By Cat Lewis
I spent three years working as a Police Enquiry Officer for Thames Valley Police force. They’re one of forty-three forces across the UK serving a diverse population of over 2.3 million people and covering the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. My long shifts in the control room involved recording crime data and answering 999 and non-emergency calls.
“I spoke to thousands of victims, people from every walk of life, day after day, shift after shift. For all the years I worked there, trans people in bathrooms were never even on our radar.”
At that time, I lived in a small village in Oxfordshire, a remote spot. My house was on a quiet country lane with one neighbour. It was a conservative, white, straight, community. Nobody around me seemed to be anything other than cisgender. Life was quiet.
That time has been on my mind a lot lately. In recent years, people in the U.K. have seen ongoing attacks, both in the British legal system and in the press, of trans people, with organisations campaigning against trans rights shaping media coverage and, by extension, politics.
Amnesty International reported that, between January 2020 and April 2025, four UK newspapers published a staggering 17,000 articles on ‘trans issues’, averaging 9 per day.
The purpose of this campaign? To amplify anti-trans perspectives and elevate “trans issues” as a top-tier political debate.
Just this week, headlines reported: “Transgender people will face ‘enforced segregation’ under new guidance on single-sex services”, prompting the London Mayor’s office to call the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance created by the government “discriminatory, contradictory and unworkable.”
I see headlines and hear cruel arguments from the likes of JK Rowling, who says that when “you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman,” you’ve opened the door to “any and all men who wish to come inside.”
Meanwhile, I can’t recall a single incident while working in the police control room involving a trans perpetrator.
“What I logged, consistently and without exception, were women abused, coerced, assaulted, beaten, raped, and murdered, not by trans people, but by cis men.”
In many cases, these were men they trusted, men they slept with or shared a home with. That was what the evidence actually shows.
To better understand the data recorded by official institutions, namely the police, it’s important to know how most police forces record crimes. Forces are separate entities, each with its own policies and ways of working. Some forces will have policies and data that are similar. Others will vary. They use different systems to record crime, and it’s only when their data goes to the national database that it gets analysed along with all the others.
The whole system assumes the gender binary. In the U.K., perpetrators are recorded as “male” or “female”. What feeds into that binary varies from force to force and is in flux. In 2026, the Met Police, which covers London, still works on the basis of two possible genders: “male”, “female”, and a third option of “unknown” for people who officers aren’t able to ask.
The data is unreliable and easily manipulated. Crime stats have been subject to reclassifications and changes in recording practices to make figures look better, which is something the Office for National Statistics has acknowledged.
For example, in the six years Theresa May served as Prime Minister, the Conservative Party stated that between 2010 to 2016, crime reduced by 30%. This ‘reduction’ in crime occurred because certain crimes were reclassified and changes were made in how police officers noted offences. This reclassification was effectively a political move by May’s government.
“When police officers in the UK record a crime and note the offence, there is no third gender, no recognition of transgender identity, and therefore no tick box to support what the current debate insists is an epidemic of transgender violence being carried out against cis women.”
In fact, the only time “transgender” comes up in reports at all is when officers attempt to note the incentive for a crime, like: “racially aggravated assault” or “transphobic hate crime”.
At Westminster, three separate but overlapping policies, a 2023 building-regulations mandate, the 2025 Supreme Court ruling, and Parliament’s own internal facilities rules, combined to strip trans people of the right to use toilets matching their lived gender.
It all started in 2023, when Rishi Sunak’s government mandated single-sex toilets in new buildings across England. Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch framed the move as ending “the rise of so-called ‘gender-neutral’ toilets” despite no data ever being published on how common gender-neutral toilets actually were.
Two years later, in 2025, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under the Equality Act, paving the way for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to restrict people’s access to single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms on the basis of biological sex, not gender identity.
Then, within the walls of Parliament, that shift crystallised into a single flashpoint event.
In June 2025, a trans barrister named Robin Moira White used the women’s toilets at Westminster after attending a Women and Equalities Committee hearing. She was literally directed to that toilet by parliamentary staff.
Later, she stated that she was then aggressively confronted by gender-critical activists Kate Harris and Heather Binning and left, in her own words, “white, shaking.”
Harris denied shouting at White. Parliament then apologised, not to White, but to those who harassed her. Within a week, Parliament rewrote its toilet policy to require visitors to use facilities matching their “biological sex”.
Critics argued in the media that the sequence of events shows policy shaped less by evidence of harm than by who simply made the most noise.
I had to look beyond the U.K. to see where this anti-trans campaign, and the attack on gender-neutral bathrooms, began. Doing so, I just met another blank.
Advocacy groups across the United States, including the ACLU , the Human Rights Campaign, and the Transgender Law Centre, each confirmed they have never found a single documented case of a trans woman attacking a cisgender woman in a bathroom in the United States, ever.
The Williams Institute, a research centre on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy at UCLA’s School of Law, found: “There is no evidence that allowing transgender people access to bathrooms aligning with their gender identity jeopardizes safety and privacy”.
This tracks with what I witnessed in the police control room.
And this blows my mind: National policy affecting the lives of a tiny percentage of the population is being set because of anti-trans opinions. Not data; opinions.
“No one would be foolish for thinking that, at some level of leadership, decisions affecting tax-paying citizens would be led by data. Yet here we are.”
Decisions are being made without collecting the relevant data, because there is none.
In 2026, a Freedom of Information exercise sent to England’s 62 unitary authorities, representing over 17 million people, found that complaints about trans women using public toilets were virtually non-existent. This survey wasn’t even asking for victims of assault or harassment to report their experiences; it just asked for those with a complaint about trans women using public toilets to share them.
Of the sixty responding councils, thirty-five reported zero incidents. Zero. Only one, York, had a single complaint.
So, trans women in restrooms were on no one else’s radar either.
“The statistics being used to drive policy, fuel parliamentary time, and justify the exclusion of trans folks do not exist.”
I do my best in conversations with women driving this fight. I’m told that calling them fake feminists is too jarring. I try not to speak out of anger, frustration, or annoyance. Yet I know many of them believe they are protecting women. But their beliefs are based on a warped reality and false information.
Here’s something grounded in fact: The overwhelming source of harm to women isn’t trans women, and I suspect TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), deep down, know this.
Sometimes, conversations are not really about data. Sometimes it’s about nostaliga. Certain folks like to think back to times when they believe “men were men and women were women”.
If that’s the lane you want to go in, fine, let’s go back. Let the record show that many ancient cultures had a much broader gender spectrum and greater understanding of the interplay between sex and gender than current discourse suggests.
Cultures have existed across time that recognise a third gender and don’t rely on the binary of “man” and “woman”. Many still exist.
Go to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal and learn about Hijras, a legally recognised, non-binary identity. This third gender is written into the ancient scriptures of the Ramayana (5th–4th century BCE) and the Mahabharata (8th–9th century BCE), texts that millions of people read to learn how to live and navigate life.
Explore the indigenous history of North America and learn of two-spirit people, a name describing those who exist beyond binary gender and embody the masculine and the feminine. The Talmud, the ancient text of Jewish oral law, acknowledges six genders. “Androgynos” has existed for thousands of years in one of the world’s oldest religious traditions.
I think about where this magazine calls home. Berlin never needed a parliamentary debate to settle this. Berghain, the club that put this city’s nightlife on the world map, has had large, unisex bathroom stalls since it opened its doors in 2004. Unisex restrooms are a common part of a night out in Berlin.
“It’s not radical to say trans people have always been in the world. They are in ancient texts. But this coordinated attack and misinformation campaign from the highest offices in the land? This is new.”
In world history, multiple genders were not a radical theory but lived, recognised, ordinary facts, and this information is available to anyone with the intelligence and empathy to seek it.
So, I’ll hear any argument against gender-neutral bathrooms or why trans women are not welcome in the bathroom that matches their lived gender, but not if someone come to me without having learned this history. And if the argument is rooted in anything but bigotry, I’ll be surprised.
If someone has a genuine, evidence-led concern for women’s safety, follow the evidence. Present me with different stats than ones I’ve seen (the ones any officer of the law can see).
Whatever evidence you find, I assure you it will not point to a trans person in a public restroom. It’ll point to cis men.
The fact is, women do need protection, and data shows where the danger is. The question is whether those in charge are willing to see it.
I love trans people and, if my voice means anything, I want you to know how much I want you to be part of our nightlife, part of any spaces where I’m hearing music and having a good time.
Let’s dance—and pee—together.
Cat Lewis writes on culture, creativity and the unseen characters of nightlife. Drawn to the subversive, quirky and queer, her writing champions those not usually seen and tells their stories loud and clear.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
