Because the landmark 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling stating that “sex” in the Equality Act refers only to biological sex — rather than “gender identity,” as trans activists claimed — the transgender movement has faced setback after setback. After being almost entirely conquered by the trans movement in less than a decade, the pendulum has been swinging back in the UK. Consider just a few of the major changes:
- Now, organizations can legally bar trans-identifying men from female-only spaces, including change rooms, bathrooms, hospital wards, and women’s refuges, among others.
- Several sports governing bodies, including the English and Scottish Football Associations, England Netball, and the England and Wales Cricket Board, among others, have formally banned trans-identifying men from participating in female categories.
- Many businesses are updating or reviewing their policies to ensure that female-only spaces are for … well, females only (sometimes prompted by lawsuits).
- The Cass Review recommendations, which condemned sex change “treatments” for minors in nearly all circumstances, continue to be implemented by the National Health Service.
- Perhaps most surprisingly, the Labour Party — the Labour Party — banned trans-identifying men from their women’s conference.
- Trans-identifying males have been formally evicted from the UK’s girl scouting organization.
- A number of high-profile lawsuits have been won by women persecuted for objecting to men in their spaces.
The latest news, reported by the Guardian on May 21, indicates just how sweeping the reversal might be. “Single-sex toilets and changing rooms in England, Wales and Scotland must exclude transgender men and women, according to a new code of practice from the equalities watchdog,” the liberal outlet reported.
But the long-awaited guidance also says that businesses and service providers have to offer practical alternatives such as gender-neutral toilets for people who do not wish to use services for their biological sex. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) document sets out how public bodies, businesses and other service providers should respond in practical terms to April 2025’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers only to biological sex.
Additionally, the EHRC emphasized that female-only spaces in health care are mandatory. Trans activist groups — which lobbied the EHRC aggressively before the new guidance came out — are very upset with Trans+ Solidarity Alliance director Alexandra Parmar-Yee, stating that the guidance was “worryingly similar to a U.S. bathroom ban condemned by the UK Foreign Office in 2016.” But it isn’t 2016 anymore; it’s 2026. That stuff doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
According to a May 22 report in the Guardian, this return to normalcy — which, as staggering as it sounds, is only a decade or so back — has rendered life unlivable for LGBT people: “Like many transgender individuals, the Guardian has interviewed in recent years, Alice is making plans to move out of the UK. It’s been made abundantly clear that I’m not welcome. I love my job and my family, have a happy life here, but I will not be a second-class citizen in my own country.’”
But this guidance was published despite lobbying from the once extraordinarily powerful LGBT lobby. I am not one to get unrealistically optimistic in the wake of small culture war battles — the fact that we’re having one over men in women’s bathrooms is a sign of just how degraded our culture is to begin with — but it does look like the pendulum swing in the UK may be more enduring than we pessimists first feared. If some trans activists are planning to move, it means they think they’ve lost.
For a lobby that has run the country for a decade, that is an admission I was not expecting.