As the dust settles on last week’s general election, voters are beginning to learn more about their new government’s plans for change. From growing the economy to curbing illegal immigration, Labour’s goals, as confirmed in recent speeches by Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, are becoming clear. Yet one policy issue remains conspicuously uncertain: the issue of women-only spaces.
In an interview with the Times in the final week of campaigning, Starmer stated that biological males with Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) should not be allowed in women-only spaces. This contradicted comments previously made by the since-appointed education secretary Bridget Phillipson in an interview with LBC in which she refused to answer a question about female lavatories. Then there was the treatment of Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who has since been re-elected in Canterbury and whose gender-critical stance on the issue led to threats and abuse from trans activists during the campaign period.
The origins of this debate are difficult to trace, but they start somewhere around the late 2010s following the government’s public consultation into reforming the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. Led by then equalities minister, Penny Mordaunt, the consultation sought to understand public sentiment around simplifying the process to allow individuals to legally change their gender. ‘Trans women are women and trans men are men,’ Mordaunt famously told parliament during a debate on the topic in 2018.
Since then, much of the conversation has centred on the ideological divisions between trans-rights campaigners who want access to single-sex spaces (including women’s toilets, women’s sports, and women-only boards and panels), and women’s rights activists who want to protect them. For the latter group, the issue of protecting women from violence – male violence in particular – has been paramount.
In the UK, violence against women is endemic. One in four biological women will experience domestic abuse at the hands of a male perpetrator at least once in their lifetime. A minimum of two biological women are killed by a former or current male partner every week. Despite being more likely to be arrested for incidents of abuse, biological women are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violence. In comparison, 93 per cent of defendants in domestic abuse cases are male. It is clear that some men pose a danger to women.
Safety concerns then are an important reason to have women-only spaces. But there are other reasons, too, why women might want to meet without men. For decades, women have responded to the exclusion they have faced from all-male spaces like sporting clubs, bars, and workplaces by creating female-only spaces, from informal community clubs to international organisations. These spaces were not created out of a desire to validate one another’s gender identity, but from the need to be seen and heard. A necessity to share joyful stories about motherhood and painful ones about infertility. To revel in the happiness of a good marriage and lament in the sorrow of a loveless – or worse, abusive – one. To trade food hacks that make peeling garlic easier and period hacks that make the accompanying (and often debilitating) migraines and cramps more manageable.
Women’s rights groups that campaign for the protection of women-only spaces on the basis of safety are right to do so. But in taking this route, they cede too much ground. After all, there are other things that make biological women unique beyond their disproportionate likelihood of being attacked by men.
As a result of the focus on safety in recent years, women-only spaces – from toilets to locker rooms – are seen solely as ‘safe zones’; providing shelter to vulnerable women from a violent world. But safety should be the guaranteed starting point, not the goal. Women-only toilets are not just a shelter away from the harassment of men. They are also the location in which a canon event can take place: that of one woman complimenting another over the colour of her dress or, more seriously, coming to her rescue with a spare sanitary pad. The same goes for locker rooms, shelters, and women-only co-working spaces. These places should not be used solely as hideaways from the world, in which victimised women take shelter, but rather as places to cultivate and perpetuate female solidarity, camaraderie, and joy.
Critics of this stance will call it elitist and idealistic. They will say that it is privileged and entitled to demand female joy at a time when transwomen are also being victimised by a harsh and violent world. To this one might respond – with civility and kindness – that there is more than one solution to this problem. Biological women’s spaces that exclude transwomen do not have to prohibit the formation of transwomen-only spaces that may very well exclude biological women. Biological women’s spaces do not have to exist at the expense of transwomen-only spaces. So on and so forth.
As the new Labour government solidifies their plans for dealing with the issue of women-only spaces, they may feel pressured to choose between one of two options. To either infiltrate women-only spaces or protect them. But another option exists in which the integrity of these spaces is not only maintained but expanded, not only for biological women, but transwomen, too. There is room for women-only spaces and for transwomen-only spaces.
For too long, the goal of single-sex spaces has been reduced to the provision of safety. But this approach has robbed both transwomen and biological women of something just as important: community.
Catch up on SpectatorTV:
Comments