

Why we’ve taken police chiefs to court, with guest Cathy Larkman

In this week’s podcast Helen Joyce talks to Cathy Larkman, policing lead at Women’s Rights Network, about our judicial review against the National Police Chiefs’ Council over its abusive strip-searching policy.

Cathy, who served as a police officer for more than 30 years, finishing her career as a superintendent, speaks from experience about how female police officers will come under pressure to search male detainees, including rapists, cross-dressing fetishists and men who simply enjoy threatening and humiliating women.

Read about our case.

Read State sanctioned sexual assault, Cathy’s report for the Women’s Rights Network.

Can you spare two minutes to email your MP?

Nearly 150 MPs have signed Labour MP Stella Creasy’s motion calling for Parliament to reject the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s draft code of practice. But they seem not to understand that the code doesn’t make law; it just explains how to follow the law.

More than 1,200 Sex Matters supporters have already written to their MPs. Could you spare a couple of minutes to do this? Use our simple online tool to challenge them if they signed or offer your support if they didn’t.

Take action now!

In other news

The Association of Green Councillors has issued guidance to the Green Party’s councillors which wrongly states that trans-identifying men do not have to be excluded from single-sex spaces, as reported by The Telegraph (Genevieve Holl-Allen). Fiona was quoted as saying that Green Party councillors who act on this disinformation could put their local authority at risk of legal action, and will also be letting down all those who want single-sex spaces and services.

Outrage over Lush’s decision to launch a Pride Month window display featuring a cartoon tiger with mastectomy scars was covered by The Telegraph (Gabriella Swerling). Helen said that the campaign was deeply disturbing and offensive, and that the grim fact that thousands of girls and young women have had healthy breasts cut off in an effort to look like men is a tragedy.

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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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Helen Joyce and Dr Emma Hilton, chair of Sex Matters, with former police officer Cathy Larkman

Like everyone who opposes trans ideology, I would imagine, I sometimes still boggle at its depraved consequences. Among these have been policies saying that if a male police officer identifies as a woman, or has a piece of paper from the government saying he is a woman, then he is a suitable person to carry out a strip-search on a female detainee. That was the policy of nearly every police force in the UK until the Supreme Court judgment of April 2025, despite it being obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense and compassion that a woman’s already traumatic experience of being strip-searched would be made a thousand times worse if the person doing it was a man. How he identifies is irrelevant.

We have all repeated the facts a thousand times by now. Nearly all sexual criminals are men. Nearly all their victims are women. “Trans women” – men who say they are women – aren’t magically less prone to such crimes than other men; indeed prison figures suggest that they may be more prone. Some are motivated to cross-dress by a fetish; policies that treat them as women are sexually exciting for them. And of course allowing trans-identifying male officers to strip-search women would enable serious human-rights abuses against vulnerable women. That proponents of doing so claimed to be motivated by human rights was sickening.

In late 2024 Sex Matters started a legal challenge against British Transport Police over an opposite-sex searching policy, which was settled after the Supreme Court judgment led to it being withdrawn. And yet so determined are the gender ideologues to enable opposite-sex strip-searching that they have tried again, this time with guidance written by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, a talking shop that produces model policies for police forces. This says that a detainee who declares a trans identity can “request” to be searched by someone of the opposite sex. If such a person can be found, the cross-sex search can proceed on the basis of “consent”.

Perhaps this guidance seems less awful than saying trans-identifying men can search women (that is a low bar). But it is still an outrage. Valid consent cannot possibly be obtained from someone who is under arrest. The NPCC’s claim that officers who refuse to carry out opposite-sex searches will experience no detriment to their careers is wilfully naive.

You don’t have to be overly cynical to see that the opportunity to expose themselves in front of female officers will be seized upon by many male detainees, whether because they find exposing themselves arousing, because they like humiliating and frightening women or because they dislike the police and want to cause as much trouble as they can.

We think the killer legal argument is that the guidance is in direct contravention of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), which sets out in great detail how police searching must be carried out. PACE leaves no wiggle room for opposite-sex searching – none at all.

And so Sex Matters has taken a new challenge against this NPCC guidance. I will be attending the hearing in the High Court on Tuesday 16th June, together with my colleagues Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena, retired officer Cathy Larkman of Women’s Rights Network and a representative of the Police SEEN network.

We have set up a crowdfunder and published our court papers, which include witness statements from Cathy and Maya. Cathy’s is filled with insights from her more than 30 years as a serving officer; Maya’s includes dozens of quotes from serving police officers explaining why opposite-sex searching is so harmful and dangerous.

I carried out some of the research cited in Maya’s statement, in particular the interviews of those officers. Like most people, I have never been arrested or spent any time in a custody suite; hearing about this particularly fraught part of their job increased my respect and admiration for them and made me even more enraged that police leaders are so determined to push through this dangerous and disgusting policy.

I urge you to read what they had to say – and, if you agree that cross-sex strip-searching must not be allowed under any circumstances, please consider supporting our legal case.

Helen Joyce

Donate now

Find out more:

• The story of the case so far

• Our legal submissions

• Trans-identifying males who have committed sex crimes

• Our crowdfunder

Media coverage:

Both The Telegraph (Daniel Martin) and the Daily Mail (Sam Merriman) covered our judicial review of the NPCC guidance. They quoted current and retired police officers who told us that female officers will feel under immense pressure to carry out searches on male detainees despite not wanting to, and their fear that a man directed to manipulate his private parts by a female officer could experience this as arousing.

Child gender medicine: CAN-SG conference

In this week’s episode of the Sex Matters podcast, Fiona McAnena talks to Dr Louise Irvine, co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG), about Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine, on Sunday 5th and Monday 6th July in London. The conference will feature world experts discussing the social and clinical care of gender-distressed children and young people. Whether you’re a clinician, educator, parent, researcher, or simply concerned about child safeguarding and ideology distorting medical practice, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

CAN-SG has offered Sex Matters’ supporters an exclusive discount: use the code SM25 for 25 percent off all ticket prices. Further discounts are available for people on low incomes, and students can attend the full two days for just £20.

Our challenge to City’s unlawful ponds policy

The City of London committees involved with the ponds on Hampstead Heath have voted to continue with a “trans inclusive” approach which allows men who say they are women to use the women-only pool, showers and changing rooms. Our legal hearing is scheduled for November.

Read more…

Media coverage:

Author Amanda Craig wroet in The Telegraph about an encounter with a naked man at the Ladies’ Pond several years ago that led to her visiting the facility much less frequently. Maya discussed the story with Nana Akua on GB News, while Victoria Smith wrote for UnHerd that the City of London Corporation’s decision to retain a trans-inclusive policy rather than following the law on single-sex spaces was an insult to women.

Work with Sex Matters

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EHRC code: write to your MP

More than 120 MPs have signed Labour MP Stella Creasy’s motion calling for Parliament to reject the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s draft code of practice. But they seem not to understand that the code doesn’t make law; it just explains how to follow the law.

Nearly a thousand Sex Matters supporters have already written to their MPs. Could you spare a couple of minutes to do this? Use our simple online tool to challenge them if they signed or offer your support if they didn’t.

Take action now!

Media coverage:

Among those who have signed the motion are two Labour MPs from Hertfordshire, Josh Dean and Chris Hinchliff. Bishop’s Stortford Independent (Sinead Corr) quoted Helen as saying that either the signatories really don’t understand the difference between law and statutory guidance, or they are knowingly indulging in pointless virtue signalling, and that neither possibility is impressive.

In other news

An investigation by NHS Sussex into the rogue WellBN GP practice in Brighton and Hove has resulted in the clinic being ordered to end prescriptions of cross-sex hormones for 78 children. The Telegraph (Michael Searles) quoted Fiona as saying that doctors hellbent on promoting transgender ideology have done untold harm to vulnerable young people,

EHRC chair Mary-Ann Stephenson revealed at a Women and Equalities Committee meeting on Tuesday 9th June that the equalities watchdog needed to relocate after its old office was targeted by transactivists. The Telegraph (Dominic Penna and Daniel Martin) quoted Fiona as saying that it’s disappointing that committee MPs who insist on undermining women’s right to single-sex spaces had nothing to say about vandalism or threats by transactivists.

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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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Maya speaking in the River Room at the House of Lords

On 4th June we launched our new sport report, Getting back on track: Using the Equality Act to enable and protect sport for women and girls, in the River Room at the House of Lords. We co-hosted the event with the Women’s Sports Union, and guests came from across the sports world, including chairs and chief executives of national governing bodies, sportswomen, journalists, policy-makers and lawyers.

The event was introduced by Baroness Davies of Devonport, aka Sharron Davies MBE.

The report describes the battle for fair sport for women and girls: how the law has been misunderstood and misrepresented by activists demanding access for trans-identifying men to women’s sport, and by a succession of civil servants and sport policy-makers who wrongly presented this as “inclusion”. It explains how protections for women and girls in sport are threaded through the Equality Act, and why female-only sport and recreation aren’t just desirable, they’re necessary.

I have spent years working on sports policy, first at Fair Play For Women and now at Sex Matters. In that time I have had hundreds of conversations with politicians, officials, athletes and funders, and have heard every excuse imaginable for failing to protect the female category for girls and women.

The big message I hope everyone takes from this report is that sports leaders need to stop looking for compromises and get-out clauses to validate a few trans-identifying men and get back to protecting, celebrating and promoting women and girls in sport – not just because that’s what the law says, but because it is the right thing to do.

Fiona

Fiona, Maya and Helen celebrating the launch of Getting back on track with Louie French MP, the shadow minister for culture, media and sport.

Getting back on track: a new report

In this week’s episode, Maya Forstater and Fiona McAnena talk about our new report, Getting back on track: Using the Equality Act to enable and protect sport for women and girls – why we wrote it and what is in it.

They discuss how the law enables separate sport for women and girls in several different ways, how this matters for fairness, safety and opportunity all the way from grassroots participation up to elite competition, and why failing to have a female category may result in legal challenge for indirect sex discrimination and harassment.

Read the report online

Download the PDF

Sex matters in sport: how the Equality Act 2010 provides the legal framework for protecting and providing for women and girls in sport.

Enabling and protecting sport for women and girls: Maya’s speech to the House of Lords as we launched our report.

Housing men in women’s prisons is unlawful

The government has been allowing trans-identifying men to be housed in women’s prisons on a case-by-case basis. Now a legal opinion published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, by Ben Cooper KC and Myles Grandison, concludes that in light of the 2025 For Women Scotland ruling, this cannot continue.

Read more…

Exclusive offer for memo readers

Get 25 percent off tickets for the Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine conference, Sunday 5th and Monday 6th July in central London.

Taking as their theme the foundational principle of medicine to “first, do no harm”, the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine are bringing together leading international figures fighting for ethical, evidence-based gender medicine. The programme will cover all aspects of the social and clinical care of children and young people experiencing gender-related distress.

Maya, Fiona and Helen will all be attending for at least part of the conference. We think the medical transition of children and young adults is one of the biggest scandals of our age, and this conference is an important moment in the fightback. With the Cass Review prioritising psychosocial care for gender-distressed youth, legal challenges to the proposed trial of puberty blockers and the possibility that NHS England will halt new cross-sex hormone prescriptions for under-18s, the UK is leading the way in ending the harms.

Yet there is no room for complacency. Serious concerns remain about the social transition of minors, irreversible interventions such as mastectomies for under-25s, inadequate support for detransitioners and plans for a “conversion practices” ban that would criminalise ethical, evidence-based exploratory therapy.

The stellar speaker lineup includes:

• Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend on social transition

• Dr Anna Hutchinson on psychotherapy for gender-distressed young people

• Sex Matters trustee Professor Michael Biggs on the history of puberty blockers

• Neuropsychologist Professor Sallie Baxendale on the effect of puberty blockers on the adolescent brain

• Michael Kerr of Detransition Pathways and Dr Stella O’Malley of Genspect on detransition.

Also joining the programme is Maeve Halligan, founding president of the Cambridge University Society of Women, who will speak about the courage required of professionals working with medically transitioning children and young people, and why those responsible for children’s safety must not be cowed into remaining silent about their concerns.

View the conference programme and buy tickets: Use the code SM25 for 25 percent off in-person and livestream tickets. Further discounts available for retired people and those on low incomes. And especially for student readers of the Sex Matters Memo: attend the entire conference for just £20.

In the news

Louis Goss for The Telegraph broke the news that Lloyds Bank has updated its policy on single-sex facilities and told staff to use bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex. The article referred to our recent report, Sex-based rights in the City, which found that leading banks including HSBC and NatWest were continuing to let staff use toilets based on gender identity rather than sex.

Susanna Rustin for The Guardian wrote that the EHRC code of practice protects a range of vital single-sex spaces, not just toilets, and mentioned our criticism of the section of the guidance that says sex should be treated as special-category data.

Greg Heffer wrote for the Daily Mail on the new health secretary James Murray’s admission that he has changed his mind since stating in 2022 that “trans women are women”, and that he now vows to protect single-sex spaces in the NHS on the basis of sex. Maya said he needs to update NHS policies and language, and to rip up Annex B, which says single-sex wards must operate on the basis of “gender identity”.

Daniel Martin for The Telegraph reported that the House of Commons has signposted staff upset by the EHRC code of practice to transactivist organisations for support. Helen said it wasn’t acceptable for House of Commons management to appear to mourn the enforcement of sex-based rights at the same time as MPs are considering the guidance under parliamentary procedure.

The news that City of London councillors have voted in favour of a policy that would enable trans-identifying men to swim at the Ladies’ Pond at Hampstead Heath was covered widely by the media, including Daniel Lavelle for The Guardian, Daniel Martin for The Telegraph, Ellie Doughty for The Times and BBC London. Fiona said that many councillors seem to think UK equality law doesn’t apply to the ponds, and that the councillors had voted to unlawfully discriminate against and harass women.

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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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I am sure that Sex Matters supporters will not be surprised that following the publication of the long-awaited EHRC guidance the rump of recalcitrant, confused and captured organisations have not meekly agreed to get in line with the law.

At the Hampstead ponds the City of London is still operating its gender-identity based policy, and we have heard from several pond swimmers who were disturbed and upset by the sight of men in skimpy bikinis among the sunbathers during the hot half-term week.

Marks & Spencer is still advertising “men’s” and “women’s” changing rooms on its website, but using ambiguous signage in store and telling customers they can use whatever changing rooms they want.

Stonewall has apparently assured the EHRC that it will follow the Equality Act, but the activist group TransLucent and the trade union Unison say they want to change the law, and charity-sector leaders are telling charities they can afford to “take their time” before coming into compliance.

So there are going to be a lot more legal cases before this is all done.

Is it feasible for a lot of individuals to start legal cases? For most people it is too expensive and difficult – and it’s hard for us to help with a lot of individual cases. But we have been helping people to work out whether have a case that could be funded by the JK Rowling Women’s Fund, and putting together detailed guidance on how to make your own “small claim”.

This week we have published a guide to pursuing a small claim for gender-critical belief discrimination. More about that in the podcast and below.

We have also heard that our case against the City of London will be heard in November, which is not soon enough but will come. We are also working on several more cases, which I will share more news on in the next few weeks.

Maya Forstater

Small claims explained

Fighting bigotry in service provision

In this week’s episode, Helen and Maya talk through what is colloquially known as a “small claim” for belief discrimination against a service provider.

Examples of such discrimination include being refused service in a pub, barred from a gym or forced to leave an event because you are known or suspected to hold gender-critical beliefs (or to be associated with someone who does).

Sex Matters has published a guide on this process, which you can read on our website.

Fighting bigotry in service provision

If you’re refused service in a pub, barred from a gym or forced to leave an event because someone knows you hold gender-critical beliefs, you can take what’s known as a “small claim” for belief discrimination to the county court. We explain the law, show you how to prepare a claim and what to ask for, and guide you through writing your “letter before claim”.

Read more…

In the news

Coverage of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated code of practice for service providers continued this week. Maya appeared on GB News’s Free Speech Nation with Josh Howie, while Fiona was interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer on TalkTV.

Daniel Martin and Dominic Penna for The Telegraph broke the news that Sex Matters has written to Bridget Phillipson calling for withdrawal of the “asking about sex” section of the EHRC guidance on the basis that it is legally wrong. Maya said that sex is not special-category data, but ordinary personal data that can be used routinely, just like other personal information such as name or age.

Lee Peart for Healthcare Management quoted Maya in its coverage of the guidance as saying that any business, charity or public-service provider that took a wrong turn and started letting men who identify as women use women’s spaces or vice versa must now urgently fix its policies, and that organisations that don’t want to get into legal trouble should seize on this opportunity for a reset.

Gabriella Swerling for The Telegraph had a front-page story on Sunderland Minster posting signage on social media which encourages trans-identifying people to use the bathroom of the opposite sex, in defiance of the guidance. Maya said that any woman using the facilities would probably have a case in claiming harassment against the diocese of Durham, so this just seems like legal action waiting to happen.

In other news, Gordon Rayner for The Telegraph covered the news that the new BBC director-general Matt Brittin is under pressure to deal with ongoing transactivism within the broadcasting corporation. Fiona said that the good work of many BBC journalists is being undermined by misleading output from other teams, and that to regain public trust Brittin needs to weed out transactivists and reassure staff that genuine impartiality will be rewarded, not punished.

Mary Wright and John Glover for the Scottish Daily Express wrote on the findings from campaign group Women Won’t Wheesht that 16 out of 17 Scottish universities, including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and St Andrews, are failing to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Fiona said that these universities are prioritising the feelings of young men who say they are women, and that graduates will enter the workplace thinking that women’s needs take second place to male feelings.

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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.

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On Thursday 21st May the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s long-awaited code of practice for services, public functions and associations finally landed. It is largely very good and will be helpful to give businesses, public bodies, charities and associations confidence to follow the law, not the misinformation.

Service providers should get cracking and fix their policies now. “Waiting for the guidance” was always a bad excuse, but in any case now it is gone.

Most importantly, the new code replaces a legally flawed line in the previous version, dating from 2011, about allowing people to use single-sex services “according to the gender role in which they present”, which did untold damage. The new version instead provides detailed explanations of how the single-sex exceptions work based on sex, not gender identity.

It explains that there is no lawful option whereby service providers can admit trans people to a service intended for the opposite sex. If they do this, they are likely to lose the ability to rely on single-sex and separate-sex legal exceptions, opening them to liability for committing sex discrimination against people of the opposite sex who remain excluded, and sex discrimination or harassment against people forced to share an unexpectedly mixed-sex space. This is the argument we are running in our case against the City of London over the gender identity-based admissions policy at the Hampstead ponds.

When the guidance dropped, our team settled down to speed-read, interrupted by sending out press quotes, answering a zillion WhatsApp messages, and recording media interviews and our own podcast to help people understand what is important in the 300-page document. You can watch the podcast on YouTube and read our initial analysis on our website.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll publish a series of blog posts on what the guidance means in various situations: how it will affect different kinds of individuals and organisations and where there might be loopholes or confusion. To get our posts in your inbox as soon as they’re published, subscribe to our Substack.

Overall, we gave the guidance eight out of ten. While there is lots to be happy about in it, we were dismayed to see that it includes a new section on “asking about sex”, which includes legally incorrect advice presented as a requirement of data-protection law. This advice that sex is “special category” and sensitive data is wrong in law, undermines the rest of the guidance, recreates the problem it set out to solve, and harms women’s rights and safeguarding.

This section should never have been included in the guidance laid before Parliament and should be disregarded. It appears to have been added at the last minute following pressure from the government’s Office for Equality and Opportunity to say that there are “limited circumstances in which it may be legitimate for service providers to ask about a service user’s sex” and telling businesses they need staff training on relevant procedures and protocols. (I wonder which organisations will be lining up to deliver that?!)

This directly contradicts both reality and the Supreme Court’s clear interpretation of the law. There are limited circumstances when service providers can ask or record your sex, in the same way that there are limited (but fairly broad) circumstances when a service provider can ask your name, address, date of birth or whether you would like a vegetarian meal. They don’t need to treat sex as special sensitive data.

Read our update about what is so wrong with this part of the guidance. (If you’d like to get our updates emailed to you as soon as they’re published, subscribe to our Substack.)

We will be writing to the Minister for Women and Equalities, Bridget Phillipson, and to the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Mary-Ann Stephenson, calling for this section to be withdrawn.

Maya Forstater

EHRC guidance finally here!

The new code of practice explained

This week, Maya, Helen and Fiona give their initial take on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s long-awaited update to the Code of practice for services, public functions and associations, which has been published by the Minister for Women and Equalities and laid before Parliament.

Read the code of practice.

Read our first analysis of the code.

To see our video output:

• find our podcasts on Substack

• follow our YouTube channel

• find us on TikTok.

Will the government solve the sex-data problem in this Parliament?

In the King’s Speech the government announced that it is pressing ahead with a Digital Access to Services Bill that will introduce free, voluntary digital ID, and has said this will not include sex. As the mess in the data section of the EHRC guidance shows, it is crucial to get sex data right. We have published our response to the consultation on digital ID and our equality impact assessment, which shows what a bad idea it is to leave sex out of the plan for digital ID.

Read more…

What is in the new guidance?

The excuse of “waiting for guidance” has finally gone. And the biggest flaw of the 2011 guidance – that it told service providers to operate based on gender self-ID – has been taken out.

Read more…

Sex is not “special category” data

The draft EHRC guidance includes a new section on asking about sex that is wrong about the law. There are five reasons why we will be asking for this section to be withdrawn.

Read more…

In the news

The publication of the EHRC’s updated code of practice was covered widely, including by Alison Holt and Nick Triggle for BBC News, Katie Harris for the Daily Express, Daniel Martin for The Telegraph, Geraldine Scott for The Times, Martin Beckford for the Daily Mail and Lauren Gordon for The Mirror. Maya was quoted extensively, with each outlet taking different lines from her analysis, including that there are no more excuses for organisations to delay updating unlawful policies.

Maya was interviewed by BBC News and Sky News. Helen was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 and Julia Hartley-Brewer on TalkTV. Fiona was interviewed by Jeremy Kyle on TalkTV.

In other news, Jason Groves for the Daily Mail revealed comments made by Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham that men who identify as female should be allowed to use female toilets, and that those who fight for sex-based rights represent a “minority view”. Helen said that any politician who aspires to be prime minister needs a better grasp of what voters want than to think that fringe transactivist views are mainstream.

Helen was interviewed for a feature by Irish Daily Mail journalist Georgina Heffernan, which covered Helen’s personal background and journey to becoming an author on sex-based rights and director at Sex Matters.

Also for the Daily Mail, David Churchill wrote that the NHS could face thousands of discrimination claims from female staff across the UK following the successful employment tribunal of an NHS employee in Leeds. The tribunal found that she had suffered discrimination and harassment because trans-identifying male colleagues were told they could use women’s toilets and changing rooms according to NHS England policy.

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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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Maya delivering our One year later report to Bridget Phillipson

The Minister for Women and Equalities, Bridget Phillipson, has promised to present the long-awaited code of  practice for services, public functions and associations for approval by Parliament this month. If she is going to meet her deadline, the parliamentary timetable means that in practice she has to do it in just a few days’ time – during the week starting Monday 18th May. Once it is laid before Parliament, it will come into legal effect 40 days later unless a motion is passed to annul it. The last time that happened was in 1979.

The code, when it comes, will provide a detailed explanation of the single-sex and separate-sex exceptions as applied in different kinds of single-sex services, with lots of practical examples. Perhaps its most important function will be to stop duty-bearers repeating endlessly that the reason they haven’t changed unlawful policies in the year-plus since the Supreme Court judgment in the case of For Women Scotland is that they are “waiting for guidance”.

There was never any reason to wait. The previous version of the code, which dates from 2011, was clearly wrong in saying that “If a service provider provides single- or separate sex services for women and men… they should treat transsexual people according to the gender role in which they present.” That was already true before the Supreme Court judgment. Service providers really should already have stopped pretending to be confused about this.

In cases such as the Red Lion Pub and Croft v Royal Mail in 2003, Green v Secretary of State in 2013 and the first For Women Scotland case in 2022, courts have confirmed again and again that identifying as transgender doesn’t confer the right to be treated as the opposite sex. The Supreme Court made clear last year that having a gender-recognition certificate doesn’t either. Earlier this year the High Court confirmed that the EHRC’s straightforward explanation of what the Supreme Court judgment means in practice for separate-sex facilities accurately reflected the law.

Most recently, on 13th May, news broke that Faye Russell Caldicott (a pseudonym; she was granted court anonymity) had won her case against NHS England. She was represented by our former chair, Naomi Cunningham – congratulations, Naomi! The judgment is a breakthrough, concluding that a policy of allowing trans-identifying men to use women’s toilets, showers and changing rooms amounts to discrimination and harassment related to sex.

NHS England had defended itself by saying it had applied the law as it understood it based on advice from Stonewall, GIRES and Unison. The judgment brushed that excuse away, saying that “reliance on contemporaneous guidance or good practice advice cannot justify an incorrect interpretation of the law”. It was just the latest confirmation that, whether or not the EHRC’s code of practice is laid next week, organisations that have been delaying fixing faulty policies really need to get on with it.

In other news, my colleague Helen Joyce attended a debate at the Cambridge Union, at which Maeve Halligan, founding president of the Cambridge University Society of Women, spoke in favour of the proposition “This House believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community.” You can watch the entire debate on YouTube; both Maeve and her fellow CUSW founder Serena Worley, who spoke from the floor, performed remarkably.

Maya Forstater

The state of free speech on campus

Equality Act-shaped hole at the heart of Sussex judgment

In this week’s episode, Maya and Helen discuss the recent legal judgments that highlight the importance of strong protections for free speech and academic freedom to people who hold gender-critical views.

As Maya wrote last week in Times Higher Education, at the heart of the High Court judgment in the judicial review brought by the University of Sussex is an Equality Act-shaped hole. The Office for Students’ investigation into its failure to protect academic freedom and free speech on campus had been sparked by the hounding of Professor Kathleen Stock, who had been accused of hate by activists for speaking up about misrepresentations of the Equality Act. The High Court overturned the regulator’s £585,000 fine punishing Sussex for infringing on academic freedom and freedom of speech by adopting a policy in 2018 banning so-called transphobic propaganda from its campus and pledging to discipline those committing “transphobic abuse”.

EHRC code: any moment now...

The EHRC Code of  practice for services, public functions and associations is expected to be presented to Parliament for approval before the end of May.

We have published a short explainer about the code: what it’s for, what happens next and why it matters.

Read more…

Hampstead Ponds: update

You may have seen media reports that the City of London has decided to stick with its policy of permitting people to access the ponds designated for the opposite sex on the basis of their “lived gender”. After the vote in support of the plans at a meeting on 12th May, they must now go before another committee on 4th June.

Meanwhile our legal challenge continues: the court has let us know there will be a hearing this autumn.

Read a case update…

In the news

Ben Lynch for BBC News, The Standard and The Mirror broke the news that City of London councillors have voted not to change the policy of allowing trans-identifying men to access the Ladies’ Pond at Hampstead Heath, which is subject to an ongoing legal challenge by Sex Matters. Susanna Siddell for GB News revealed that the City plans to spend £1m on “privacy” upgrades at the ponds. Legal news site LexisNexis published its analysis.

Writing for Civil Society, Léa Legraien covered Sex Matters’ first annual report. Maya was quoted as saying that much of our work has been about pressing institutions, employers, regulators, schools, sports bodies and public authorities to follow the law.

Sam Merriman for the Daily Mail reported that the King’s Speech included plans for a ban on “conversion practices”. Helen said that the real targets are parents, teachers, therapists and spiritual advisors who don’t subscribe to trans ideology, and don’t think the incoherent, subjective notion of “gender identity” is what makes someone a boy or girl, or a man or woman.

Further coverage of our report on sex-based rights in the City included Emma Ann Hughes for Insurance Post, who focused on insurance provider Admiral’s decision to stick with gender-neutral (mixed-sex) toilets, and Oliver Partridge for GB News.

Fiona was interviewed by Kevin O’Sullivan on TalkTV on the news that Harriet Harman has been appointed as the government’s advisor on women and girls. Shortly after last year’s Supreme Court judgment, Baroness Harman claimed it meant that trans-identifying men could still use women’s spaces.

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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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The news on 29th April that the High Court had overturned the £585,000 fine imposed by the Office for Students (OfS) on the University of Sussex for breaching free-speech regulations was hugely disappointing.

I have written to the chair and chief executive of the OfS calling on it to appeal the judgment, which Sex Matters believes is wrong in law. Our argument has also been published in an article in Times Higher Education.

In short: there is a huge Equality Act-shaped hole in the middle of the judgment.

The OfS started its investigation in 2021, after Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded out of the university (you can read the whole history here). The OfS said: “It’s important to stress that this case – and the OfS’s investigation – is not about the substance of ongoing debates around sex and gender.”

We say it couldn’t be more wrong.

What happened at the University of Sussex cannot be understood unless you recognise that when activists put pressure on the university to adopt a policy banning “transphobic propaganda” in 2018, what they wanted banned were statements that straightforwardly reflect the definition of sex in the Equality Act. What Stock had been targeted for in the first place was pointing out the problem with what those activists meant by “transphobia”.

A large part of the judgment hinges on arguments about the meaning of the terms “reasonably practicable” and “freedom of speech within the law” when assessing whether or not the university had breached its obligation to “take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured”.

It was here that everyone in court appeared to have a collective attack of amnesia. The judgment reads as if my employment appeal tribunal case, and the cases of Jo Phoenix v Open University, Rachel Meade v Social Work England, Roz Adams v Edinburgh Rape Crisis, Higgs v Farmor’s School and all the rest had never happened. It completely overlooks the detailed legal framework for balancing freedom of belief and speech with protecting people against unlawful harassment.

The answer to what is “reasonably practicable” for a university to do is the same as for any other institution: set policies in line with the Equality Act, train staff on those policies and enforce fair and robust disciplinary processes.

So when campus activists started agitating for the University of Sussex to adopt a sweeping new policy in time for Trans Day of Remembrance, it should have just said: “No thanks, we’ve already got a policy that aligns with the Equality Act and covers all nine protected characteristics.”

Perversely, the university cited the fact that it already had a high-level policy protecting free speech and academic freedom when defending itself in court, even though in practice that high-level policy did not stop the university from adopting the activists’ charters.

A further twist in the tale is that the policy Sussex adopted in 2018 came almost word for word from one written by Equality Challenge Uni (now Advance HE) that was in turn based on one adopted by the Association of Colleges in 2005, which was drafted by Socialist Workers Party activist David Renton. Tribunal-watchers will remember that Renton is now a barrister and was Allison Bailey’s roommate at Garden Court Chambers. He refused to express solidarity when she was discriminated against and harassed for expressing views that are in line with the Equality Act. Instead, after overhearing Allison talking on the phone about why trans-identifying men should not be in women’s prisons, he told a colleague that her view seemed “a million miles away from chambers values”.

In 2023 the University of Essex published a paper by Renton and two academics, titled Universities’ Legal Obligations in the Context of Trans Inclusion, Trans Equality, and ‘Gender Critical Activities on Campus. This claimed: “The decision in Forstater has been widely misunderstood and it is worth emphasising that the Appeal Tribunal in that case accepted that Ms Forstater had a protected opinion, does not mean that the manifestations of that opinion were protected.”

It is shocking how a tiny coterie of motivated and persistent people has managed to corrupt the governance of large, expensive and important institutions by promoting a misreading of the Equality Act. Anyone who wants to save the Equality Act and these institutions needs to drag them back to reality.

Maya Forstater

City firms flout sex-based rules

Our new report exposes widespread non-compliance

In this week’s episode, Maya and Helen discuss our latest report, Sex-based rights in the City, which uncovered the widespread failure of the financial sector to comply with the Supreme Court ruling.

Not one of 15 financial institutions contacted replied clearly stating that it provided single-sex toilets, as required by workplace regulations, and restricted access to people of that (biological) sex.

Maya and Helen discuss how we got here, the experiences of those working in the sector and what can be done to bring employers into compliance.

Our new report finds that despite usually taking legal compliance seriously, firms in the financial sector failed to update their policies on access to single-sex spaces in line with the 2025 Supreme Court judgment.

Read more…

In the news

Eleanor Harmsworth for The Telegraph covered Sex Matters’ report on sex-based rights in the financial sector as an exclusive, revealing that none of the 15 companies contacted could confirm that they are compliant with the Supreme Court ruling. The report quotes female staff concerned about this as feeling angry, unvalued and cynical, and points out that on any other topic, a Supreme Court judgment would see City firms rushing to ensure all policies were brought in line with the law.

Maya wrote for Times Higher Education on the High Court judgment in the University of Sussex’s case against the Office for Students. Sussex was successful in overturning the record fine imposed on it for failing to uphold free speech on campus and academic freedom, after an investigation prompted by the hounding of Professor Kathleen Stock. Maya argued that the verdict wrongly overlooked the Equality Act’s role in determining what universities can be expected to do to protect free speech.

Writing for The Telegraph, Cameron Henderson broke the news that education provider Pearson is teaching GCSE pupils that it is “discrimination” and “inequality” to provide toilets only for men and women. Maya said that single-sex facilities ensure safety, dignity and privacy for everyone, as well as preventing discrimination against women, who are harmed more than men are by having to share toilets and changing rooms with the opposite sex.

Helen wrote for The Critic on her experience of both making crime reports and being the subject of them. She contrasts the criminal justice system’s deferential treatment of trans-identifying former police officer Lynsay Watson, who makes serial allegations about gender-critical people and seeks judicial review when police decline to prosecute, with the way allegations of criminal harassment against him are slow-walked or ignored.

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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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Filing Sex Matters’ first annual return to the Charity Commission and publishing our first annual report has been a milestone for the charity, and for me as chief executive. It is one of the many “first time for everything” experiences the board and I have gone through together, with input from the team. It is part of the board’s statutory responsibility, but together we also wanted to make sure what we produced was useful and interesting for our supporters.

The annual report sets out the charity’s short history, its principles and strategy, the resources we have attracted and how we are using them. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you might still enjoy the summary.

We started out around a kitchen table with a rough idea – that “sex matters in life and in law, and it shouldn’t take courage to say so.” Since then, we have experimented furiously to work out how we can most effectively make that vision real, and we will keep doing that.

I’ve never been a chief executive before, so pulling the report and audited accounts together was daunting. But the feedback has been so encouraging. Here is a selection: “We are very proud of you all!”, “What an impressive document”, “Thank you and well done! I’m proud to have been a supporter” and “Thank you for having our backs and being in the frontline of our battles.”

I am grateful to all the trustees, including those who stood down this year, in particular Naomi Cunnigham as chair and Julia Casimo as treasurer, and to Emma Hilton, who replaced Naomi as our chair. Without all their hard work, we would not have got this far.

The annual report has also provoked challenges, mainly by people asking “why aren’t you doing X?” To which my answer is generally: “Because we are doing Y.” My job as chief executive is to make sure the team all know what “Y” is, and why we are doing it, and that they are supported and able to do their jobs. It is the board of trustees who have ultimate responsibility for the charity’s strategic direction, and together with the senior leadership team – me, Fiona McAnena and Helen Joyce – they spend a lot of time thinking about what to do next and how to manage risks and resources.

As you can imagine, a lot goes on behind the scenes. As well as board meetings, we have an annual strategy weekend; this year’s has just taken place.

From left to right: Emma Moore (administrator and help-desk manager), Rebecca Bull (trustee), Helen Joyce (director of advocacy), Michael Biggs (trustee), Emma Hilton (trustee and chair), Maya Forstater (CEO), Fiona McAnena (director of campaigns), Simon Knapp (trustee and treasurer), Anya Palmer (trustee), Charlotte Cadden (trustee).

We welcomed a new board member, Simon Knapp, who is taking over the important role of treasurer.

Simon has worked in senior finance roles across the charity sector and is strongly committed to our mission. (I think there are more people in the voluntary sector like this than you might imagine!)

Last week I also started a short course for new charity CEOs at Bayes Business School, with a cohort of charity CEOs. Some were pleased to meet me, and a few were not. One asked with incredulity how we could be a human-rights charity. I explained that our starting point is that human rights are universal, but this does not mean that transgender people get everything they want: other people have rights too. I gave her a copy of our human-rights framework.

The practical discussions on the course were fascinating and helpful. My big lesson from the first day was that the challenges I face as a CEO are not so different from those faced by other charity CEOs (even the ones who think we are deplorable): sitting between the board and the team and trying to make sure we stay true to our mission, respond to opportunity and hostility, and act effectively.

Back: Hargey Fionntán (Market Development Association), Jennie Lucas (Maggie Oliver Foundation), Katie Nurcombe (Intensive Care Society), Sam Plummer (Youth Connect South West), Christine Fogg (Bayes Business School), Middle: Maya Forstater (Sex Matters), Leonora Sharp (Terapia), Alanna Harris (Canary Wharf Multifaith Chaplaincy), Front: Dan Jones (Settle), Tamara Newman (Committee for Middle East Peace), Elisabeta Pashaj (Downhurst Residential Home), Rukia Augustine (St Albans Food Bank), Kate Heslegrave (St Helena Hospice), James Roberts (Citizens Advice Peterborough), Izzy Ivezic (The Baked Bean Charity).

Many of the worst cases of capture by gender ideology that we at Sex Matters hear about concern charities. Their boards and leadership seem particularly prone to losing sight of their mission and getting confused about the Equality Act. Scope cancelling Janet Murray’s choir from singing at the London Marathon (and then reinstating it with a grudging statement) was just the latest example.

Thinking hard about governance is important for how Sex Matters conducts itself as a charity, but also for understanding how things have gone wrong in so many institutions. One of the most important bits of good governance is identifying and managing conflicts of interests. The Charity Commission has just published new guidance on this important topic. It emphasises that a conflict of interest doesn’t mean something dishonest is going on, and that conflicts are also not always about financial decisions. They can be about personal loyalties and the interests of people or organisations connected to trustees getting tangled up with decision-making.

When charity trustees, public policy-makers, regulators or judges make decisions related to sex and gender, there is too often an undeclared conflict of interest: a trans-identifying family member or friend whom they hold dear, and whose strong personal wishes shape their decisions and the language they use. It is crucial that people who are working for the public good do not confuse this purpose with doing what feels good for the people nearest and dearest to them.

If you work in a charity and are gender-critical, get in touch!

Maya Forstater

Meet the Sex Matters help desk

In this week’s episode, Fiona talks to Emma Moore, who manages our help desk. They discuss common themes, the advice provided to those seeking support and the resources available on our website.

Practical help

This new section of our website makes it easier to find our practical tools and template emails, as well as general advice and tips on What you can do if you have a problem.

Read more…

Hampstead Ponds: the City of London says it is sticking with "trans inclusion"

Sex Matters says: “We’ll see you in court”

The City of London Corporation has published its report on the Hampstead Heath bathing ponds and is planning to take a decision about the final policy to be adopted on 4th June.

We have received an order from the High Court that our case against the City of London will be listed between October and December 2026. We will keep you updated.

Read more…

Don't forget: Consultation on digital identity closes today

The government’s consultation on digital ID closes on 5th May. Here are the instructions on how to take part.

Last week we talked about this on the podcast and our survey got nearly 1,000 responses. Thank you for your thoughtful and constructive comments. There are diverse views and important concerns. But whatever you think about digital ID, you can tell the government to include sex!

Read more…

In the news

Ben Lynch broke the news that the City of London is recommending that the Ladies’ Pond at Hampstead Heath remains mixed sex, even as Sex Matters’ legal case continues, in a piece that ran in BBC London, MyLondon and Ham & High (print only). Maya said that the City of London’s proposal to continue with its approach of allowing fully intact males into the women’s pond is simply unlawful, and that the City is operating as if Hampstead Heath is outside the law. Alastair Lockhart also covered the story for The Standard.

Justin Bowie for The Courier interviewed Sandie Peggie, who said that she was shocked by bogus quotes in her judgment that were first revealed by the same newspaper to have been incorrectly attributed to Maya’s 2021 tribunal judgment.

Helen’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021) was included in The Times’ list of the 25 best non-fiction books of the 21st century.

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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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Some of the speakers with Baroness Sarah Ludford (in red jacket)

On Tuesday 21st April I took a stack of Sex Matters One year later booklets to the Houses of Parliament for a meeting of peers and MPs at which women who have been harmed by the failure to protect women-only spaces told their stories. Among them were several women featured in the booklet, including Darlington nurse Bethany Hutchison, gym user Miranda Newsom and mental-health volunteer “D”.

Their stories highlighted the harms done to women when organisations fail to follow the Equality Act and instead follow gender ideology. These are ordinary women trying to do ordinary things where their dignity, privacy and autonomy should be upheld: use the office toilets; get changed for work or at the gym; run a women’s mental-health peer support group. They reveal NHS bodies, local authorities and charities wilfully ignoring the law and subjecting women to punishment for speaking up for their rights. There were tears on the panel and tears in the audience.

By now all MPs will have received the booklet in their pigeonholes. If you haven’t written to your MP about this, now is a good time. Ask them to urge the Minister for Women and Equalities to lay the EHRC guidance before Parliament in May, as she has promised, and to act decisively to ensure that the law as clarified by the Supreme Court is enforced.

Write to your MP: why are we waiting?

Something that would help ensure that organisations understand and follow the law would be a simple, clear way for people to prove their sex when registering for or accessing services. For many years public bodies have allowed people to change their sex on documents such as passports and driving licences, making these worse than useless for this purpose.

Now the government is planning a new form of digital ID that people will be able to have on their phones. Its proposed “solution” to the problem of unreliable sex data is to leave sex off altogether.

This is a mistake. It will leave individuals and service providers floundering and mired in conflict, instead of being able to simply and clearly verify a fact about people that is often needed.

We know there are a range of different views on digital ID itself, and Sex Matters has no institutional position. But whatever your views you can argue that if it goes ahead sex should be included.

A government consultation about it is open until Tuesday 5th May. It is really important that people use this opportunity to tell the government not to leave sex out of digital ID.

READ:
Our update on why digital ID should include sex
(and our briefing on putting sex on digital ID, if you have time)

LISTEN TO:
Our podcast on the topic
(in which Helen Joyce calls me a nerd, the absolute cheek of her)

TAKE ACTION:
Use our guidance to respond to the consultation
(it won’t take more than 10 minutes)

Maya Forstater

Putting sex on digital ID

In this week’s episode, Maya and Helen discuss the new national digital ID (BritCard), which the government has committed to creating by the end of this parliament. But the government does not plan to include sex on the BritCard, saying that this “is not necessary for the intended purpose of the digital ID”.

Maya and Helen explore why failing to include sex as a voluntary field on the BritCard is a cop-out that will leave individuals and service providers floundering and mired in conflict, instead of being able to simply and clearly verify a fact about people which is often needed.

Sex matters in local elections

Too many local authorities have told us that they are “waiting for guidance” on single-services when in fact the law is clear. If there are elections in your area on Thursday 7th May, we have some questions you can ask candidates to find out if your local authority understands and respects the law.

Read more…

Update: the City of London seeks to delay again

As the deadline approached for the City of London Corporation to file its defence for allowing trans-identifying men into the women’s pond and showers on Hampstead Heath, it made a last-ditch attempt to evade this by asking for another delay.

Read more…

In the news

Janet Murray for The Telegraph reported that a Girlguiding group has closed and reopened as a Scout group over the charity’s move to align with the law on single-sex services, with other leaders suggesting that more may follow or affiliate with local Pride groups. Maya said that Girlguiding is learning the hard way that there is no easy path back from pretending that men and boys can be female, and that Pride youth groups are hardly a natural fit for the Girlguiding movement.

Sian Maher for The Scottish Sun reported that the trans-identifying male doctor Dr Beth Upton has been registered by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency as female and is working in two New South Wales hospitals. Helen said that male doctors should never practise as female and medical organisations should never record doctors as the sex they are not, and that doing so sets the scene for patients’ rights to be breached. The news was also reported by Rachel Baxendale for The Australian.

Helen wrote for The Critic on how the fallout from the puberty-blocker trial shows what happens when politicians outsource policy choices that require a backbone. She said that when institutions such as medical regulators fail to do their job, Parliament is supposed to fix the rules that govern them, but many politicians have lost faith in their moral intuition or lost touch with it entirely.

Maya appeared on GB News with Olivia Utley and Cameron Walker to discuss the one-year anniversary of the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling. Maya said that there is no excuse for anyone to be ignoring the law.

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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