Parliament surrenders to anti-trans activists on toilet policy

The UK parliament has implemented a trans bathroom ban, telling trans people that they are no longer be allowed to use toilets which align with their lived gender. Instead, trans people have been told that they must “use facilities that correspond to their biological sex or the gender-neutral toilets”.

This comes after an incident last week, where – following a grilling of the Equality and Human Rights Commission by the Women and Equalities Committee – a trans barrister was accosted by activists for using the facilities she had been told to use by parliamentary staff, in line with the policy then in place.

Robin White, a trans barrister, attended the committee as a member of the public. Due to a serious health condition, she asked staff if she could sit close to the door so that she could access the toilets with ease. Staff told her she would be able to easily access the female facilities along the corridor.

But when she went to make use of the facilities after the session, she was confronted by two prominent “gender critical” activists, who “loudly and unpleasantly” demanded that she should not use the female toilets. They alerted security to her presence, and asked them to intervene.

The activists then made a complaint. Rather than taking action against the activists who had appointed themselves vigilante toilet police, parliamentary staff instead provided them with an apology for having allowed White to use the women’s facilities, despite this being in line with the then parliamentary policy.

“It left me white, shaking,” White said, “really concerned about how welcome I was on the parliamentary estate.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been attacked for just going about my normal business. Potentially that is a situation that trans people are going to face all across the UK after the Supreme Court ruling.”

Following this incident, parliament has now updated its policies to prevent trans people from using the appropriate facilities, even though it had said it would wait for a new statutory code of practice before updating its policies.

For the director of Good Law Project, Jo Maugham, this raises important questions.

“The Supreme Court had a whole section of its judgment headed – and here I quote – ‘Why this interpretation would not be disadvantageous to or remove protection from trans people with or without a GRC’,” Maugham said, “and you have to ask why the parliamentary estate has chosen to ignore what seems to be the law. It may be expedient in the short term to be dictated to by JK Rowling’s billions – but it is going to prove very unwise in the longer term.”