Trans Rights - Allegedly

I have a trans friend and I have been watching the Darlington NHS Trust case with interest. Honestly, it is the perfect example of how Britain now handles anything remotely complicated. We take a real, messy clash of rights, we refuse to admit it is a clash of rights, and then we act shocked when it ends up in court and everyone is furious.

Because that is what this was. Not a pantomime villain story. Not a purity test. Not a chance for Twitter to scream “Nazi!” at strangers. It was two sets of people saying something completely normal, but we treat the answer as binary because we're led to believe it's a binary world - it's not.

The nurses were saying: this is a women’s changing room. It exists for a reason. I should not have to undress in a space I understand to be single sex, and then be told I am some sort of medieval bigot for wanting privacy. That is not an exotic demand. It is the baseline expectation that created female facilities in the first place.

And the trans woman, meanwhile, was saying: I am a colleague. I am here to do my job. I should not be treated as a threat just for existing, and I should not be shoved into the men’s changing room where I am more exposed to humiliation, hostility, or worse. Again, not exotic. Just basic dignity.

So what did the Trust do? It did the classic modern institutional thing. It picked one answer, declared it morally superior, and treated everyone who had a problem with it as a nuisance. Then it looked baffled when the nuisance turned into a tribunal.

This is where people start doing the lazy comparisons. “Well you’re no more naked than at a beach.” Fine. But nobody is being ordered by HR to go to the beach at 7am with their colleagues and a manager hovering nearby. Context matters. A workplace changing room is not a leisure space, it is a functional space where privacy expectations are baked in.

Equally, the other lazy move is to say “single sex means single sex, end of story.” But if your solution to every trans person is “use the other room”, you are not creating inclusion. You are creating a daily ritual of exclusion, and then congratulating yourself for being practical.

The truth is that both sides are right about the bit they are talking about, and wrong about the bit they are pretending does not exist. Women’s privacy matters. Trans dignity matters. You cannot solve that by shouting one of them off the stage.

The synthesis is painfully simple, and that is why it drives everyone mad. This is not mainly a philosophical problem. It is a design problem. You stop treating changing rooms like a battlefield and you build privacy in by default.

Lockable single occupant changing rooms. Proper cubicles. A genuinely separate option. The kind of thing that would make the whole argument evaporate overnight. It protects women’s privacy without turning trans staff into a permanent exception, and it stops managers trying to do equality policy with slogans and a straight face.

Because that is what went wrong here. Not that people had feelings. People always have feelings. What went wrong is that the employer acted as if only one set of feelings counted, then discovered that the law is not a customer satisfaction survey.

And that is the wider lesson. If you want a functioning workplace, you do not force colleagues into a moral cage fight in a changing room and then call it “inclusion”. You design the space so nobody has to surrender their dignity for someone else’s comfort.

It is not hard. It is just more effort than issuing a policy memo and hoping everyone shuts up.