Data from hundreds of public bodies in England shows only four complaints about transgender women in women’s single-sex spaces over a period of three years, according to advocacy group TransLucent.

As SceneMag reports, on January 3, the organization released the results of six separate investigations conducted in recent years. Between 2022–2024, TransLucent submitted Freedom of Information requests to major public bodies in England — including NHS hospitals, domestic violence shelters, and local authorities that maintain public restrooms and changing facilities — to see how many official complaints about trans women in women-only spaces had been documented. The investigations specifically examined “whether cisgender women patients or service users had formally objected to sharing spaces with trans women,” according to the report.

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“Across local authority toilets, hospital wards, and domestic abuse refuges, the evidence demonstrates that political and media rhetoric about trans women threatening women in single-sex spaces is unsupported by actual complaints,” the report reads.

Of 40 usable responses from authorities that maintain public toilettes and changing facilities (at public pools and leisure centers), TransLucent found no reported complaints about trans women in 2022. In 2024, the organization found only two complaints documented by the 47 authorities they surveyed — “one about policy, one based on perception rather than confirmed identity,” according to TransLucent.

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When it came to NHS hospital wards, FOI requests to 102 NHS foundation trusts between April 2020 and June 2022 turned up no complaints from cisgender women patients about the presence of a trans woman on their ward. Subsequently, out of 157 substantive responses from NHS trusts to a December 2023 survey, only one reported an incident with the was not treated as serious, according to the report.

As for domestic abuse refuges, TransLucent notes that a May 2024 Women’s Aid survey on single-sex services and policies received only a 23.7% response rate, suggesting a lack of a problem. The group’s own research, according to the report, has found that the domestic abuse refuge sector’s “established risk-assessment procedures, mixed models combining communal refuges with the independent living model, and national placement systems enable services to accommodate trans women without compromising other residents’ safety.”

“Claims of trans women ‘invading’ refuges are contradicted by sector practices, which focus on individual risk assessment rather than blanket exclusions,” according to the report. “The investigation concluded that where exclusion occurs, it typically reflects the stance of explicitly trans-hostile providers rather than any pattern of problematic behaviour by trans women seeking refuge from violence.”

TransLucent’s FOI investigations, the group says, demonstrate that trans women’s presence in women’s single-sex spaces “doesn’t generate ‘the wave of complaints’ that gender-critical and culture war rhetoric suggests.”

“With 382 public bodies reporting only four relevant complaints, the evidence is overwhelming: trans women’s access to appropriate single-sex spaces is not creating documented safety or dignity problems in England’s major public services,” the report concludes. “The numbers are clear: this is a manufactured controversy, not a documented crisis.”

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