"Bathroom ban" has increased harassment in UK

 10 November, 2025 - Author: Will Roberts

Workers' Liberty

Pic: ACLU. Florida has by far the harshest "bathroom ban" among the right-wing states in the USA which have enacted such bans, but still milder than proposed by the EHRC in the UK.

Campaigning group TransActual have produced a report tracking the effect of the EHRC's now-withdrawn “interim update” in the first few months after the Supreme Court ruling in April.

The report is based on a survey TransActual carried out among trans people in the UK and other “gender non-conforming” people – in this context, that largely means cis people whose appearance differs in some way from the norm (for example, butch lesbians).

Despite all necessary reservations due to only one survey being done, and the survey being opt-in, and for that reason self-selecting, the findings are clear: the knock-on effect of the EHRC’s "interim update" has been an increase in harassment and abuse across the spectrum, and significantly more so for trans people.

The focus on the EHRC’s update, rather than the Supreme Court ruling itself, is for a simple reason: the Supreme Court did not rule on toilet access, only on membership of official committees in Scotland, and maintained that trans people should be free from harassment and discrimination under the 2010 Equality Act. The focus on toilets came from the EHRC’s later "interim update", which fuelled much of the media coverage (papers were keen to frame the case as “a victory for women’s rights” in the specific domain of “single sex” or “women’s” spaces).

Trans people and gender non-conforming cis people alike report being confronted in public toilets and changing rooms. That happened before, but people have felt particularly bolstered to do so thanks to the EHRC.

The following is a report from a cis woman:

“The most recent is that I went to the ladies’ loo at Victoria station. A group of young women gathered around me and told me I should get out, saying ‘don’t you know you’re not allowed in here anymore’. I … locked myself in a loo. They stood outside and were banging on the door and shouting that they were going to call the police and that I was ‘disgusting’ and had no right to be born and all sorts of horrible things …I’m a cis woman and just happen to be tall and quite flat chested and wear my hair short. Before the ruling any challenges had been gentle, like ‘oh by the way this is the ladies’ and people were embarrassed or apologetic when I said ‘it’s okay I’m a girl’, but now it’s aggressive and horrible…”

As we said at the time of the ruling, this was an inevitable result of the backlash around the Supreme Court case: anyone who is deemed not to “fit in” will be on the receiving end of hatred that has been whipped up by transphobic campaigners and the right-wing press.

The effect on trans people (who have experienced a much more significant jump in incidents than cis respondents, according to the report) is also enormous. Many report opting to use no “gendered spaces” at all, restricting the amount they drink and where they go out in public to accommodate this. Such choices, in deference to prejudice, were common enough before, but they have increased; and they have been linked to dehydration and urinary health issues, as well as just being plain humiliating and degrading.

TransActual’s survey received a large number of “malicious” responses from transphobes looking to skew or make fun of the results. This is no surprise – the same has been true of any open consultation or survey regarding trans people in the last several years.

Rather than just discard them, TransActual incorporate some findings based on analysing these responses, and plan to release a separate report in the future. Commonalities between the malicious responses are: justificatory language (“can now”, “allowed to”, “the law is clear”), suggesting that the ruling has bolstered and lent credence to anti-trans opinions; misinterpretations celebrating things that the Supreme Court ruling did not rule on, such as removing protections for trans people or saying that blanket exclusions of trans people are somehow “required”; and perhaps most significantly, “media mirroring” – language taken directly from reports in the right-wing press that has filtered down into general conversation, particularly phrases like “a win for women”, and “common sense prevails”.

More research will follow, and unless the EHRC "interim update" is overruled rather than just withdrawn, the uptick in harassment and discrimination will continue. It is vital that socialists join the fight against the current reactionary wave targeting trans people in the UK and beyond.