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LONDON (LifeSiteNews) – Britain’s equality watchdog has ruled that “transgender” men who say they are women can be refused single-sex services, including access to areas regarded as private such as dressing rooms and bathrooms.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published new guidelines Monday outlining the lawful application of sex-based discrimination regarding the provision of services to men and women in Britain under the Equality Act 2010.

The guidance, which applies to England, Scotland, and Wales, states that there “are circumstances where a lawfully established separate or single-sex service provider can exclude, modify or limit access to their service for trans people.”

In an accompanying press release from the EHRC’s chair, Baroness Kishwer Falkner confirmed that “service providers wishing to limit services to a single sex are legally able to do so, provided the reasons are justified and proportionate.”

Service providers are required to demonstrate the need for sex separation, including the exclusion of the gender-confused, on grounds of “privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety.”

Explaining the conditions under which sex-selective service providers can exclude those who merely identify as the opposite sex, the commission stated that areas used for “special care, supervision or attention” fall under the single-sex service provision, examples of which include wards in hospitals and nursing homes.

Last month, an NHS hospital admitted that one of its patients accused of raping a female patient in a women’s-only ward was a “transgender” male after CCTV footage of the incident was shared with police.

Sex-separated changing rooms can also disallow “trans” individuals from using the area associated with their preferred identity over their biological gender since “a woman might reasonably object to the presence of a man (or vice versa),” the guidance states.

Continuing, the EHRC noted that group counseling sessions for “female victims of sexual assault” and a “domestic abuse refuge,” for example, are considered justifiably exclusive to women as those present “are likely to be traumatised by the presence of a person who is biologically male.”

The ruling won praise from women’s advocacy groups across the U.K., which lauded the decision as recognizing the need to base policies on biological sex.

Appearing on GB News Tuesday, Susan Smith of campaign group For Women Scotland welcomed the guidance while noting that the need for intervention from EHRC on single-sex spaces is “an indication of how far [pro-LGBT] organizations like Stonewall have completed this institutional capture and managed to reframe the law and to reinterpret the law.”

A press release from Sex Matters, a group which advocates for laws and policies to be based on biological sex in Britain, celebrated the guidance as “a very positive and important step in the right direction” since it “clarifies that sex … is binary, and that a person’s legal sex is their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.”

Speaking out against the newly published guidelines, “transgender” NHS equality chief “Tara” Hewitt described the ruling as “transphobic” and “hostile” while calling for healthcare providers to “ignore” the EHRC.

Kat Barber, of campaign group Sex Not Gender Nurses and Midwives, told the Telegraph that the reaction of ranking NHS figures like Hewitt “says a lot about who is leading the NHS and what their attitude is to women wanting single-sex care. It also suggests that nurses who want to provide care based on the Equality Act would not be supported by their employers.”

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