August 9 2025 - 8:00am
If the “gender wars” of the past decade have taught us anything, it’s that framing matters. Take, for instance, the shocking headlines that have emerged in response to the EHRC’s latest recommendations on women-only spaces.
According to the Times and the Independent, trans women are to be “banned from single-sex spaces”. Except this isn’t true. As the Telegraph more accurately puts it, trans women — that is, biologically male people who claim to be women — are to be “banned from public female-only spaces”.
Such a ruling should not be controversial. As the barrister Naomi Cunningham points out, “single-sex spaces for women can’t have men in them, because if they do, they’re not single-sex”.
The difference in headlines is all-important. The first example suggests a singling out of trans women, targeting them for exclusion merely for being trans. The second simply states that female-only spaces are to be female-only in more than just name.
Even so, the Telegraph headline could have been better. Rather than make it all about banned trans women, why not focus on the women whose rights are being restored? Why not express the news as a positive — “women’s access to female-only toilets, changing rooms and refuges to be protected”? We ought to be seeing the EHRC move as progress (or, at the very least, a reclaiming of ground that should never have been lost).
That women are not the subject of headlines regarding our own rights is an indication of how fragile these rights remain, and of what we will be up against when it comes to enforcing them. The panic and outpouring of misogyny that followed the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling and subsequent EHRC guidance are the result of years of misinformation and outright lies.
At the heart of it all is the miscasting of members of a dominant group (males) as vulnerable victims of members of a subordinate group (females). In academic articles, Stonewall training sessions, books, and newspaper think pieces, something very justifiable and ordinary — women’s fear of male violence and right to privacy — has been recast as privileged, bigoted “cis” women’s paranoia about anyone who is different.
How deeply ingrained this narrative has become was seen recently in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal. Dr Beth Upton, a male employee who failed to respect Peggie’s need for a female-only changing room, ought to have been seen as precisely the kind of man who creates the need for such spaces. Instead Upton’s colleagues and employer rushed to portray Peggie as the aggressor.
To many people, it is obvious how wrong this is. There is nothing different or boundary-shattering about the likes of Upton. Nonetheless, the past decade has seen a certain class of people embrace the idea that some male people are in fact vulnerable women. The law may have been clarified, but it will be a long time before such people stop insisting that the law is both confusing and a gross violation of human rights.
None of this serves trans people well. Not only will some be terrified by headlines falsely insisting they are banned from public life, but those who truly do “just want to pee” have been ill-served by activists who wanted an awful lot more. In all this time, had there been a campaign to make everyone more accepting of people who are genuinely gender non-conforming, feminists would have been right behind it. Isn’t it time for male-only spaces to become more inclusive of the feminine male?
Given that resistance to the EHRC ruling is being led by the Good Law Project, it is unlikely that women will lose their spaces all over again. A legal victory is one thing, though; an entire reframing of what has happened, one that centers women and their needs, will take a lot longer to emerge.
It is depressing to see a win for women positioned as a human rights loss. Female people are human, too. Let’s hope that 10 years from now, we’ll recognize whom this story really belongs to.
