Nabbed by the Toilet Police

May 17, 2025

But look, in reality, when you say ‘ban’, am I going to be standing outside toilets? I’m probably not. There isn’t going to be Toilet Police.
- UK Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, 27 April 2025

It was a few days after these reassuring words that the Toilet Police got me.

I had been in the UK a month, during which time the British Supreme Court had unexpectedly ruled that transgender people were banned from single-sex spaces of their gender identity.[1] That meant transgender women to be sent to men’s prisons, pulled out of their sporting and school communities, and, of course, prohibited from using the women’s toilets. JK Rowling, who had chipped in 70,000 pounds to support the successful challenge,[2] posted a victory selfie.

I live liminally, gender-wise, but in Britain I usually present feminine. Now, for the first time in years, I felt anxious on the street. For weeks, the court ruling was just a discordant undertone to our visit, until on my final night in London I personally ran afoul of the New Regime.

It was midnight and some of my friends had plied me with cocktails and urged me to come out dancing. After some rote protests about being a parent now, I allowed myself to be pulled along to a Camden club.

I hadn’t planned on revelry, but it is important for the story to be clear that I was wearing a dress and a full face of makeup. And for an hour everything was great. We danced and drank and shouted incoherent enthusiasms to each other. But as the gin and tonics settled in my bladder, I felt my anxiety building. Red light strobed across grinning faces, the pulse of music thrummed in my spine, and, in the whirl, I imagined J K Rowling’s leer behind her cigar.

I needed to piss, and I was afraid.

All I want to do when I go out is have fun and not cause trouble. If I am presenting male, that means using male or gender-neutral toilets. But for over a decade now, when I am presenting femme with my friends then I go with them to the toilets. Not out of genuine fear of violence, but more as an escape from the smirks and side-eye I’d experienced in men’s toilets in the past. If I was going to make people uncomfortable in either room, the lesser disruption had seemed to be to go with female friends whose presence could reassure other women of my non-rapist credentials. These are the mental gymnastics you learn when Bathrooming-While-Trans.

My friends noticed my discomfort and loyally announced their own need to pee. So, we filed through a maze of crimson corridors until we got to the pair of doors that have bifurcated so much of my life.

And there she was. The literal Toilet Police. She was a stocky woman marking each visitor as they approached the door, and as we passed, she raised a finger of doom and pointed it at me. “NO,” she commanded, then rotated the finger towards the masculine pictogram on the other side of the hall. “You go there.”

We froze. I didn’t want to speak, ashamed of further betraying myself by my voice. Drunk and anxious as I was, the idea of going to that male bathroom, alone, was just impossible. I would rather go home.

My friend Ayse came to the rescue, shifting defensively in front of me. “Back off,” she warned the guard and escorted me ahead of her into the bathroom.

It was 2am on a club night and the place was the usual mix of sanctuary, social hangout and drug den. There were seven or eight women around. Gaze fixed downwards to hide my humiliation, I pushed into the cubicle and peed. My head was ringing, there were raised voices outside, then the rap at the door.

“OUT!”

I could try to describe how it all went down, but honestly, I don’t remember – my stress hormones overloaded. There was commotion, complete strangers were clamouring, I think, in my defence. Ayse indignantly shouted that she would file a complaint with the club owners. Toilet Policewoman ignored it all, put a hand on my shoulder and thrust me to the door. I was obviously leaving anyway, there was nothing to be gained now but my humiliation and the performance of this purification ritual.

I can’t remember if I was given a chance to clean my hands.

For a minute afterwards I stood crying against the wall while further arguments washed down the corridor. “She belongs here!” someone said. Did I though? Was it the presence of genderqueer people like me that had driven a backlash against all legally recognised trans people? My own lack of confidence in my moral rights made it hurt so much more. The last time I’d been yanked out of a woman’s bathroom I was 4 years old; the memory was seared into my core. The past rose in my throat like vomit.

The Toilet Policewoman returned and took up position in front of me. She looked a little ashamed, and she touched a now gentler hand to my arm.

“It’s not me,” she said. “It’s just the way things are now.”

WASHING THEIR HANDS

While I may not have got the chance to wash my hands, everyone else in Britain has washed their hands of me. The Supreme Court, like Pontius Pilate, declared themselves innocent of the consequences of their actions because their ruling “does not cause disadvantage to trans people.[3]” I’m not legally trained, so I can only give my layman’s opinion that this is ‘bullshit’.

The Court based their reading of sex, “which we conclude is the only correct one”, on their interpretation of the Equalities Act of 2010. Unfortunately, they did not actually consult with the drafters of that law. If they had, they could have heard from civil servants like Melanie Field, who testified last month that contrary to the Supreme Court’s interpretation, the Equalities Act had been intended to allow trans people with a Gender Reassignment Certificate the full legal status of their biological counterparts.[4]

No worries then, Keir Starmer has a majority of over 150 seats and took the Labour leadership promising that “trans rights are human rights and I support the right to self-identification [of gender].[5]” His Government could clear up the matter in an afternoon with a one-line clarification of the Equalities Act. But sensing a change in the political weather, it did no such thing – instead decreeing that since the Court had ‘clarified’ everything there was nothing more to be said.

The ball was then lobbed to the Equality and Humans Right Commission whose mandate is to protect equality across nine grounds, including gender reassignment. The EHRC released an explainer on the ‘practical implications’ of the new law, which plumbed Kafkfaesque depths with its paired assertions that:

- trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities.
- the law also allows trans women (biological men) not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities, and trans men (biological woman) not to be permitted to use the women’s facilities.[6]

In other words, there is no space for us, at least anywhere where in the words of the Supreme Court, “reasonable objection might be taken to our presence”.[7]

Organisations are floundering. Sporting codes which only weeks ago voiced full or partial support for trans players have one-by-one changed their tune as they received internal ‘legal advice’.[8] Presumably that anti-trans activists would sue the pants off them if they didn’t fall into line (pants removal and the checking therein being a driving obsession for the anti-trans brigade). That’s certainly the strategy being discussed on Mumsnet, where the celebrating campaigners have turned their attention to forcing organisations to comply with the new regulations.[9]

The truth is that far from offering clarity, the Supreme Court has tied British institutions into impossible knots. Nobody understands what the law means, or rather everybody understands it differently. A British non-profit called The Good Law project (with the input of a King’s Counsel) explained:

You are the sex you are born with for the purposes of the Equality Act, your certificated sex if you have a GRC for many other legal purposes, and your lived sex for the purposes of human rights law. Regrettably, this does not tell you which door to open when standing in front of a row of toilet doors.[10]

This is of little help at 2am. From social media posts and direct from friends I have already heard stories of toilet vigilantes (ironically, usually men) scouring women’s bathroom lines in search of the gender non-conforming. Cisgender women are being seized on and told to prove their womanhood, including the butch lesbians in whose name the Supreme Court specifically justified its ruling.

Even as trans people are being yanked from bathrooms, hospitals and sports teams, British officials have piously repeated the media line that they are offering us “dignity”. This is a lie. But with the court ruling coming a fortnight before the little Englanders of the Reform Party looked set to blitz local elections, Labour washed their hands of the trans people they had promised to protect.

And to whose benefit?

Not the disabled Britons whose toilets now face a rainbow inundation of the exiled genderqueer. Not women like my friends whose night at the club was ruined as they left early with me. Not the clubs themselves, which face the long-term fear of being sued if they let a single trans slip through their net. Not the Toilet Policewoman, whose doleful expression showed her shame at having reduced me to tears. The other patrons who had to endure security pushing into their toilets? Doubtful.

I am lucky enough that my life is not deeply affected. And while trans men were included in the Supreme Court’s discussion for form’s sake, nobody is seriously contemplating testicle checks at the urinals. The real victims are full-time, British, transgender women whose lives have been thrown back decades. Because, as the Government is implying every time they tell us to relax, we don’t have to really worry about the law; we just have to be conventionally attractive.

PASSED OVER

Because there is one other thing I remember about my public shaming. There was another trans woman in the bathroom. She was young and pretty, but I recognised it in the subtle cast of her features and the flash of recognition between us. I wonder what she felt as I was pulled out. There but for the Grace of God, go I? She hadn’t been stopped, this time. Because, this time, she had passed.

Passing, the concept that dominated my anxieties as a child and I had naively thought was obsolete. Passing meant to hide your transness and move through the world eyes-down, mouth shut, ‘stealthing’ as a cisgender woman. Passing meant lying about your past and fearing for your future. Passing was the trauma of my adolescence.

The upshot of this misguided revision of the law is that passing is back. And, if I may say so, it is the intended upshot. Not to eradicate trans people entirely, but to silence the ones to whom “Reasonable objection might be taken”. As one user wrote on Mumsnet: “if the odd quiet respectful nearly-passing transexual gets in under this system, I don't mind too much. The important thing is that it must be possible to exclude men who are not respectful.”[11] And for that purpose, the current legal confusion is brilliant; because when nobody is sure of their ground, people bow to the loudest voices.

That’s why, contrary to the Government’s pieties, of course there will be Toilet Police. This ruling has opened every business in Britain up to lawfare from any citizen who wants to devote themselves to bodily purity, and Britain is famously never short of busy-bodies. And so, while I fly safely away to Australia, that girl I saw will be scared every time she goes to the bathroom. Maybe for the rest of her life.

A CHILL IN THE AIR

They can’t get enough of gender policing, the Brits. Eighteen hours after being Toilet Policed, I was standing in Customs at Heathrow airport, my baby in my arms. The security guard asked me his sex. They needed to know whether a male or female officer should conduct a pat down of the little bub. It was important for the baby’s dignity.

On the plane home to Australia, I considered why I was still so upset. After all, one outcome of the last month’s chaos is a huge showing of love and support from everyday people across Britain. In every town we went we saw trans pride flags. People were marching in the street and signing petitions and, in the most British of rebellions, running classes in how to compost your old Harry Potter books for growing mushrooms.

But something has changed. For all of us in the West, life in the post-war era has been a slow and steady expansion of rights. Civil rights in the 1960s, women’s rights in the 1970s, gay rights in the 80s and 90s. Our view of society was a slowly widening visor, taking in more and more beautiful human potential.

It would be absurd hyperbole to say that visor has snapped shut. But for the first time, the expansion of my rights has gone into reverse. It’s a feeling that American woman have been grappling with since 2022, when their abortion rights were curtailed. It is, perhaps, not dissimilar to what Indigenous Australians felt last year when the promise of constitutional recognition was snatched from them in a failed referendum. A sudden realisation that maybe this was as good as it was going to get.

It's not just in Britain. In Trump’s America, trans soldiers have been purged from the military and trans people cannot even get a visa to enter the country. Just a few weeks ago the Hungarian government passed a law banning any assembling of queer people. In an era when Liberal democracy is besieged on all fronts, Britain is siding with the new autocracies in scapegoating trans citizens to assuage a wider cultural pessimism. I’m sure Keir Starmer feels bad about throwing trans people under the bus, but compared to brewing war, technological disruption and the petulance of mad kings, we’re low on the priority list. But there are only so many compromises liberal democracy can make before you start to wonder what is it that we are expected to fight for?

Jodie and I had been discussing moving to Britain, trying to picture what it would be like to live our life there. Well, the trip made one thing clear. It would be a step back in time, to a world that prickles against your skin in a hundred tiny ways. And the thing about oppression is, it widens. It affects us all.

So that’s why I’m writing this. Not to complain about myself, I’ll be fine. But to point out the repercussions that will happen under this legal ruling and are already happening. From the landlord who was asking where he can find money and space for a gender-neutral bathroom in an 18^th century terrace to the butch cisgender woman who was made to show her tits to get into her rightful bathroom. From the ten-year-old kicked out of their netball team to the trans adolescents whose potential will be crushed as they return to hiding in their bedrooms. This legal ruling is a disaster for everyone.

Except bathroom renovators.

[1] JUDGMENT For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent), 16 April 2025

[2] ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, The Guardian, 19 April 2025

[3] JUDGMENT For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent), 16 April 2025, page 86, paragraph 265 (xvii)

[4] Court ruling on ‘woman’ at odds with UK Equality Act aim, says ex-civil servant | Gender | The Guardian, 19 April 2025

[5] ‘Keir Starmer on a storied career spent fighting for LGBT+ rights and standing shoulder to shoulder with the trans community’, Pink News, March 2 2020

[6] An interim update on the practical implications of the UK Supreme Court judgment | EHRC

[7] JUDGMENT For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent), 16 April 2025, paragraph 221, page 68

[8] FA to ban transgender women from playing women’s football in England | Football | The Guardian

[9] There is much passing around of this explainer: Workplace toilets: know your rights - Sex Matters

[10] Trans inclusion after the Supreme Court decision: FAQs | Good Law Project, updated May 14 2025

[11] Best solution for bathrooms | Mumsnet