1
What is the Problem?

In January 2016, the UK government's Women and Equalities Committee (WESC) published the Transgender Equality Report. The report claimed that each of us is assigned sex at birth and quotes a newspaper article which claims that it is a 'sobering and distressing fact that in UK surveys of trans people about half of young people and a third of adults report that they have attempted suicide'. Speaking of the single-sex exceptions permitted in the Equality Act 2010, the report states that the Act permits service providers not to allow a trans person to access separate-sex or single-sex services - on a case-by-case basis. Quotes in this section included comments from an anonymous individual who likened the permitted exclusion of transgender people to apartheid, from the Scottish Transgender Alliance recommending the removal of the single-sex exceptions from domestic violence and abuse refuges and rape crisis services, and from Galop, an LGBT anti-abuse charity, which claimed that transgender people are currently at serious risk of harm by being excluded from such services. One respondent, Mridul Wadhwa, had written with regard to employment in 'the gender-based violence sector', 'I am disappointed to think that someone has the right to refuse work to me and others like me in my sector just because they think that I might not be a woman.'1 This book makes the case for why I disagree and is a defence of women-only spaces.

I will begin by asserting that human beings are not assigned a sex at birth, but that our biological sex is observed and recorded. Our biological sex is in reality determined by our chromosomes at fertilisation, and sex differentiation in an embryo begins after 6-7 weeks of gestation.2 In chapter 7, I will take a closer look at the statistics on suicide and transgender youth and show that the claim above has no place being reported as fact in a report from a government inquiry. Throughout the book I will aim to explain why allowing biological males with transgender identities to access women's spaces poses a serious potential risk to women's safety, well-being and recovery.

Seventy-four per cent of all victims of recorded domestic abuse-related offences against adults aged between 16 and 74 years in England and Wales were female.3 Ninety-two per cent of defendants in domestic abuse-related prosecutions in England and Wales were males.4 Ninety-eight per cent of perpetrators of rapes and assaults by penetration in England and Wales were male.5 Ninety-five per cent of those exploited in prostitution are female.6 Girls are at least three times more likely than boys to report experiences of child sexual abuse.7

Globally, 27 per cent (more than a quarter) of women aged under fifty are estimated to have been subjected to physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner violence in their lifetime, 13 per cent in the year prior to being surveyed. Twenty-four per cent of girls and young women aged 15-19 years old and 26 per cent of women aged 19-24 had experienced this violence and abuse at least once by the time they were 15 years old.8

Men's violence against women and girls is both a manifestation of sex inequality and a way in which sex inequality is maintained. Men's violence against women is more than a number of individual acts perpetrated by individual men, though of course every man should be held to account for what he does. It is a social and political issue and it is for this reason that we need to address the circumstances that are conducive to it.9 Whether or not individual men pose harm, it benefits women if all males are excluded from some spaces. Equally when we think about men who are abusive in relationships, we shouldn't characterise their behaviour as a series of isolated incidents. Domestic abuse is a way that women are diminished and controlled; violence can be part of that control. Perpetrators routinely fail to recognise this. If they admit to violence, they are more likely to excuse it as an out-of-character outburst, something that is rare, rather than something that fits within the pattern of how they operate in a relationship, and something that reflects broader patterns of men's violence against women. Power and control are the endgames. Sociologist Sylvia Walby talked about private and public patriarchy: private patriarchy being what happens in many heterosexual homes, public patriarchy being what happens in the world outside.10 The personal is political. Women learn how to modify their behaviour, how to avoid upsetting their partner, and to put his needs first. Outside the home, women make innumerable small or large modifications to what we do to try to keep ourselves safe. All men benefit from the sex inequality maintained by men's violence against women and girls.

Feminism is not a monolith. There is no prescribed set of rules and no single way of doing feminism. However, this book reflects the ways I've come to approach feminism. Debate exists within feminism about whether we should be revolutionaries or reformists. Revolutionaries recognise that patriarchal society is the core or root of the problem and that equality in this society is an impossible dream. A reformist position would be to chip away at what is wrong with our society, try to squeeze a few women (usually those privileged in some way) into roles usually occupied by men and gradually create one that is not so hostile to women. In reality, most feminists are a combination of both and most radical feminists also recognise the value of reform. The feminists who created refuges11 and rape support services recognised this. Specialist services for women who had been subjected to men's violence were needed - and are still needed - because of what men do to women, girls and children. It never meant that they accepted that men's violence against women and girls was inevitable and could not be ended.

It is incorrect to claim that there is no clash between a feminism which targets sex-based oppression and gender identity ideology,12 or that there is no clash between women's sex-based rights and protections and some of the prospective extensions of trans rights. This book is primarily about why we need women-only, that is single-sex, spaces, particularly specialist services led by women, which are delivered by women, to women who are victim-survivors of men's violence. I look at how they were developed through an incredible wave of feminist activism and how the state then assumed ownership of what women created. I will look at the threat posed to single-sex services by transgender rights activism and ask what has happened to the feminist spirit in the movement responding to men's violence against women? How has this movement reached the point where many refuse - whether through capitulation or conviction - to say that women are adult human females? That women's oppression is based on our sex and that some of the needs of women are best met in single-sex services.

The importance of women-only space goes beyond the needs of women who have been subjected to men's violence. Conflicts about males who self-identify as women mainly fall into two categories: practical considerations about mixed sex spaces and more abstract concerns over social justice and fairness. However, this book deals mainly with the first. Physical spaces and services include hospital wards, prisons, support or counselling groups, changing rooms, toilets, women-only leisure services such as gym classes or swimming pools, conferences and meetings, schools and training; or the provision of personal or medical care, sports categories, prizes, shortlists or awards for women; or particular jobs. In the UK, some of these are covered by the Equality Act 2010, and the single-sex exceptions justify excluding males if doing so is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim and if at least one of six qualifying criteria are met:

1. only people of that sex require it;
2. there is joint provision for both sexes but that is not sufficient on its own;
3. if the service were provided for men and women jointly, it would not be as effective and it is not reasonably practicable to provide separate services for each sex;
4. they are provided in a hospital or other place where users need special attention;
5. they may be used by more than one person and a woman might object to the presence of a man (or vice versa); or
6. they may involve physical contact between a user and someone else and that other person may reasonably object if the user is of the opposite sex.

The explanatory notes13 go on to give examples where this is lawful, such as in cervical cancer screening services, domestic violence support service, hospital wards, changing rooms in department stores. These are examples, rather than being a list of the only possible exceptions. The single-sex exceptions mean that the prohibition of gender reassignment discrimination does not apply in these circumstances; instead, sex is given precedence over gender reassignment. In 2022, the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission issued new guidance on interpretation of the Equality Act and the single-sex exceptions. The guidance made more explicit the legitimacy of women-only space in qualifying circumstances.14

However, using the Act still isn't mandatory, so there are cases where the single-sex exceptions could be applied and haven't...