The Mayor of Hackney, Caroline Woodley, has said “dialogue will have to continue” about Hackney Council’s equalities duties and strategy, following the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the definition of a woman under equalities law is based on biological sex and its possible implications for which people are allowed access to single-sex services and spaces. “I’m very keen to ensure that we uphold the law and that we have open dialogue in a way that will be suitable and appropriate in order to do that,” she said.
Woodley’s comments came during a section of yesterday evening’s meeting of the council’s cabinet in which a deputation was received from campaigners arguing that the council “must have regard to its public sector equality duty and protect females from sexual abuse by protecting single-sex spaces” including by creating “a strategy that increases females’ use of leisure centres and keep them safe”, and claiming that the council’s current stance on trans inclusion “falsely equates sex and gender” and has been superseded by recent case law.
The deputation was led in the council chamber by Hackney resident Suraiya Khandoker (pictured, centre, among supporters), who described herself as a “sex realist” – a term she and allies consider to more accurately reflect their position than “gender critical” – and had a particular focus on plans approved earlier this month to revamp the borough’s King’s Hall leisure centre, whose architects have developed an approach to designing sports and leisure building changing facilities they say will “remove barriers to participation in sports for the LGBTQ+ community”.
Khandoker said “the Supreme Court confirmed that biological sex is real and women’s rights matter,” and argued that “the plans for the King’s Hall and the policies and operations of all the council’s leisure centres must be changed to comply with the law” so that Hackney fulfils its “statutory duties regarding all protected characteristics, including sex”.
An interim update from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) about the “practical implications” of the Supreme Court judgment says they means that under the Equality Act (2010) a woman is “a person born female” and that if “somebody identifies as trans, they do not change sex for the purposes of the Act” even if they have a gender recognition certificate.
The interim update said the judgment had implications for services that are open to the public including leisure facilities. It states:
“It is not compulsory for services that are open to the public to be provided on a single-sex basis or to have single-sex facilities such as toilets. These can be single-sex if it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim and they meet other conditions in the Act. However, it could be indirect sex discrimination against women if the only provision is mixed-sex”.
Khandoker said that King’s Hall architects Faulkner Browns have not set “a new benchmark” for inclusivity with its changing facilities approach but instead created a situation for King’s Hall which would mean women “losing access to women only changing space”.
She contended that “Hackney Council has put in a lot of resources to meet trans needs, but not women’s,” making her case by referring to excerpts from council documents and images of the proposed organisation of changing facilities reproduced on an X/Twitter feed.
She spoke of “an epidemic of spy cameras placed in cubicles by men who then upload voyeurism material on to the internet”, with most of the victims women, and cited a newspaper report that far more sexual assaults are committed in unisex changing environments than in those where spaces for men and for women are separate.
Khandoker drew attention to a full council meeting held in March 2023 which saw a vote in favour of a joint motion of the Labour and Green groups asserting that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”. She maintained that “this needs reviewing” in light of the Supreme Court ruling.
Khandoker was introduced at the meeting by Labour councillor Lynne Troughton who said that since the deputation was submitted earlier this year “the landscape has change significantly”. She argued that although “unisex facilities” such as those proposed for King’s Hall might have appeared to be a “good compromise option” they would “not safeguard women and girls or comply with the single sex exceptions in the Equality Act” and “would discriminate against women” as well as being “a health and safety risk” and “inadequate for schools”.
Troughton urged the cabinet to take “impartial and specialist advice to ensure the plans for King’s Hall and all facilities in the borough are future-proofed against legal challenge”.
Responding to the deputation, Susan Fajana-Thomas, cabinet member for community safety and regulatory services, asked if its supporters were “aware of the work Hackney is doing through our domestic abuse interventions around women’s safety, as well as our night time economy in public spaces”.
Carole Williams, cabinet member for employment, human resources and equalities, said it “will take the council some time to throughly consider all the potential implications of the recent Supreme Court ruling, and any associated changes to statutory guidance and codes of practice” but said the council will “continue to stand by all of our communities including trans siblings and against all forms of hate, discrimination and violence”.
Williams acknowledged that “sexual abuse harms too many women across our borough and across the country” and said “Hackney Council is both firm in condemning any form of sexual violence” and “committed to women’s safety and challenging violence perpetrated by men against women” through a number of policies and programmes.
She also stressed that she wanted to avoid “associating male violence with trans inclusion in any way,” on the grounds that this would be “transphobic” and therefore “cause psychological harm as well as increasing the risk of threats and violence towards trans people”.
To some heckling from supporters of the deputation in the public gallery, Williams said Office for National Statistics figures published in March 2020 showed that “transgender people in England and Wales are twice as likely to be victims of crimes as cisgender people”.
She defended the March 2023 full council vote, saying that the motion passed “aimed to ensure that the council’s policies are aligned with its public sector equality duty, guaranteeing trans residents the same access to public services as everyone else”, and she challenged the newspaper report referred to by Khandoker, saying its figures were “not supported by local information”.
Thanking those who had brought the deputation, which was backed by the charity Sex Matters, Woodley said: “I think this is a dialogue that will have to continue, particularly as the ruling of the Supreme Court unfolds, so the conversation won’t end here. It’s still a very sensitive topic, I understand the feeling in the room”.
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