Transgender People Should Use Disabled Toilets if They Reject Birth-Gender Facilities – Kemi Badenoch

UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said transgender staff and customers should use disabled toilets if they do not wish to use facilities matching their biological sex, following a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Badenoch described the approach as a cost-effective solution for businesses, arguing it would avoid the need to build new gender-neutral toilets. Her comments come after the Supreme Court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer strictly to biological definitions. The decision effectively allows the exclusion of transgender women from women-only spaces such as toilets and changing rooms.

Badenoch insisted the issue is “not as complex as it’s often made out to be” and pointed out that most businesses already offer a unisex disabled toilet. “Almost all businesses I see have disabled loos. They are unisex, different from gender neutral. Trans people can use those,” she said. “If you are providing a single-sex space, it has to be a single-sex space.”

She stressed that the move would protect businesses from the costs of adapting or expanding facilities to accommodate transgender users. Badenoch also said that concerns about toilet access were driven not by transgender people themselves, but by “predatory men who used lax rules to claim they were women and access women’s toilets.” She added that government regulations around toilets had been in place for two years, despite initial public ridicule.

Meanwhile, senior minister Pat McFadden confirmed that transgender civil servants and public sector workers will no longer be allowed to use toilets and changing rooms aligned with their identified gender. McFadden said the Government would adhere to new guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), though he admitted there would be no active enforcement, stating, “there isn’t going to be toilet police.”

The Supreme Court’s decision over the Easter period reaffirmed that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act mean biological woman and biological sex. In response, the EHRC issued fresh guidance, including a directive that schools must provide single-sex changing facilities for boys and girls over the age of eight. While the guidance allows for alternative arrangements for transgender pupils, it specifies that trans girls should not use girls’ facilities and trans boys should not use boys’ facilities.

The EHRC also clarified that sports clubs and associations with 25 or more members can lawfully restrict membership to biological men or women, meaning lesbian women’s clubs, for example, are not obliged to admit trans women. A new detailed code of practice based on the Supreme Court ruling is now being prepared by the EHRC, with the aim of submitting it to the Government for approval by June.