{"id":396921,"date":"2026-01-29T13:25:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T13:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396921\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T13:25:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T13:25:07","slug":"judge-blocks-charitys-challenge-over-trans-peoples-use-of-hampstead-ponds-single-sex-facilities-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396921\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge blocks charity\u2019s challenge over trans people\u2019s use of Hampstead ponds single-sex facilities | Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">A charity cannot bring a high court challenge over rules allowing trans people to use the single-sex facilities at swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath, a judge has ruled.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Sex Matters sought to take legal action against the City of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk\/london\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">London<\/a>, which operates the men\u2019s, women\u2019s and mixed bathing ponds in north London.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Its barristers told a hearing in December the policy of allowing trans people to use the facilities for the gender with which they identified amounted to sex discrimination.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The challenge, which the City of London opposed, followed a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/society\/2025\/apr\/16\/critics-of-trans-rights-win-uk-supreme-court-case-over-definition-of-woman\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">supreme court ruling<\/a> last year that the terms \u201cwoman\u201d and \u201csex\u201d in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">In a ruling throwing out the legal action on Thursday, Mrs Justice Lieven said the \u201cappropriate forum\u201d for such a claim was through an individual at the county court, rather than the high court.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">She said: \u201cIn my view the more appropriate person to bring this claim is an individual who says that they have been discriminated against by decisions about access to the ponds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">More details soon \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A charity cannot bring a high court challenge over rules allowing trans people to use the single-sex facilities&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-396921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}