Why Women Still Need Female-Only Spaces

Respecting transgender people should not require women to surrender every boundary based on sex

There are subjects today that people approach with extraordinary caution because one misplaced word can end the conversation before it has even begun.

This is one of them.

But I believe difficult subjects are precisely the ones we need to be able to discuss calmly, respectfully and honestly.

I support the dignity, safety and freedom of transgender people. I do not believe transgender people should be harassed, humiliated, denied employment, denied healthcare or treated as lesser human beings.

At the same time, I believe women have the right to retain some spaces that are exclusively female on the basis of sex.

Those two beliefs do not have to be enemies.

For clarity, when I use the term female-only in this article, I am referring to sex rather than gender identity.

And I believe we have reached a point where society needs to be able to say something very simple:

Inclusivity does not require the abolition of every boundary.

Why did women need their own spaces in the first place?

Female-only spaces were not invented because women disliked men.

Many developed because women lived in societies overwhelmingly governed by men.

Men controlled parliaments, businesses, property, universities, professions and much of public life. Women had to fight for the vote, access to education, independent property rights, equal employment opportunities and representation.

Australia’s history reflects this struggle. Women campaigned for the right to vote and stand for election while employment remained heavily restricted and women were paid less than men.

The Women’s Liberation Movement later created consciousness-raising groups where women could speak with other women about marriage, sexuality, violence, motherhood, employment and inequality.

Former Australian women’s adviser Elizabeth Reid described these groups as deliberately creating a space in which women’s voices could be heard rather than dominated by others.

That principle matters.

Sometimes people speak differently when members of the opposite sex are not present.

Sometimes women need to discuss experiences involving their bodies, sexuality, pregnancy, menstruation, miscarriage, rape, domestic violence or male violence without having to negotiate someone else’s feelings about being excluded.

That is not hatred.

That is privacy.

Australia has a particularly powerful example

In March 1974, a group of Sydney feminists took over two vacant houses in Glebe and established Elsie Women’s Refuge, Australia’s first refuge for women and children escaping domestic violence.

At that time, women experiencing violence frequently had nowhere safe to go. Domestic violence was commonly regarded as a private family matter and police intervention was limited.

Elsie changed that.

It helped spark a national refuge movement that eventually led to hundreds of services around Australia.

Think about what those women were saying through their actions.

They were saying:

There are circumstances in which women need a place of their own.

Not because every man is violent.

Clearly he isn’t.

But because women escaping male violence may reasonably require an environment in which male bodies are not present.

The distinction is enormously important.

A safeguarding rule does not necessarily constitute an accusation against every individual who falls outside it.

Sex sometimes matters

There is an uncomfortable statistical reality behind this discussion.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, approximately 22% of Australian women have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. ABS data also found that women were far more likely to have experienced sexual violence perpetrated by a male than by a female.

That does not mean males should be treated as inherently dangerous.

It means sex is not always an irrelevant characteristic when designing safeguarding policies.

We recognise this principle everywhere else.

Risk management does not require believing every person within a category will cause harm. It asks whether certain boundaries can reasonably reduce risk, preserve privacy or make vulnerable people feel secure.

For a woman who has been raped, sexually assaulted or violently controlled by a male partner, the presence of someone with a male body in a changing room, refuge, trauma group or intimate communal environment may matter to her profoundly.

I don’t think she should have to justify that reaction.

Her dignity matters too.

This is where the definition of “woman” becomes important

Australian federal law protects people from discrimination because of gender identity.

Importantly, the Sex Discrimination Act defines gender identity in a way that does not require medical intervention, and the Australian Human Rights Commission confirms that protection is not dependent upon the sex someone was assigned at birth or upon surgery or other medical treatment.

That is an important protection against mistreatment.

But it also raises a legitimate public-policy question:

Should gender identity automatically determine access to every space originally created around sex?

I don’t believe it should.

That doesn’t mean somebody’s gender identity should be mocked.

It means gender identity and biological sex answer different questions.

There are countless situations where gender identity may be the relevant consideration.

There are others where anatomy, physiology, reproductive biology, physical development, privacy or trauma history may make sex relevant.

We should be mature enough to acknowledge both.

Australia is already confronting this question legally

The issue recently reached the Full Federal Court through the Giggle for Girls case.

Giggle was designed as a women-only social networking application and excluded transgender woman Roxanne Tickle. In May 2026, the Full Federal Court upheld the finding that she had been unlawfully discriminated against because of gender identity and increased her compensation to $20,000.

Whatever one’s opinion of that particular case, it demonstrates how complicated the intersection between sex-based rights and gender-identity protections has become in Australia.

Interestingly, another common-law democracy has recently travelled in a different direction.

In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court unanimously held that the words “woman,” “man” and “sex” in Britain’s Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex.

Crucially, the Court also made clear that transgender people continue to receive legal protection against discrimination under the separate protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

That distinction interests me enormously.

Because perhaps the answer does not require choosing whose human rights matter.

Perhaps it requires defining different rights clearly enough that they can coexist.

The problem with identity becoming the only criterion

My concern is not that transgender people are secretly dangerous.

That would be an unfair conclusion.

My concern is much broader.

If access to a protected space depends entirely upon an individual’s declaration of identity, what objective boundary remains when someone acts in bad faith?

Safeguarding rules have to be designed not only around the intentions of good people but around the possibility of people exploiting them.

History teaches us repeatedly that rules created with compassionate intentions can still contain loopholes.

The overwhelming majority of people identifying as transgender may be completely sincere.

That does not answer the policy question.

A safeguarding system must still ask what happens when someone isn’t.

And women should be allowed to raise that question without immediately being characterised as hateful.

Women’s toilets tell another interesting historical story

Even something as ordinary as a women’s public toilet carries a history few of us think about.

In nineteenth-century Britain, public toilets were overwhelmingly designed for men. Women’s facilities were scarce partly because authorities assumed respectable women would remain closer to home.

Historic England notes that inadequate toilet provision actually restricted women’s independence and ability to travel through public space.

Women eventually gained facilities designed specifically around their needs.

That wasn’t exclusion for exclusion’s sake.

It increased women’s participation in public life.

This is why I become uncomfortable when every female boundary is automatically treated as an outdated form of discrimination.

Some boundaries were achievements.

What concerns me most is women’s reluctance to speak

I increasingly hear women qualify their opinions before they express them.

“I’m not transphobic, but…”

“I support everyone, but…”

“I don’t want anybody to think I’m hateful, but…”

We should ask ourselves why women feel they must seek permission before discussing their own boundaries.

A woman should be allowed to say:

I do not want a male-bodied person in the room while I undress.

She should not require a political theory to justify it.

She should not need to disclose a history of sexual assault.

She should not have to establish that the person beside her represents a specific threat.

Privacy itself can be sufficient.

Consent matters outside sexual relationships too.

And transgender people need safety as well

There is another reality that should not disappear from this conversation.

Transgender people experience violence, harassment and discrimination at disturbing rates in Australia. The Australian Human Rights Commission has documented significant experiences of violence among transgender and gender-diverse people.

That means telling transgender people simply to “go somewhere else” without providing safe alternatives would not be an adequate solution.

We can do better than that.

My preferred approach is more spaces, not fewer.

Maintain female-only facilities where sex, trauma, privacy, safeguarding or fairness genuinely matter.

Create safe and dignified facilities for transgender people.

Provide individual private changing rooms where possible.

Allow mixed or gender-neutral facilities for people who prefer them.

Support transgender-specific peer groups, refuges and services where there is demand.

And retain female-only services where their purpose genuinely depends upon sex.

That strikes me as accommodation rather than domination.

Nobody receives everything they want.

Everybody receives something they need.

Women should not have to redefine themselves to accommodate everybody else

Perhaps this is the part of the debate I struggle with most.

For generations women fought against male institutions telling them what being a woman meant.

They fought against assumptions about how women should dress, behave, work, marry, raise children, express sexuality and participate in society.

The feminist message I grew up understanding was revolutionary in its simplicity:

A woman could be feminine, masculine, heterosexual, lesbian, maternal, childless, ambitious, shy, powerful, vulnerable, glamorous or completely uninterested in femininity—and she was still a woman.

I don’t want that freedom narrowed again.

We don’t need another war between vulnerable groups

A woman who doesn’t conform to femininity doesn’t need another gender category.

A little girl who hates dresses and loves football doesn’t need fixing.

A lesbian who rejects conventional femininity doesn’t somehow become less female.

Perhaps liberation should mean expanding the ways people are allowed to live rather than continually redefining the categories themselves.

Respect must travel in both directions

I will respect someone’s chosen name.

I will treat transgender people with dignity.

I will oppose harassment and cruelty directed towards them.

But respect cannot mean that every philosophical, biological or policy disagreement must disappear.

And inclusion cannot mean women are never permitted to say no.

There are occasions when boundaries are necessary.

There are occasions when biological sex is relevant.

There are occasions when women need other women.

That should not be a radical statement.

I don’t want women and transgender people positioned as enemies.

Both groups have experienced violence.

Both have experienced discrimination.

Both deserve safety.

The solution therefore cannot simply be:

One group’s rights erase the other’s.

Perhaps we need to abandon that binary altogether.

A humane society should be capable of protecting transgender people from discrimination while simultaneously recognising legitimate sex-based boundaries for women.

We have enough creativity to build additional facilities.

We have enough wealth to create additional services.

We have enough intelligence to distinguish privacy from prejudice.

And hopefully we have enough courage to allow women to participate openly in the conversation about where those boundaries should lie.

Because history contains an important lesson.

Women’s freedoms were rarely handed to them politely.

Women had to organise.

Women had to speak.

Women had to create their own organisations.

Women had to establish their own refuges.

Women had to challenge institutions controlled overwhelmingly by men.

And sometimes they had to say something extraordinarily powerful:

This space is ours.

I believe they must retain the right to say it.

Not everywhere.

Not without reason.

Not with cruelty.

But where sex genuinely matters—yes.

Protecting transgender dignity and protecting female-only spaces do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The question facing us now is whether we are courageous enough to defend both.

By Jim Villamor