The third man

Women have waited with growing impatience for the Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson to put before Parliament a “Code of Practice” for practical application of the Equality Act after the reminder, issued by the Supreme Court in April 2025, that “Sex” for the purposes of the act refers to biological sex.

She finally published the expansive draft guidance last week to great confusion, some disagreement, and significant anger. 

What most people had really wanted to know was whether men who say they are women can and will be kept out of women’s toilets, changing spaces, services and sports. Some had hoped, even expected, that this guidance would make it clear. It didn’t do any such thing. It never really could do any such thing and women were naïve to expect it would. 

Firstly, it is only guidance on how government feels the law could be applied and is not law itself. It gives “example” scenarios of where rights might be protected in certain circumstances but specifically how conflicting provisions for other relevant “Protected Category” individuals could be balanced out. 

It is a very long document and I am not a lawyer, so like many I was hunting for the parts relevant to women’s rights. I looked for parts that explicitly said that if men are pretending to be women they can still be excluded from places designated as “female-only” such as toilets and changing spaces. This is a simple and very basic level campaigning point for women of the “gender critical” movement and has been for some time. 

In relation to single-sex provisions like toilets, the guidance says,

In many cases, it will be proportionate to take a holistic approach to service provision by providing a mix of services which may include both separate or single-sex services and mixed-sex services. The mix of services in terms of the size of the separate or single-sex services and of the mixed-sex services should reflect the needs and relative numbers of service users with different needs. 

Rather than insisting there are male and female toilets, and that the respective males and females must use them, the guidance suggests a “holistic approach” to toilets, providing an example to make things “clearer”:

… a service provider operates a shopping centre and decides to renovate the centre. It initially intends to only provide separate-sex toilets to improve the safety and comfort of users. This disadvantages trans people because it means that a trans person cannot access a toilet catered towards their acquired gender. The service provider therefore decides to also provide toilets in individual lockable rooms with hand basins. 

None of this is sufficiently clear, because the notion of “acquired gender” has nothing to do with sex. It is a pretense. A person has not “acquired” anything which changes their biological sex. Rather than focus on making sex-based rights explicit, as it purported to do, the guidance offers further insult to anyone who rightly understands that there are only two sexes.

This cowardly guidance capitulates once again to the incessant noise of “gender identity” ideologues and it is evidence of a government fearful of upsetting them. 

A “third space” option might feel more comfortable and “kind” to politicians being pressured by lobbyists or even perhaps to those new to the debate, but after years of campaigning battle-weary women have learned that there is no compromise to be made with the aggressors of the trans rights movement. They don’t want a third space, and I don’t know who informed Bridget Phillipson that this would appease such men. No genuflection is ever deep enough. 

What men pretending to be women really want is access to spaces and services which affirm and validate them “as women”. The Good Law Project, famed for their “trans” advocacy, confirmed this in their response, 

Forcing trans people to use third spaces creates stigma, and risks outing them. A trans woman who goes to the pub with the rest of her female friend group would have to explain why she cannot go into the women’s toilets with them. In practice third spaces are often insufficient – denying trans people access to vital services and pushing them out of public life. This will cause serious harm.

The idea that there would suddenly be a big reveal as a man steps into a mixed-sex toilet is ludicrous. The man in the GLP’s example has female friends who will know full well that he is a man, as much as he does. There are very few examples where women with functioning eyes are unable to use them to accurately identify the opposite sex.

Meanwhile, the internet is awash today with men declaring they will not use the third space even if it is made available and will continue to use the women’s loos because they believe they are women. 

This guidance meanwhile confirms that it will be ineffective in policing such men. Not least because it admits no one is allowed to apprehend men lying that they are women:

Where there remains a genuine concern about the accuracy of the response to a request for an individual to confirm their sex, then the service provide, person performing public functions or association should consider what action is proportionate in the circumstances. For example, sex on passports and driving licences may be changed with or without a GRC and birth certificates may reflect the acquired gender of someone who has a GRC. Therefore, it is unlikely to be proportionate or practical to ask for further evidence of a person’s sex. In such circumstances it is likely to be necessary to weigh up the relevant factors to decide whether to exclude the individual from the service or to permit them to continue to access it.

We are in a position where the man will not voluntarily use the male toilet, or the alternative provided for his identity choice, but will probably lie if asked about his sex, with very little to be done about it. All Phillipson has succeeded in doing is feeding the media headlines that have angered and motivated these men to further trespass against the safety of women. Their hatred for Gender Critical women in particular will have been exacerbated.

Phillipson laying before Parliament a document with such a lack of clarity paves the way for yet more legal cases when men go where they shouldn’t be. The law isn’t effective in stopping them and women can only apply pressure by testing the inadequacies of that law repeatedly in court. 

We got into this mess because of the legal fiction enshrined in the Gender Recognition Act which imposed itself upon the Equality Act 2010, where the Protected Category of “Gender Reassignment” includes anyone with a vague notion that they might fancy being a bit womany sometimes. As the Code of Practice makes plain:

People who are proposing to undergo, are undergoing or have undergone a process (or part of a process) to reassign their sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. 

The problems here reside in the words “proposing to undergo” as this can be little more than thinking about it, and “other attributes of sex” which is just as nefarious and could be as silly as a man having grown his hair long. It is now transparent that the government cannot and will not save women from the madness they created in 2004. 

We don’t have gender self-identity legally in the UK (where men simply can say they are women and it becomes a legal fact) but it would be hard to find where the line is held against it. That line must be held by women and women must not be fooled by this guidance.

Interpreting terrible law via risible guidance does nothing to protect women from terrible men. The only thing that will reverse the state we are in is to overturn the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and remove “Gender Reassignment” as a protected category in the Equality Act.

There is no point thinking a battle is over when you can still feel the knife in your back.