Not always. Women's safety and privacy are real and hard-won, and some concerns about specific settings deserve a serious answer. But many demands made under the banner of women's rights have no connection to any woman's safety, and some carry documented harm for trans people. The honest question is not whether women deserve protection, but whether a particular policy actually achieves it.
This piece came out of my Triggernometry conversation with Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull. I am going to work through the evidence here in more detail than a filmed debate allows, and I am going to do it plainly. I am not restating her claims as though they were open questions. I am answering the serious version of the concern, because that is what the evidence deserves.
Women's safety and privacy are legitimate concerns
Women fought for recognition of sex-specific needs, protection from male violence and access to services designed for them. They had to fight hard, and the gains were not automatic. I am not arguing with any of that, and there is not a word of condescension in what follows.
But those legitimate interests raise a specific set of questions. Which right, exactly, is threatened in a given setting? What evidence shows the threat? Is the restriction proportionate to it? Could the same protection be achieved without excluding an entire group of people? Those questions matter because women's safety is too important to rest on an untested assumption. If the evidence does not support a restriction, then the restriction is not protecting women: it is doing something else.
What the evidence actually says about public facilities
The most frequently cited fear is that inclusive toilet and changing-room policies expose women to assault or voyeurism. That fear is understandable, but the available evidence does not support it.
A 2018 Williams Institute study[1] compared Massachusetts localities with and without gender-identity-inclusive public-accommodation laws. It found no increase in reported assaults, sex offences or privacy violations in toilets, changing rooms and locker rooms following inclusive policies. Incidents were rare in both inclusive and non-inclusive localities.
That study concerns public facilities in Massachusetts, not every type of women-only setting, and I am not overstating it. But it does challenge the core assumption. The available evidence from inclusive public-facility policies has not shown the predicted increase in assaults or sexual offences. That does not remove the need for safeguarding, but it means that if you are designing policy to keep women safe in changing rooms, blanket exclusion of trans women is not a measure the evidence supports.
Prisons: the hardest case
Prisons are not the same problem as public toilets, and I refuse to answer them in the same breath. They combine deprivation of liberty, intimate living conditions and people with complex and sometimes serious offending histories. The stakes are higher in every direction.
Since 2023, HMPPS policy has generally excluded trans women with male genitalia, or convictions for sexual or violent offences, from the mainstream women's estate except in exceptional circumstances. That is the current policy[2], and I am not going to pretend it does not exist.
What I will say is this: placing a trans person in a male environment is not a neutral or risk-free decision either. US Bureau of Justice Statistics data[3] found that approximately 35% of transgender prison inmates and 34% of transgender jail inmates reported sexual victimisation during the relevant reporting period. That figure is not an argument against all risk assessment in prisons. It is an argument for honest risk assessment, one that considers anatomy, offending history, vulnerability, behaviour and individual risk, rather than treating placement in male housing as the safe default.
Prisons require more than a slogan from either side. Placement must protect female prisoners while also recognising the serious risks trans prisoners may face. Identity alone cannot answer that; individual evidence and risk assessment must.
The demands that have nothing to do with women's safety
Some of what is demanded under the banner of women's rights has no connection, direct or indirect, to keeping any woman safe in any setting. Restricting access to hormones or other healthcare does not make a women's facility safer. It does not change what happens in a changing room, a prison wing or a refuge. It causes harm to trans people and protects nobody.
Deliberately misgendering trans people, refusing their names, or publicly describing all trans women as predatory is not a safeguarding policy. It is degradation. A trans woman who has lived as a woman for decades, who has a Gender Recognition Certificate, who has never harmed anyone, is not made safer to be around by being humiliated. The humiliation is the point, not an unfortunate side effect.
And preventing trans people from receiving dignified treatment in healthcare, in administration, in public life, protects no identifiable sex-based right. There is no woman anywhere who becomes safer because a trans person is refused their name on a form.
Safeguarding asks what rules are necessary in a particular setting. Prejudice starts when every part of a group's healthcare, identity and public life is treated as a threat.
The legal position after For Women Scotland
The law has shifted, and I am going to be accurate about where it now stands rather than glossing over it.
The Equality Act 2010 protects both sex and gender reassignment as separate protected characteristics. Following the Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland in April 2025, "sex" in the Equality Act means biological sex for the purposes of that Act, including for single-sex provisions. The EHRC's guidance on that ruling[4] makes clear that the judgment represents one court's interpretation of the Act, not a new Act of Parliament, and that trans people remain protected against discrimination under the characteristic of gender reassignment.
The law now permits separate and single-sex services and, in appropriate circumstances, the exclusion of trans people where legally justified. It does not establish that every service must exclude trans people, and it does not strip trans people of protection from discrimination in other contexts. A service that chooses to exclude trans women where there is no genuine justification for doing so may still face challenge.
There can be genuine conflicts of interest in specific settings. Privacy and dignity sometimes create competing claims that require careful thought, and those conflicts should be resolved using evidence, necessity and proportionality, not blanket assumptions about an entire group. The EHRC's services code of practice[5] is the framework for working through that.
On the GRC specifically: following the Supreme Court judgment, a GRC no longer changes a person's sex for Equality Act purposes. Campaigning to restrict GRCs cannot, therefore, be straightforwardly presented as necessary to control access to Equality Act single-sex services, because the GRC no longer has that effect under the Act. That argument has lost its own internal logic.
A question about proportion
It is fair to ask where the attention is going.
In the year ending March 2026, only 3.4% of recorded rape offences had received a charged or summonsed outcome[6] at the point that data was published, though that figure will rise as investigations conclude. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner's 2026–29 strategy[7] says services remain inadequately funded following years of underinvestment. Workplace sex discrimination and violence against women remain significant and well-documented.
I am not claiming that any particular women's organisation ignores those things: I do not have evidence about every organisation, and it would be unfair to generalise. What I am asking is whether the scale of political energy, legal challenge and funded campaigning directed at trans people is proportionate to the evidence of harm trans people cause. That is a legitimate question, and the evidence does not support a yes.
What practical policy actually looks like
Dignity, privacy and safety are not a fixed prize that one group must take from another. They are interests that good policy tries to protect for everyone, and there are concrete ways to do that.
Individual risk assessment in prisons and other high-risk environments, within current law and placement rules, is more defensible than categorical exclusion on any single criterion. Private, single-occupancy facilities in changing rooms and similar spaces meet genuine privacy needs without requiring anyone to be pushed out of a shared space entirely. Appropriate single-sex services, where they are genuinely justified and proportionate, can coexist with dignified alternatives for trans people where access is restricted. Existing rules against harassment, voyeurism, assault and sexual violence can and should be enforced regardless of the perpetrator's identity, because those rules already cover the harms people say they are worried about.
None of that is a concession to danger. It is what evidence-based policy looks like when the goal is actually to protect people rather than to exclude a group.
If you are trans, or if you are a parent trying to understand what your child is walking into when these arguments are made: you are not imagining it. Some of what is said under the banner of women's rights would not make a single woman safer in any setting. You are right to name that, and you are right to expect better than you are currently getting. The answer to this is not a fight over who counts; it is a clearer insistence on what protection actually requires and what it does not.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about trans healthcare, rights and the life around them.
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