Susanna Rustin's piece in the Guardian is the respectable, carefully argued version of a case that has real consequences for trans people's lives. Because it is careful, it deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissal. But careful does not mean right, and there are things in this article that need to be said plainly.

What the article is actually arguing

Rustin's position is that the EHRC's updated draft code of practice, which follows the Supreme Court ruling that "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex, is not really about toilets. The deeper prize, she argues, is prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, lesbian groups, and women's health settings. The trans rights response, she says, risks obscuring the genuine purpose of those spaces, and that purpose is the safety of women who have survived violence.

That is a coherent argument. The question is whether it holds up when you look at what it actually requires, who it names as a threat, and what it leaves out.

The statistic that needs examining

The most striking factual claim in the piece is about trans women in prison. Rustin writes that a government minister reported 151 out of 245 transgender prisoners identifying as women were convicted of a sexual offence. She acknowledges that other data may point to different conclusions, but uses the figure to support the idea that there is "no failsafe way to distinguish a transgender woman from a man who wishes to access female spaces."

A few things are worth knowing about that statistic. The prison population is not representative of the trans population as a whole. People incarcerated for sexual offences have an obvious strategic reason to seek reclassification, and the data tells us nothing about the overwhelming majority of trans women who are not in prison and who simply want to use a changing room or a refuge without incident. Using the prison population to characterise trans women generally is not analysis, it is extrapolation, and it is the kind of extrapolation that would be challenged immediately if it were applied to any other group.

The argument also contains a sleight of hand that surfaces repeatedly in this debate: the idea that because it is impossible to verify gender identity, any trans woman might be a man exploiting the system. That logic, applied consistently, would justify suspicion of every person in every protected category. We do not build policy on the worst-case actor. We build safeguarding policy on evidence of actual harm, and the evidence that trans women as a group pose a particular risk to women in shared spaces does not exist.

What is missing from the picture

Rustin acknowledges, briefly, that trans people face high rates of domestic abuse and need access to services. That acknowledgement sits in a single sentence before the article moves on. It deserves more than a sentence, because it is the part of the picture that the entire framing of "protecting women" tends to erase.

Trans women who have survived domestic violence need refuges. Trans women who have survived sexual assault need rape crisis services. Trans women who are ill need healthcare. When the code says that single-sex services cannot include trans women even if they hold a Gender Recognition Certificate, and that organisations should offer "alternative, mixed-sex facilities" instead, what that means in practice for a trans woman fleeing abuse is: not here. Go somewhere else. Something that cannot be said to a cisgender woman.

That is not a minor administrative inconvenience. For a trans woman with nowhere safe to go, it is a closed door at the moment she most needs it open. The safety being protected here is not hers.

The framing of "sacrifice"

Rustin ends by saying that single-sex spaces should not be "sacrificed" on grounds that seeking a female-only space is bigoted. Nobody serious is arguing that seeking female-only space is bigoted. The argument is about whether the way those spaces are defined causes harm to trans people, and whether that harm can be justified. Those are different questions, and conflating them makes the debate harder to have honestly.

The EHRC code is draft guidance. It has significant authority, but it is not yet statutory code, and it has attracted criticism from multiple directions, including from organisations concerned that the "special category personal data" provision makes single-sex spaces harder to operate, not easier. The legal landscape is still being settled, and the human cost of that process is being paid most heavily by trans people who are not abstract policy problems, but people who need a doctor, a shelter, a support group, or simply a place to change their clothes.

What I want people to hear

Rustin's article treats trans people as a risk to be managed rather than a population with safety needs of their own. The violence statistics she cites about women are real and they are serious, but trans women are also women, and many of them are among the survivors those statistics describe. The frame of "women versus trans women" does not reflect reality. It reflects a political choice about who gets to count.

Genuinely good safeguarding looks at the behaviour of individuals, trains staff, creates reporting mechanisms, and designs services around the people who actually need them. It does not exclude an entire group from protection on the basis that a small number of bad-faith actors might theoretically share a characteristic with them. That principle applies to everyone, including trans women.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and equality.