Why is the Hampstead ladies’ pond still open to men?

It’s not often you see a protest demanding nothing more than the law be enforced. But that’s exactly what happened this Bank Holiday Monday at the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds in north London.

Around 30 gloriously gobby women – some clad in swimsuits and sporting fake beards – descended on the Highgate Men’s Pond – a pond on Hampstead Heath that’s reserved for male bathers. Waving signs that read ‘No peens in our pond’ and belting out ‘No goolies in our poolies’, the women were there to protest against the gender self-identification policy still in place at both the men’s pond and the nearby Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. The City of London Corporation (CLC), which runs the ponds, is so far refusing to comply with last month’s Supreme Court ruling, which states that spaces calling themselves women-only should be reserved for biological females.

A bemused but good-natured police officer was summoned to the scene of the protest, gamely trying to keep a straight face while being asked to address the women as ‘sir’ and ‘your lordship’. When entry to the men’s pond was politely refused, five of the ‘sirs’ simply hopped over the fence and plunged in. They were met with raucous cheers from the bank.

The point of the demonstration couldn’t have been simpler. A single-sex space ceases to be ‘single sex’ the moment it becomes a feelings-based free-for-all. If men can get into the ladies’ pond with a declaration of ‘gender identity’ and optional dash of lippy, surely women in fake beards should qualify for the men’s?

This latest splash of civil disobedience was led by Amy Desir and Hannah Clarke, the duo behind the ‘Man Friday’ protests, who first made headlines in 2018 by crashing the men’s pond to protest against self-ID. Seven years on, their message is the same. Only now, the law has been clarified at the highest level, and it is firmly on the side of the protesters.

Venice Allan, a feminist campaigner who helped organise the protest, tells me that, after the Supreme Court ruling, she ‘had hoped that the CLC would comply with the law and make the men and women’s ponds single-sex again’. She points the finger at Edward Lord, the nonbinary-identified, long-time CLC official who spearheaded the self-ID policy. He once claimed that letting men into the ladies’ pond ‘shouldn’t be controversial’.

Yet just last month, the Supreme Court reaffirmed what most of us already knew – namely, that single-sex spaces are legal, necessary and must be protected. The swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath are no exception. But the CLC has doubled down and is claiming that the self-ID policy will remain in place until formal guidance has been issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). So far, the EHRC has only issued interim guidance advising that men who identify as women should not be able to access women’s facilities in the workplace or public spaces.

Protester Hannah Clarke is damning about the CLC’s cowardly equivocation: ‘The interim guidance is out and it reasserts the judgment made by the Supreme Court, which is, let’s face it, hardly the most complicated thing to understand.’

Tellingly, the same day as the men’s pond protest, the Telegraph revealed that staff at the pond had actually been instructed not to ‘get drawn into any conversations’ about the Supreme Court’s ruling with the public. Presumably, this is because the pond’s current self-ID policy would be impossible to defend.

‘This isn’t complex’, Amy Desir tells me. ‘Hampstead Heath has a men’s pond, a ladies’ pond and a mixed pond. The CLC has no excuse not to comply with the law… It’s astonishingly easy to tell the difference between men and women.’

Contrary to the testerical mewling of trans activists, no one is trying to stop them from swimming. The mixed pond exists and anyone can use it. But men who get a thrill from wearing itty bitty bikinis don’t want mixed spaces – they want to take over women’s spaces. Even with the law behind us, the fight to reclaim those spaces is only just beginning.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.