A strip search is one of the most intimate and potentially traumatic encounters anyone can have with the state. It involves vulnerability, exposure, and an almost total loss of control. The fact that we are now in a courtroom arguing about whether trans people should be protected from their own police force during that moment tells you something stark about where we are.

On 16 June, the High Court heard a judicial review brought by Sex Matters against the National Police Chiefs' Council and the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police. The challenge was directed at guidance issued by both defendants that permits cross-sex strip searches in custody when a transgender detainee is involved, provided that both the detainee and the searching officer give their informed consent. Judgment was reserved, so we are still waiting to hear the outcome.

What the case is actually about

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, known as PACE, contains same-sex search provisions. Those provisions create a real difficulty for trans detainees, because the law does not automatically account for someone whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. The guidance under challenge tried to navigate that gap by making consent the governing principle: if both the trans person being searched and the officer conducting the search agree, a cross-sex search can proceed.

That sounds, on its face, like a reasonable attempt to find a workable solution. It centres the trans person's wishes. It does not force anyone into a situation they have not agreed to. The lawyers defending the guidance, Fiona Barton KC and Robert Talalay, acted for the police defendants, and the central argument they advanced was that consent remains a legitimate basis for police action even where a statutory power also exists.

Sex Matters disagrees. Their challenge rests on the idea that consent cannot sit alongside coercive state power in this way, and that the guidance is therefore unlawful. Linden J heard the arguments and reserved judgment.

What is actually at stake for the trans person in that custody suite

I want to stay with the human reality here for a moment, because it is easy to let the legal argument swallow it.

When someone is in police custody awaiting a strip search, they are frightened, often disoriented, and entirely without power. For a trans person, that moment carries an additional layer of exposure, because their body may not match what the officer in front of them expects, or what the law, written decades before anyone was thinking carefully about trans lives, anticipated. The question of who searches them, and under what conditions, is not abstract. It is immediate, physical, and deeply personal.

The guidance being challenged tried to give that person some agency. It said: you get a say. You can consent to a cross-sex search if that is what you prefer, and the officer can decline if they are not comfortable. Both parties' autonomy matters. That strikes me as a genuinely thoughtful attempt to navigate an impossible gap in existing law, rather than simply applying the letter of PACE in a way that disregards the trans person's identity entirely.

The organisation bringing the challenge

Sex Matters exists to argue that sex should be treated as immutable and binary in law and policy. Their challenge here is consistent with that position: they want the same-sex search provisions interpreted strictly by biological sex, regardless of a trans person's identity, legal recognition, or stated preference.

If that argument succeeds, a trans woman in custody could be searched by a male officer against her will, simply because the law, read in Sex Matters' preferred way, categorises her as male. Her consent to a female officer conducting the search would carry no weight. The thing that was designed to protect dignity, the same-sex search provision, would instead become a mechanism for enforcing a category that does not reflect who she is.

That is not a neutral application of the law, but a particular reading of it, one that consistently produces outcomes where trans people are the ones who lose.

Consent and coercive power

The legal question the court is wrestling with is genuinely interesting. Can consent operate as a governing principle where a coercive statutory power also exists? That question matters not just for trans detainees but for the broader relationship between police discretion and individual autonomy. The defendants argued yes: policing by consent is a foundational principle, and the existence of a power under PACE does not extinguish the possibility of a consensual alternative. That seems right to me, but I am not the judge, and we will wait to hear what Linden J concludes.

What I do know is this: policy built on consent, on genuine informed agreement between real human beings in a difficult situation, is better policy than policy built on categorical rules that ride roughshod over the person in front of you. The guidance under challenge was attempting to do something humane. Whether the courts agree that it did so lawfully is another question.

Why this matters beyond the courtroom

Cases like this shape the everyday texture of trans people's lives in ways that rarely make headlines. Most people will never be strip-searched. But every trans person who is detained, for whatever reason, needs to know that the system has thought about them. That there is guidance, however imperfect, that does not simply erase their identity at the moment they are most vulnerable.

If the challenge succeeds and the guidance falls, what replaces it? A strict biological reading of same-sex search provisions that leaves trans detainees without any accommodation at all. The burden, as so often, falls on the people who were already bearing the most.

Judgment has been reserved. I will be watching for it.

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 advocate. She is the founder of GenderGP and writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.