Two more Women’s Institute chapters have announced that they are closing this month, rather than comply with a new policy that would require them to exclude transgender women. The organization is the largest voluntary women’s organization in the United Kingdom and creates social and political advocacy opportunities for its members.

Following the UK’s Supreme Court ruling last year that trans women aren’t women for the purposes of the non-discriminatory Equality Act, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes chose to ban trans women from its organization.

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“It was done out of conscience and conviction, but was not something a few months ago we thought we would ever have to do – or even want to do,” said Frances Riley, who had been on the committee of one of the shuttered Women’s Institute chapters, in an interview with Bristol 24/7.

Following the closure of at least a dozen Women’s Institute chapters earlier this year, the two additional chapters have closed at the deadline for chapters to adopt the new policy. Both are located near Bristol.

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The Longwell Green Women’s Institute shut down with an effective date of April 1 after key committee members resigned. Westbury-on-Trym Women’s Institute also closed down after the committee was faced with the new anti-trans policies and held a vote to shut down in solidarity with the trans community.

In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that trans women were not women for the purposes of the UK’s Equality Act, which led to some confusion over what spaces were or weren’t affected by the ruling. The ruling even applied to trans women who had a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), the document necessary to update one’s birth certificate in the UK. That court’s decision resulted from a case brought by the anti-trans group For Women Scotland, which was largely funded by noted-transphobe JK Rowling.

The Women’s Institute was established in 1897, and its chapters have welcomed out trans women since the 1970s, with the organization making their inclusion official in 2015. But, in December 2025, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) made the decision to no longer allow trans women to hold formal membership so that they could maintain their status as a single-sex charity in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.

At the time, the NFWI chief executive, Melissa Green, said, “It is with the utmost regret and sadness that we must announce that, from April 2026, we can no longer offer formal membership to transgender women. As an organization that has proudly welcomed transgender women into our membership for more than 40 years, this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice.”

Explaining the Westbury-on-Trym Women Institute’s decision to close down, Riley told Bristol 24/7 that the committee members were told to sign a form to confirm that they were assigned female at birth. They were also told that if they did not sign, they would be forced to resign.

Riley explained that the committee was unilateral in its refusal to adopt the anti-trans measures: “The whole committee of eight decided this was a decision we weren’t prepared to go along with.” The committee then put up the matter of closing rather than excluding trans women to a vote among the chapter’s membership — over three-quarters of the members voted to close.

The anti-trans movement’s efforts have led to the closure of Women’s Institutes that the NFWI supported, erasing significant history in the United Kingdom. But the communities won’t disappear entirely. The NFWI is setting up separate trans-inclusive sisterhoods, and some chapters are reopening as independent groups under a different name. Riley explained that that is the case for her chapter: “It’s a lovely group and very social, so we have set up a Westbury-on-Trym Woman’s Association which will start in May.”

The UK Supreme Court ruling has had a similar impact on the Girl Guides (a UK equivalent to Girl Scouts), which in March announced that trans girls and young women would have to leave the organization by September 6. The lawsuit that led the Girl Guides to move away from its trans-inclusive policies after the court’s decision was reportedly supported by Maya Forstater, a long-term anti-trans ally of JK Rowling.

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