As the fifth major sporting body looks set to announce a ban on trans women athletes that will directly prevent trans girls’ participation in sports at a grassroots level, Mermaids is publishing our open letter urging the UK’s four national sporting bodies to support trans-inclusive policies across all sports. The letter, which urges sporting bodies to start from a point of inclusion, received more than 2,100 signatures from individuals and organisations, including Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, British Kickboxing Council, cyclist Dr Veronica Ivy, former footballer Neville Southall and RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’s Divina De Campo.  To date, Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI),…

Yesterday (4 April 2022) the Equality and Human Rights Commission published its guidance on single-sex spaces which can be found here. This is non-statutory guidance that explains the law, it is not the law itself. The guidance provides a number of worrying examples of instances where trans people could be barred from single-sex spaces. The guidance states that trans people can be excluded from single-sex spaces if their presence infringes upon the ‘dignity’ or ‘safety’ of others. This is very concerning as it suggests that sharing a space with a trans person is inherently dangerous, and that trans people risk…

Content Warning: Conversion “Therapy”/abuse. Mermaids announces that we will be joining the coalition of LGBTQIA+, trans and HIV organisations who have decided not to sign up to the government’s ‘Safe to be Me’ conference planned for Summer 2022. This is following a culmination of government inaction which has seen them fail to reform the Gender Recognition Act, address the year-on-year rise in transphobic hate crime or develop a comprehensive healthcare strategy for trans and non-binary people. The government’s latest decision to actively exclude trans and non-binary people from the ban on conversion practices has left us with no choice but…