Summary
Four Years, Seven Surveys, Four Complaints: What our FOI data actually shows about trans women using women's single sex spaces.
Four Years, Seven Surveys, Four Complaints: What Our FOI Data Actually Shows
In recent days, Southampton City Council finally sent us its response to our most recent Freedom of Information investigation — one of two outstanding replies from the 62 unitary authorities in England whom we approached earlier this year. The final remaining authority that has not replied is Derby – we are still chasing.
Southampton’s answer, like the vast majority of the councils that responded before it, was zero: no recorded complaints about trans women using women’s facilities. With Southampton’s confirmation in place, we thought it was a good moment to step back and look at the whole picture. Because Southampton’s reply doesn’t close out one survey – but it does reinforce a body of evidence that we believe tells a clear and consistent story.
Since late 2021, TransLucent has submitted Freedom of Information requests to public bodies across England – local councils, unitary authorities and NHS trusts – asking a simple, specific question: how many recorded complaints have you received about trans women using single-sex spaces?
We’ve asked it seven times, to different sets of organisations, covering different time periods, worded slightly differently as our knowledge of the law and the data has developed. We are strong believers in data, and we think the results deserve to be seen together, not simply as isolated headlines.
The full picture:
June 2026 — All 62 unitary authorities in England (Jan–Dec 2025). With Southampton’s reply now in, 61 authorities have responded. Fifty-one told us they had received no complaints during 2025. Five said they don’t track this kind of data at all. Four claimed a cost exemption under the Freedom of Information Act. Just one authority, the City of York, recorded a single complaint.
November 2025 — the 50 largest local authorities by population. Covering the whole of 2024, of the 47 councils that responded, 36 had received no complaints, and 9 said they don’t collect this data. Two councils – Bradford and Sheffield – each reported a single complaint: one concerning a policy objection about trans people, the other because someone was perceived to be transgender (rather than actually being trans). We have counted both complaints.
February 2024 — the 50 most populated local authorities in England, covering circa 20 million people over the year of 2022, forty-six councils responded, including the London Borough of Newham. Thirty-five had no complaints, five didn’t track the data, and six claimed a cost cap exemption. Newham did record one incident, but it involved a cisgender person entering a facility designated for the opposite gender (not a transgender person, or someone perceived to be one), so we haven’t counted it among the trans-related figures.
January 2024 — NHS acute and mental health trusts (September 2022–August 2023). This was our largest single exercise: 130 acute trusts and 50 mental health trusts (one of which, the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, uniquely serves both functions and so received and answered two separate requests), for a total of 180 FOI requests. Of the 167 trusts that responded, 156 had received no complaints, and 10 declined to answer, mostly citing the cost of compiling a response. Only one trust, Shrewsbury and Telford, confirmed a single minor complaint from a woman inpatient, which was not escalated beyond the first stage of the NHS complaints procedure.
December 2021 onwards — three smaller NHS surveys. Before we scaled up our approach, we ran three earlier, more modest surveys of NHS Foundation Trusts (and equivalents), each asking whether female inpatients had complained about sharing wards with trans women inpatients. A random sample of 42 trusts covering July 2021–June 2022, a sample of 50 covering the whole of 2021, and a sample of 10 covering April 2020–March 2021 all returned the same finding: zero complaints in every single case where a trust responded.
What over four years of asking the same question tells us
Put together, these seven investigations represent 444 individual Freedom of Information requests sent to public bodies across the UK since 2021 – councils serving tens of millions of residents, and NHS trusts responsible for the overwhelming majority of the country’s inpatient care. In total, we have identified three confirmed complaints that involved a transgender person (or someone perceived to be one) using a single-sex space or facility: one in York, one in Sheffield, and one at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. A further complaint (which we have counted) from Bradford was about policy. A complaint was also recorded at Newham when a man used a women’s loo presumably in error, which for this article we have disregarded as it was not trans related.
The NHS complaint was not escalated beyond being a minor complaint. None of the local authority complaints, as far as we are aware, resulted in policy changes at local level, but because of the Supreme Court judgment For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers and the resulting EHRC Code of Practice, some trans people are now being “outed”, or are refusing to leave their houses in fear they may need a loo and service providers are estimated to need over £703 million to rectify a “non-problem”.
Is it any wonder trans people may think of gender-critical organisations such as For Women Scotland, Sex Matters and LGB Alliance who refer to trans women as “trans identifying men” as “hate groups”?
The repeated pattern shows that claims of widespread, systemic problems around trans women’s use of single-sex spaces in British public life are not borne out by the evidence available through the approved channels created for exactly this purpose.
Time and again, when we’ve asked the organisations responsible for running these spaces – NHS Trusts, Councils, providing changing rooms, toilets and designated female hospital wards a similar question, the answer has overwhelmingly been the same: virtually no recorded complaints.
Southampton’s reply doesn’t change that picture. It reinforces it.
As local government continues to reorganise over the coming years, and as new consultations and legislative proposals about single-sex spaces and gender recognition move through various public bodies, we intend to keep asking these questions — of new authorities, under new structures, and over new time periods — because we think good policy has to start with good data.
The sad situation today is that because of a culture war against a tiny minority of people (trans women are outnumbered by a ratio of 600 cisgender women to one), trans people are being “outed”, or failing to participate in society and service providers have to find a horrific amount of money to rectify a problem that doesn’t exist.
