Jay Todd, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

In the UK and globally, we are witnessing eliminationist attacks on trans and gender diverse people that are attempting to criminalise trans existence, remove trans and gender diverse people from public life, and refuse even the reality of trans life. Since I wrote, in an AntipodeOnline Intervention in 2023, that “trans liberation in the UK is under threat”, the social and political situation facing trans communities in Britain has deteriorated drastically, not least in the aftermath of the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers on the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 on 16 April 2025, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s interim update on the “practical implications” of the judgment, published on 25 April.

This is a grave and critical moment: these alarming developments will, if implemented as currently set out, erode civil rights in Britain and segregate and prohibit trans and gender diverse people from participating in public life with dignity and in freedom, with wider implications for all, particularly LGBTQIA+ people and women, both trans and cisgender. Their logics, which seize upon and exceed the limits of the Supreme Court’s ruling, are also already intensifying everyday violences against trans and gender diverse people and contributing to fascist energies that excel at transforming moral panics into authoritarian control.

On 1 May 2025, 533 academic geographers wrote to the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers calling on the Society to respond and take action. As a body that exists to champion and advance geography, the Society must act to protect the rights of trans and gender diverse members of the geographical community to fully participate in public life and, in turn, undertake their work and research in dignity. The signatories to the letter, representing the entire discipline and geographers of every career stage from around the world, demonstrate a refusal of these transphobic developments that cannot be overlooked: they send a message of disciplinary solidarity that the geographical community stands ready to actively defend and advance the liberation of trans and gender diverse people.

Included among the signatories are academic leaders in the geographical community and world-leading experts on the geographies of trans and gender diverse people. The published geographical research expertise in this field evidence the extent to which trans and gender diverse people would be impacted by the current trajectory of interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The signatories also include many feminist geographers—representing a rejection of the malevolent and transphobic logic that continues to pit trans rights against the rights of cisgender women.

It is not too late to avoid the annihilationist, authoritarian, and spatially systematic exclusion of trans people from public life. Geographers and the bodies that represent us must be at the forefront of efforts to safeguard trans and gender diverse people’s existing rights, actively combat growing authoritarianism, and advance trans liberation in the UK and elsewhere.

The text of the letter and its signatories follows.

* * *

1 May 2025

Dear Professor Dame Jane Francis and Professor Joe Smith,

We are currently witnessing brazen, authoritarian attempts to roll back civil rights in Britain that, if implemented, threaten the very ability of many in the geographical community to work, learn, and participate in public life. We are writing to you as academics and researchers in the geographical community, many of us with expertise in trans lives, LGBTQIA+ lives, sexualities, and gender. We ask that you write, with urgency, on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to the UK Government, the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and to higher education leaders across the UK, to seek assurances on the inclusion and dignity of trans and gender diverse members of the geographical community and people across the UK in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers on 16 April 2025, and the EHRC’s interim update on the “practical implications” of the judgment published on 25 April.

The Supreme Court ruling of 16 April—that the definition of sex under the Equality Act 2010 refers to “biological sex”[1]—according to former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, does not mandate that trans men and women should be excluded from any space or that organisations should act in a prejudiced way toward trans and gender diverse people. Indeed, trans and gender diverse people remain protected under the Equality Act 2010 against all forms of discrimination under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.

However, the EHRC’s interim update argues that in workplaces and services open to the public—including schools and universities—trans men and women, and young trans people, should not be permitted to use “single-sex” facilities in their gender, and that the law also allows, “in some circumstances”, them to be prohibited from using “single-sex” facilities according to the sex they were assigned at birth. The update also intervenes in the ability of marginalised queer communities, such as spaces for gay men and lesbians, to be trans inclusive, by mandating that “women-only or lesbian only association[s] should not admit trans women … and men-only or gay men-only association[s] should not admit trans men”. As such, the EHRC’s interim update constitutes a grave attack on the entire LGBTQIA+ community.

Furthermore, this update, together with the Supreme Court ruling, defines sex as narrowly as possible: this is deeply harmful to all people (and particularly to women) as it will further police gender and hence curtail all people’s (particularly women’s) lives.[2]

Peer-reviewed geographical research has demonstrated the harmful impact of the spatialised reinforcement of gender binaries on trans and gender diverse people,[3] and has more specifically evidenced that trans people are already extremely marginalised and hypervisible within UK society, illustrating the devastating everyday impact that this has upon trans people’s everyday lives.[4] With our expertise, we are able to say with confidence that this interim update—if implemented—would enormously exacerbate existing inequalities between trans and gender diverse people and cisgender people, establish an unprecedented, legitimised exclusion of trans people from participation in public spaces and public life, and contribute to a crisis of mental ill health within trans communities.

Over the last two weeks, we have witnessed how the ruling and the EHRC’s interim update have already intensified transphobia and other forms of hate. Members of the geographical community, including RGS members, are undoubtedly experiencing significant concern about how their dignity and rights will be secured. Indeed, the EHRC’s interim update—if implemented—would prohibit trans and gender diverse members of the geographical community from being able to carry out and deliver their research, teaching, and wider everyday lives in dignity and with freedom.

The EHRC is moving at speed: its consultation will open in mid-May and last for only two weeks. We therefore ask that you write as soon as possible to the UK Government and EHRC to:

• State that the EHRC’s interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling, evidenced via its interim update, if implemented, would have a devastating impact upon trans and gender diverse individuals and communities, risking trans and gender diverse people’s segregation and removal from public life in the UK, noting that both ongoing and peer reviewed published geographical research shows that trans people are already extremely marginalised within UK society.

• Request that trans and gender diverse people are involved in every stage of developing statutory guidance in light of the Supreme Court ruling.

In line with the Society’s principle of working “towards greater equality, diversity and inclusion within its practices and activities as well as across the wider geographical community”, and its commitments to “communicate and promote the role geography and geographers have in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion” and “maximise our convening power across core networks to promote EDI objectives”, we also ask that you:

• Publicly re-affirm the Society’s commitment to trans inclusion and equality.

• Actively engage with higher education leaders to encourage the protection of trans staff and students’ rights and dignity in the workplace at this worrying time for trans communities.

• Make clear that members of the RGS and wider geographical community have expertise in relation to research and teaching relating to trans and gender diverse people—and noting that our research can inform policy and legislative change in related areas.

It is important at this moment that there is publicly accessible evidence of how organisations and individuals are refusing these increasingly bold and discriminatory attacks on trans and gender diverse people. We therefore also ask that the Society publish its communication with EHRC and the UK Government, in addition to a public statement with regards to its ongoing commitment to the inclusion of its trans and gender diverse members.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Jay Todd, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Trans Geographies, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

Professor Felicity Callard, Professor in Human Geography, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

And 531 co-signatories from around the globe

Notes

[1] “Biological sex” is a complex term; the Supreme Court simply defined it as the sex of a person at birth which appears to mean “sex as initially recorded on one’s birth certificate” which, as one interpreter of the Supreme Court ruling has noted, is “a matter of documentation and presumption, rather than actual biology”.

[2] Cross K A (2025) The Potemkin feminism of “sex-based rights”. Liberal Currents 22 April https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-potemkin-feminism-of-sex-based-rights/ (last accessed 6 May 2025)

[3] For example: Bender-Baird K (2016) Peeing under surveillance: Bathrooms, gender policing, and hate violence. Gender, Place & Culture 23(7):983-988 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1073699; Browne K, Nash C J and Hines S (2010) Towards trans geographies. Gender, Place & Culture 17(5):573-577 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503104; Doan P L (2010) The tyranny of gendered spaces: Reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy. Gender, Place & Culture 17(5):635-654 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503121; Hopkins P (2020) Social geography II: Islamophobia, transphobia, and sizism. Progress in Human Geography 44(3):583-594 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519833472; Johnston L (2018) Transforming Gender, Sex, and Place: Gender Variant Geographies. London: Routledge; Lubitow A, Carathers J, Kelly M and Abelson M (2017) Transmobilities: Mobility, harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland, Oregon. Gender, Place & Culture 24(10):1398-1418 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1382451; March L (2021) Queer and trans* geographies of liminality: A literature review. Progress in Human Geography 45(3):455-471 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520913111; Namaste V K (1996) Genderbashing: Sexuality, gender, and the regulation of public space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14(2):221-240 https://doi.org/10.1068/d140221; Nash C J (2011) Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space. The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe canadien 55(2):192-207 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2010.00337.x; Rosenberg R and Oswin N (2015) Trans embodiment in carceral space: Hyper masculinity and the US prison industrial complex. Gender, Place & Culture 22(9):1269-1286 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.969685

[4] For example: Brice S (2020) Geographies of vulnerability: Mapping transindividual geometries of identity and resistance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(3):664-677 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12358; Browne K and Lim J (2010) Trans lives in the “gay capital of the UK”. Gender, Place & Culture 17(5):615-633 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503118; Hines S (2010) Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK. Gender, Place & Culture 17(5):597-613 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503116; Lanfear L C (2021) “Navigating Gender Diverse Worlds Assembled upon Binary Expectations: Investigating the Experiences of Trans People Living in Britain.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University College London; Marques A C (2019) Telling stories: Telling transgender coming out stories from the UK and Portugal. Gender, Place & Culture 27(9):1287-1307 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1681943; Mearns G, Bonner-Thompson C and Hopkins P (2020) Trans experiences of a university campus in northern England. Area 52(3):488-494 https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12595; Todd J (2021) Exploring trans people’s lives in Britain, trans studies, geography and beyond: A review of research progress. Geography Compass 15(4) https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12556; Todd J (2023) Exhaustion, exhausting temporalities, and young trans people’s everyday lives in the UK. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(3):771-789 https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2134087; Todd J (2024) Exploring young trans people’s everyday experiences of “out‐of‐placeness” and socio‐bodily dysphoria. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 49(2) https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12662; Todd J (2025) Exploring young trans and non-binary people’s strategies and spaces for navigating marginality in the United Kingdom: A novel resilience, resistance, and restoration framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2478258