Trans women pose no evidence-based threat to cis women or girls. The data consistently shows that trans women and girls are far more likely to be victims of violence, abuse, and discrimination than perpetrators of it. Protection should be built around keeping all people safe from bad actors, not around excluding a whole group based on identity.
What does "protecting women and girls" actually mean?
I hear this phrase constantly, and I want to ask the question that almost nobody asks out loud: protecting women and girls from what, exactly? Because the phrase only makes sense if you finish the sentence. And when you finish it honestly, it reads: protecting women and girls from trans women and trans girls.
Say it that way and something becomes visible. The argument requires you to accept, as a starting premise, that trans women and trans girls are dangerous. Not a specific person who has done a specific thing. The whole group, by virtue of their gender identity. That is not a safeguarding position. That is prejudice.
Where is the evidence that trans women are a threat?
There isn't any. And I do not mean that loosely. I mean that the claim that trans women as a group represent a danger to cis women is not supported by the data. What the data actually shows is the reverse: trans women and trans girls are far more likely to be victims of violence, abuse, hate crime, and discrimination than they are to be perpetrators of it.
If we are talking about who needs protecting, it is trans people. They are the group that faces elevated rates of physical attack, sexual violence, harassment, and murder. If the conversation about safety were genuinely about safety, it would start there.
Is male violence the real concern?
Sometimes the argument shifts. Instead of "trans women are dangerous", the version you hear is: "people who were assigned male at birth have higher rates of violence, therefore we should exclude everyone assigned male at birth from women's spaces." It sounds more logical than the first version, but it still does not hold.
Physical strength is not the same as risk. The fact that, on average, people who went through a male puberty tend to have greater physical strength does not make them a danger to anyone. Women commit violent crimes too, including crimes that are not physical: emotional abuse, coercive control, neglect. Violence is committed by some people. It is not a property of a sex or a gender.
The moment we allow the narrative that male people are inherently dangerous, we have accepted a form of sex-based prejudice that should have no place in how we think about one another. And then to extend that logic to trans women, because they were assigned male at birth, and conclude that cis women therefore need protection from them, is a chain of reasoning so flawed it should not survive contact with real scrutiny.
What does the Equality Act actually say?
Trans women are protected under the Equality Act 2010 through the characteristic of gender reassignment. That means excluding a trans woman from a women's space simply because she is trans is not a neutral policy choice. It is unlawful discrimination, and you need a very good reason, properly evidenced and proportionate, to justify a single-sex exception.
The principle I keep coming back to is simple: if you put "women" on the door, all women should be included. A women's space that only admits cis women is not a women's space. It is a cis women's space, and the distinction matters, legally and morally.
What about prisons and other complex spaces?
Prisons are the example that gets raised most often, and I understand why. They are a genuinely high-stakes environment, and the question of how to keep prisoners safe is serious. But here is the thing: we do not currently segregate prisons by physical size, height, weight, or strength, even though those variables map much more directly onto physical risk than gender does. We put men in male prisons and women in female prisons. If that is the principle, it has to hold consistently. Trans women are women. Female prisons have female inmates, and that includes trans women.
What we should absolutely be doing is ensuring that everyone inside a prison is safe: safe from other inmates, safe from institutional abuse, safe from themselves. Those are real safeguarding questions and they deserve real, careful answers. But "this person is trans, therefore they are a threat" is not one of those answers. It is not supported by evidence, and it is not what the Equality Act permits.
There is something else worth saying here. When a trans woman is placed in a male prison rather than a female one, the evidence shows she is at significantly greater risk of being bullied, assaulted, and killed. If protection is what we care about, this is where the energy should go.
The argument that never quite says its own name
What strikes me most about the "protecting women" framing is how carefully it avoids being direct. It never quite says: trans women are dangerous. It circles around it, gestures towards it, lets you fill in the gap. But that gap is where the prejudice lives.
Once you name it, and once you ask for the evidence, the argument collapses. There is no population-level data showing that trans women represent a heightened risk to cis women. There is no mechanism by which gender identity creates danger. There is only an old assumption, presented as concern, that people assigned male at birth cannot be trusted around women. That assumption is wrong when applied to cis men, and it does not become right when applied to trans women.
Who actually needs protecting?
All of us, from people who cause harm. Not from a gender. Not from a sex. From individuals who hurt other people, whatever body they are in, whatever identity they hold, whatever pronoun they use.
We protect people better when we focus on behaviour, not on identity. We protect people better when we build spaces that are genuinely inclusive and have proper safeguarding in place for everyone inside them. We protect people better when we stop using "safety" as a reason to exclude a group that is, by any measure, more endangered than the rest.
Trans women and girls are not the threat. They are, overwhelmingly, among the people most in need of protection. That is where the conversation should start, and it is where I want it to end.
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, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She works full-time in advocacy, education, and public engagement, promoting understanding and acceptance of gender diversity.
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