U.K. PM Starmer Says Trans People Must Be Banned From Single-Sex Spaces Without Delay

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer says transgender people must be banned from single-sex spaces as soon as possible.

His comments come after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year said that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex at birth.

Responding to a question at the NATO summit in The Hague last week, Starmer said the U.K. had accepted the ruling, but hospitals, universities, and government departments must act.

“We’ve accepted the ruling, welcomed the ruling, and everything else flows from that, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, according to Pink News.

“Therefore, all guidance needs to be consistent with the ruling, and we need to get to that position as soon as possible.”

In April, the Supreme Court ruled that “the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”

This means that women with Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) are not legally defined as women under the 2010 Equality Act.

Trans people are still protected against discrimination, indirect discrimination, and harassment under the law.

This came after For Women Scotland (FWS), backed by author J. K. Rowling, launched a legal challenge against the Scottish government over its interpretation of biological sex.

A lower court had ruled that sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex,” but this has now been overruled by the Supreme Court.

While the ruling has been welcomed by gender-critical groups, campaigners describe it as regressive and say it undermines the safety of trans people.

Britain’s first transgender judge, Victoria McCloud, applied to challenge the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights.

Over the weekend, she also called for genocide investigation groups to review the “systemic oppression” of trans people in the U.K.

After speaking at Pride In London’s Human Rights Forum on Saturday, McCloud called for Genocide Watch and The Lemkin Institute to probe what she called attacks by the U.K. government and public bodies on trans rights, Pink News reported.

She asked the groups to confront “the systematic oppression of the trans community of the U.K.”

“We in the U.K. face bathroom bans, violence, abuse, deliberate social exclusion, strip searches of trans women by male police, and calls to photograph us in toilets and other spaces,” she added.

This comes after hundreds of people attended Westminster to lobby MPs on trans rights last week, on Wednesday, June 25.

They voiced concerns about the Supreme Court ruling as restrictions on single-sex spaces are set to be implemented in the wake of the findings.

Both the Scottish and U.K. governments have already implemented toilet policies that correspond with the ruling.

Jude Guaitamacchi, founder of Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and organizer of the lobby protest, said there was a real sense of hope due to the turnout.

“We achieved exactly what we set out to do, which was to bring trans people [and] allies from across the country to meet their MP and to challenge the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] draft guidance, with the hope they speak up for the trans community and stop it becoming law,” Guaitamacchi told Pink News.