Bobbies on the Bathroom Beat
Trans protest in the UK, London on Downing Street
Image via commons.wikimedia.org

06/20/2025

6 min reading time

Writer:
Juliet Jacques
Discourse
LGBTQ+
Politics
Society

What emotions and experiences characterise the protests against the increasing restrictions on trans rights in the United Kingdom? For a fictional short story, Juliet Jacques takes on the role of a queer filmmaker who reviews the encounters and conversations during the protests in a diary entry.

London, 19 April 2025

London, 19 April 2025

I got to Westminster just after 1pm and couldn’t believe how many people were there. At two days’ notice, we’d got thousands out – I couldn’t even get near Parliament Square for the rally. Compare it to those sad little TERF gatherings where there’s six of them handing out leaflets in Hyde Park and it shouldn’t be a contest, but they get to douse each other with champagne outside the Supreme Court while we have to give up yet another bloody Saturday to protest this shit. As usual in Britain, popular support means nothing if the media have decided you need to be crushed, I can make my little documentary for Red Star News’ YouTube channel, but it won’t change anything 


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Protests in London, 19 April 2025
Image via itv.com

I didn’t ask anyone about filming – just took the handheld, there were barely any cops about. Given all the anti-protest laws the Tories passed and Labour didn’t oppose (they probably won’t question the Supreme Court decision and Equality and Human Rights Commission, guidance either), I thought there’d be more, maybe they were as surprised as me about the turnout. I was wearing a T-shirt saying TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS and a pink and blue badge, and I think everyone can tell I’m non-binary anyway, so I just stopped people and asked how the judgement affected them. The first person I saw was older than most people on the demo – white hair, walking stick. She said she transitioned in the 70s, that she’d gone on the big march against Section 28 prohibiting local authorities, including schools, from “promoting homosexuality” in Manchester in 1988, and that she felt more motivated to stand up for trans people than she had for years, because of the judgement. I wished I had more time – with the crowd surging along, I could only get quick quotes. I asked if she’d be happy to talk another time, gave her a card, and tried to get to the Square, where people had broken through the police barriers.

Context

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a man or woman is defined by ‘biological sex’ even if they hold a Gender Recognition Certificate, in a case brought by ‘gender-critical’ group For Women Scotland against the Scottish government. Hours later, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued guidance recommending trans and non-binary people be excluded from ‘single sex’ spaces such as hospital wards and sports clubs, as had been demanded by the British media for years.

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I filmed some of the speeches, and a woman in a sash saying Miss Trans Global Asia who was stopping for selfies with everyone. I tried to get forward as people were chanting, whistling, drumming, I got shots of home-made signs attacking Prime Minister Starmer and his Cabinet, the Supreme Court and EHRC, the H*rry P*tter woman and some of the UK’s appalling columnists, but far more of people celebrating trans joy, love, power, which went well with the speakers talking about suicide rates and “stochastic” attacks orchestrated by the media, trying to be optimistic by insisting this was the start of our fightback.

I went back to the road for more interviews and kept seeing friends – and not just trans ones. The vibe was good: people were scared but also angry and defiant, and this show of solidarity was helping. I spoke to a cishet couple, who said they’d come for their trans son, who was away. “Why do these people care so much about toilets?” the man said. “It’s weird.”
“They’re defining women by their body parts,” his wife added. “Is that what we fought for?”
The man laughed. “How are they going to police it, anyway? Bobbies on the bathroom beat?”

Protests in London, 19 April 2025
Awsten Atkinson (left) and Daisy Watt expressed horror and disbelief at the ruling
Photo: Sonja Horsman/The Observer; Image via theguardian.com

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Thinking that would make a good title for my film, I joined the masses spilling into St James’s Park. More cops had turned up but there was no violence, the vibe was peaceful but as Brendan Behan put it, I’ve never seen a situation that a policeman couldn’t make worse. Luckily, no-one had come along to pick a pointless fight, and anyway, they were still vastly outnumbered.
There were more speeches – I (politely) pushed to the front and asked to film them. The Court verdict has really shifted the tone: at Trans Pride there’s usually poetry and performance, now it’s all about the law. No-one was really talking about the media – we all understand that the prolonged onslaught had done its job in manufacturing consent for a rolling back of our rights, with the British Transport Police already announcing it would get men to search trans women, with sports bans clearly on the way. Someone talked about the US government’s attacks on the American community, taking away healthcare, putting trans women’s in men’s prisons and so on, and how we all knew that could happen here even without the far-right in power.

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A demonstrator holds up a sign during a march to mark International Transgender Day of Visibility in Lisbon, March 31, 2022.
Image via wnycstudios.org

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There was no clear end to something organised so hastily – the speeches finished, and people began to drift away. I bumped into a few friends I met on Twitter years ago, and walked over to the bus stop, chatting about how I might edit my footage. I got home, finished the report and put it on YouTube, where it immediately slotted into an infrastructure that people had made in response to the Supreme Court – advice on how to write to MPs and the EHRC, pieces people had written about what the verdict does (and doesn’t) mean, where other protests are happening in future, and photos from this weekend to show how many people are on our side. (There were fifty people out in the Orkney Islands – I didn’t realise there were fifty people there!) It felt like the start of a new phase of organising: I don’t know if we’ll stop this awful guidance being turned into law, any more than the gay and lesbian groups of 1988 managed to stop Section 28, but I think we’ve already seen the start of the movement that will eventually overturn it.

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