199. The Truth and Lies of Trans Inclusion at Work, with Sophie Wood
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This episode contains references to discrimination, suicide and mental health struggles. Please listen with care. What does it mean to be a woman? That might sound like a personal or even philosophical question. Something shaped by who you are, how you see yourself and how others see you. But in April 2025, the UK Supreme Court answered it in legal terms. And their answer was this. Under the Equality Act, the word woman means someone whose biological sex was recorded as female at birth.

The ruling came from a case called For Women Scotland Limited versus the Scottish Ministers, and the outcome was clear. The legal definitions of man and woman do not include transgender men or transgender women. Even if someone has transitioned, even if they've changed the sex on their birth certificate, what matters legally is their biological sex at birth. This week, we're asking, what does it mean for business owners and leaders trying to create inclusive, legally sound workplaces?

What does that ruling actually change?

Who's affected? Because this is not just a legal issue, it's a workplace issue. And it's already shaping how all people are treated at work, not just the trans community. If you manage people or lead a business, this issue affects you too. To help us understand how we got here and what comes next, we will be joined throughout this episode by Sophie Wood. Sophie is a workplace inclusion trainer, a former police officer and a trans woman. Today, she helps organizations create genuine inclusive cultures through a consultancy belonging base.

Now, fair warning, Belonging Base is not your usual DEI organisation. Yes, instead of creating wishy-washy policies that never get read, or making leaders feel bad by preaching about what they're not doing right, Belonging Base gives practical, sensible and balanced advice to leaders who want to make their cultures truly inclusive. Sophie is also a mental health first aid trainer, a big deal in the trans community, and a University of Cambridge alumni. And of course...

For more than a decade, she has been part of the conversations that most leaders are only just starting to face. As always, all the links are in the show notes. Oh, and this is what I like about Sophie, and I think you're going to like too. She's one of the most straight-talking people you're ever going to come across. She's definitely not the typical DEI leader you've probably met before. For example, here she is talking about how most companies deliver training on inclusion. A lot

lots of kind of traditional trans education. It's like, this is trans person, this is non-binary, this is definition of this, that and the other. And you just want to

poke your eyes out after about half an hour because it's boring okay um and i i'm saying that i've sat through those sessions as a trans person both post and pre-transition thinking kill me now this is truth lies and work the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture my name is leanne i'm a chartered occupational psychologist my name is al and i'm a business owner and today we're helping you uncover the truth and lies around transgender inclusion in the workplace we'll be back after this very short message from our sponsors

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The story starts in Scotland, UK, back in 2018. In March, the Scottish government introduced a law to improve gender balance on public boards, the kinds that run hospitals, universities, local services, you know the kind of thing. The law said that trans women with a gender recognition certificate could be counted as women when measuring gender balance. To

To explain that a bit further, a trans woman is someone who was born male but now lives as a woman. A gender recognition certificate is a legal document that says the government now recognises that person as female. So, if a board was meant to be half women, then a trans woman with that certificate would be included in that count as a woman. A campaign group called For Women Scotland objected to this. They say their goal is to protect

the rights of women based on biological sex and argued that including trans women changed the legal meaning of woman in a way that would make it harder to protect other sex-based rights. So for example, things like women's shelters, sports categories or health services designed specifically for women.

But their argument was not that trans women are dangerous. It was that if woman can mean anyone who identifies that way, then the legal category becomes too broad to protect anything specific. So they challenged the government and eventually the case made its way to the UK Supreme Court. Now fast forward seven years. April 2025, the UK Supreme Court finally agreed with four Women's Scotland campaigners.

It ruled that the words man, woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to biological sex at birth, not legal gender, not self-identified gender, not transition status. The court said the law needs to use consistent language, otherwise it becomes impossible to apply. So they chose biological sex as the foundation. The result is that trans people are still protected from discrimination under the category of gender reassignment.

But they are no longer counted as men or women under the sections of the law that deal with sex. And at first, that might sound quite reasonable. You might think, well, if we're talking about sex, it should be based on biology. Surely, that makes sense. But here's what that actually means. I'd like you to meet Emma.

Emma works for a large public organisation. She's been there for years. She's smart, steady and widely respected. She's been identified as one of the company's top female talent, someone on the path to senior leadership. People go to her for advice. She mentors younger women in the business. Emma's a great manager and is liked and appreciated by all of her colleagues.

What her colleagues don't know is that Emma was born a biological male. She transitioned 10 years ago. She has a gender recognition certificate. She's legally female and no one in the office has ever questioned that. She's not the trans employee. She's just Emma. So when the company launches a leadership program for women, it's no surprise when she applies. It's designed to support women with leadership potential, women like her.

But HR declined her application. They explained that the program is only for biological women, and instead they offer her a place on the men's version. And that's the moment everything changes. Emma hadn't shared that she was trans with most people at work. She hadn't needed to. But this decision outs her, not through rumor or mistake, but through policy. Through a policy her company now feels confident enforcing.

This ruling was meant to protect women's rights, but for Emma, it means being removed from a programme for women and told she belongs with the men. Not because of how she leads, not because of how she shows up, but because of how she was born. That doesn't just knock her off a development track, it undermines who she is. It tells her she's not really a woman, not here, not officially. And that message spreads. Can she still join the women's wellbeing group? Will younger women still see her as a mentor? Can she still safely use the women's bathroom?

But the loss isn't just Emma's. It's the company's, it's the women she supports, the culture she helps hold up, and the silence that follows her exclusion makes it harder for anyone else to speak up. Emma isn't real. Yet her story represents the real challenges of more than 120,000 trans and non-binary people in the UK.

Representing just 0.3% of the population, they didn't create the gender gap. The men still overrepresented in leadership did. So what exactly are we protecting? Now, Emma's story isn't just possible. It's already playing out. And it's not just in individual cases, but in policy. One of the first public signs came from the CIPD. This is the UK's professional body for HR.

They had published guidance on how to support trans employees. It was clear, it was thoughtful, and it was written by people who understood the reality on the ground. Then, it was taken down. There was no explanation. There was no update. It was just gone. That guidance had been co-written by Sophie Wood, our guest, a workplace inclusion trainer, and a trans woman. You're going to hear more from her throughout this episode. We asked her how that moment felt for her. It must have been a LinkedIn conversation. And it's like, you know, what's your main...

concern about the judgment and i said well the judgment in itself probably wouldn't make an awful lot of difference to anybody um but the way in which the judgment is just about to be weaponized by people who want to see trans people eradicated from society is going to be off the scale shit scary and i was right and that's what's happening and the momentum behind that is absolutely incredible um

And the organisations who are behind this reaction in terms of supporting

we'll call it in quotes, the interim guidance, you know, that's been issued around this is, to me, astonishing. So organisations such as the CIPD, British Transport Belief, you know, all completely U-turning and kind of saying, yeah, we're going to react to this straight away. And so...

Yeah, and that's really difficult to get your head around and actually cope with. Two years ago, I was part of a working group of people in the trans community who worked with academics who had been commissioned by the CIPD to write transportive guidance in the workplace for that organisation.

And we worked really hard on that document. It was a great piece of work. It got published. And I was like, hey, that was really good. And I was quite proud of that. So I kind of go around saying to people, hey, I took part in this, don't you know? Take me seriously for my opinions because, you know, I was part of this significant project. And then the warning signs started to come, I think, a few months ago, where the guy who led the research kind of said, oh, just need to let you know that the...

CIPD have pulled down that guidance and now there's a more simplified version in place. So how did we get here? How did a country that once spoke the language of progress start pulling back? Because this didn't begin in the courtroom. It began in politics, in the media, with people in power who saw an opportunity and turned trans lives into a debate. They said it was about protecting women. They called it fairness. But underneath it was something else. It was about control. Who has it and

and who gets to decide who belongs. This was never a debate. It was a strategy, and it's working. More after the break. Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures, and

and hard lessons are the creme de la creme, so you too can make billion-dollar moves in venture, in business, and in life. Maybe start with episode 124, where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. Now, Emma's story before the break provided an example of what could play out. Let's find out what actually does play out and did play out. I'm going to go back to Sophie and hear her story. If you then kind of think, well, this legislation's actually aimed at me, the trans woman, as opposed to being trans man, because that hasn't entered people's thoughts.

until people are now talking about the implications for what just happened. So we're now talking about 50% of this under 1%. So statistically, UK population, it's about 0.5%. Yet you are doing irrevocable damage and interfering with the lives of much broader 2% of the population who aren't even part of the equation that's actually being discussed. And again, that...

Just somebody who's just listening to this with the slightest bit of kind of, I don't know, common sense empathy might just go, well, why is that? Why is that not being taken into consideration when you're making a significant legal judgment that's going to affect the lives of UK citizens? But that just kind of, I think, underpins one of the main arguments from people such myself that these judgments are made in ignorance.

People making these judgments in the legal profession don't have the required level of understanding around what being trans is, things like what being intersex is at all.

And they purposefully, this is the egregious part for me, they purposely denied themselves the opportunity to have that understanding by refusing to hear any submissions from anybody who were in the trans community or represented the trans community. This kind of egregious discrepancy of consideration and investigation into truly both sides of the opposing arguments that were being discussed.

How can that happen in the UK, where you think about it as a democratic country, where justice is at the heart of the meaning of democracy, and that underpins what British citizenship means. And the reason it happens is because outside of a small group of people who hate trans people, and a small group of people who are trans people,

Nobody really cares. Now, this ruling didn't come out of nowhere. You can trace it back, past the Supreme Court, past the policy documents, back to a time when trans inclusion didn't feel controversial. It felt like progress. Back in 2011, there was real optimism. Workplaces were opening up. Diversity training wasn't just a tick box exercise and trans people were becoming more visible, not as a threat, but as real people. I can remember back in 2011, 2012,

Despite having my personal life absolutely fall apart around me, people get their heads around, when I first came out as trans, because of the immediate reaction to my friends and family,

I tried to take my life twice and almost succeeded on one occasion. So I'm one of those statistics that they say about trans people. But despite that, when I look back on that time, in terms of my views of the possibilities of being trans in the UK, I was actually optimistic about the words, there seemed to be an emergence of the acceptance of

equality in general at that time in society. I was working for the police service at the time, you know, and I had attended, you know, lots of different educational experiences and training courses where I

Different identities, different orientations, different nationalities were all discussed really openly in a very kind of accepting way. And so there was a real general kind of cultural vibe, you know, that this is kind of quite a healthy country to live in if you're going to be really different. Okay. So, and that kind of feeling of optimism, I think as I went through kind of 2013, 2014 was absolutely visceral. Now,

At that time, I think lots of people in the authority behind the scenes really resented the progress being made by kind of inclusive organizations that supported inclusive identities, inclusive orientations, and people from different nationalities. So people who have traditionally always been in power, like in the USA and in the UK. And so they started this kind of kickback movement

um and so as you've seen with the you know uh it started with anything like brexit in the uk donald trump being elected in 2016 you know these say donald trump for example i classify as a useful idiot yeah to the people who want him in place so they can actually activate their agenda which we're now seeing

their agenda playing out in this second administration. So there's people behind these people who want to have their influence. And it's all about power and it's all about money. And it's all about influence. And consolidating that at any given opportunity. The biggest offender out of all those newspapers in terms of volumes of articles and chance of the Guardian. The Guardian newspaper. Traditionally considered to be left-leaning, kind of progressive, you know.

And it's like, that's odd, isn't it? You've got this kind of unified kind of demonisation talking about trans people as though they're a threat. And that's the narrative that the UK public has received into their lives through their televisions, through their online media consumption from 2012 right up to present day. So even people who really are ambivalent when they think about the subject

they tend to be negatively leaning now towards trans people because they've just had this continuous kind of earworm and you have this notion of a trans debate which people are pretty familiar with which again is something that really does my head in um and it does most trans people because what you've got is on one side you've got a group of people who just want to live their lives and get on

Yeah, that's the trans community. And on the other side, you've got people who are organised with the specific intention of erasing trans people from public life because they consider that trans people having rights is a threat to

biological women having rights. Once that fear sets in it doesn't need evidence it just needs repetition and silence. Workplaces didn't suddenly become hostile they became hesitant leaders paused and trans people were the first to feel it. The legal ruling didn't create this culture it sealed it it gave weight to an idea that had been building for years that inclusion is conditional that identity is negotiable that trans lives are up for discussion.

By the time the judgment came, many workplaces had already started to pull back, quietly, without statements, without guidance. What comes next isn't just about law, it's about fear, about who gets excluded in the name of safety and what that fear is really protecting. That's where we're going next, because this isn't about protection, it's about control. When you let your mind wander into how this could be practically policed on any level,

Okay. You know, who's policing it? Who is outside the toilet in Wetherspoons? Who's outside the toilet in the local cafe in the high street? Who's outside the toilet in the cinema? Who's doing that policing? What legal authority do they have, whoever's doing that policing? Then what lawful challenge can they actually make in terms of, you know, practically, you know, policing the situation?

Do they have the right to invasively strip search somebody? Do they have the right to touch the person? Do they have the right to demand to see identification? If they're demanding identification, what identification are they actually going to look for? Is the person going to have to show their passport, their driving license, their birth certificate? Because you all carry your birth certificates around with us. And then if they're actually stopping...

A binary trans woman who's actually got a gender recognition certificate, which only has one purpose in law, and that's to change a birth certificate. Then A, you've got the situation where they would be shown a female birth certificate. And so what does the person then do then? What?

They say, well, I don't believe this is the first certificate. You'll remember that this ruling came from a case brought by 4 Women Scotland, a group that challenged the inclusion of trans women in legal definitions of woman. It was presented as a way to protect women to make spaces safer to draw clear lines. But for trans women, it has introduced new dangers, complications and humiliations. I work till the call centre, doing 12-hour shifts.

where there's one two cubicles male cubicle female cubicle so two and a half years in that job female cubicle used not an issue at all years in the police service using female facilities not an issue whatsoever you know okay maybe a couple of people at one time

Kind of felt a bit awkward, especially in the early stages of my transition when I looked, you know, a lot more differently. But not to the extent of actually having an impact on me in terms of my working life or whatever. And it's like, if I think back to the early stages of my transition, just to give another sense of balance to this conversation, is in the early stages of my transition, I was petrified to use the toilets. Absolutely petrified.

Because you didn't want to be a contentious issue. So you have these kind of, you know, these kind of, you know, spidey senses at play. You know, you want to keep yourself safe. You don't want to cause any trouble. You don't want to upset the apple cart. And that's, I think, where most trans people are coming from in terms of they just want their own personal safety in the same way as everybody else wants their own personal safety.

So empirical evidence of lived life since 2011 as a trans woman in private sector, in public sector, working in the UK, working in British overseas territory, not an issue. Once for me or any of my work colleagues just didn't exist. And that's why I keep saying, you know, what lengths have they gone to to solve a problem that just does not exist?

and how many problems are they going to create by trying to do that ridiculous thing.

And it doesn't stop there, because once you normalise the idea that someone's identity is up for challenge, that questioning spreads. It spreads from gyms and bathrooms to boardrooms and hiring panels, from HR policies to conversations behind closed doors. If you think about some of the states in the US, they already have battering bells and trans battering bands.

All the stories you hear through both sides of media in the US are never about, sometimes they're about trans people being arrested or ejected from bathrooms. But the majority of reported cases are just women being ejected from bathrooms and actually being intrusively searched by male police officers or male security staff. So how great is that for protecting those women in those spaces? So the whole

premise of this supposed legal argument is all based on essentially appearance. Do you look woman enough? Do you look female enough? And that's the question that people are going to ask themselves and answer for themselves when somebody goes into a lady's toilet. Because here's the truth. If you care about women's safety, the data is clear. The most dangerous person a woman will ever meet is a man she already knows.

In the UK, one woman is killed by a man every three days. Most of those killings happen at home and most are committed by a partner or ex-partner. That's not opinion. That's from the Office for National Statistics and the UK Femicide Census. Trans women are not the threat. They are not responsible for this violence. But somehow, they're being positioned as a reason women need protection. Based on?

And depending on which way the wind's blowing, the notion that trans people are a danger to women in women-only spaces, or that people pretend to be trans people and be a danger to women in women-only spaces. And the infuriating thing for somebody like myself is it's their whole kind of raison d'etre, their central kind of primary messaging.

is fiction. It actually doesn't exist at all. You know, there's no statistically relevant data to suggest that any person, never mind a woman, has ever been attacked by a trans person or a 900 person in a female-only space. Or,

by a male pretending to be a trans person in a female-only space. This was never just about trans people. At its core, this is about power and who gets to define identity, dignity and belonging. Because when governments or institutions start deciding who qualifies as a woman, what they're really doing is drawing a line, a line that can be moved, a line that decides who counts and who doesn't.

And once that power exists, the power to decide whose identity is valid, it rarely stays contained. We've seen it before and we're seeing it now. Rights being chipped away from the edges, cuts to mental health services, reduced access to abortion, silence around domestic violence and maternal deaths. Policies that encourage more women to have children, not by supporting them, but by making other choices harder.

And while all of this is happening, the international spotlight stays fixed on trans people, just 0.3% of the population. It's a distraction and it's working because while we're debating toilets and terminology, progress for other marginalized groups is quietly stalling. LGBTQ plus communities, ethnic minorities, disabled people, women.

The truth is, this ruling didn't just create new rules for trans people, it created new questions for everyone else. Who gets support? Who gets to feel safe? Who gets equality?

That's what's really at stake. This is not just a legal issue. It's not even just a workplace issue. It's a warning. And if we ignore it, we don't just fail trans people. We risk rolling back rights for everyone. So where do we go from here? Because if you've made it this far, you're probably wondering the same thing we are. What can we actually do? We started this episode asking what it means to be a woman. We're ending it by asking what it means to be a leader.

Because culture doesn't just change in courtrooms. It changes in meeting rooms, in feedback sessions, in team chats. And leaders, especially those of us who've never had to prove our identity to be taken seriously, need to do more. To close out this episode, we asked Sophie to share what leaders can do right now to make safer, more inclusive workplaces. Here are three things she says matter most.

So Sophie's first tip is about how we teach inclusion and why so many organisations are getting it just wrong. She says we need to stop othering and start connecting. Lots of kind of traditional trans education. It's like, this is trans person, this is non-binary, this is definition of this, that and the other. And you just want to poke your eyes out after about half an hour because it's boring. Okay. And I'm saying that I've sat through those sessions as a trans person, both post and pre-transition thinking, kill me now. This is,

How is this actually helping anybody? And so if you think about trying to achieve inclusion for people in your workplace, including trans and non-binary identities, then you need to find a way of educating people, which is inclusive and brings everybody on that journey so that levels of understanding and empathy rise at the same time as each other. So the last thing you should do in terms of your learning development team or anything else is create an education session

where the trans person is other. You've got to learn. You've got to attend a separate session about this person because they're so different. Because that just promulgates that sense of otherness about that person. So think about ways how you can actually get somebody's understanding of their experience into the conversation within a team

which brings everybody on the journey together. Sophie's second tip is simple, practical and powerful. If you want to build empathy in your team, create a space for people to talk about where they're coming from. So the kind of thing that I've used in the past and I use in mental health training is something called frame of reference. Okay. Which it's a model, it's a coaching model, it's a self-reflection model, where you literally, you just draw three concentric circles on a page. And in that

those circles, you write down all the magic ingredients that make you, you at that moment in time. So you write down everything about you, your innate characteristics, the life experiences that you had through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, your socioeconomic background, your education, your family relationships, your friendships, your

faith or no faith you know disease no disease you know neurodivergent not neurodivergent all these things you just bung it down on a piece of paper and you think that is me that is why i am how i am and that's why i react to different situations in the way that i do because that's my lived experience now if you get everybody to do that then everybody can share that lived experience in a way that people can connect with because they've done the same thing

So they might not know what it's like to be a trans person, you know, but they've had an opportunity to actually get an insight into their lived experience without being made to feel they're not part of the group. Like, you know, a lot of DEI type training,

is quite exclusionary in terms of focusing on the differences that we have. So if you can actually, you know, get people making connections on a human level with each other, then you'll raise their empathy with each other and their general understanding around each other. And that is just, that's a 45-minute team meeting, you know,

And that can be really, really effective. And that's probably the most effective practical way you can support a trans or non-binary member of your team or a member of any other minority in your team. And Sophie's final tip is one every manager needs to hear because mistakes will happen. What matters is how we respond to those mistakes. So first up, when you get misgendered, it hurts. Yep.

There's just no way around that. You know, it hurts. On some level, inside, it hurts. But it's like...

The trans experience, diversity, inclusion, equity and all that doesn't exist in a bubble. It's part of the human experience. So think wider than just it being a specialist DEI situation. So most people know that when you communicate something, that the way your communication is received is about 8 or 9% based on the words that you use. And the rest of that communication is based on your experience.

of that communication through your pace of voice, your tone of voice, through your body language, you know, through the way that you're just kind of conducting yourself. And so when you communicate to somebody in a room,

then the intent behind that communication is felt viscerally. That's what human connections are. So it doesn't matter what words come out of the mouth. The person you're speaking to knows that there's malice or no malice in that communication. Okay? And so as soon as you detect there's no malice, which is instantaneous, then it's just like, well, I've got nothing to be angry or upset about. You know? So I might politely point it out, you know,

and would kind of move on from the experience. You know, if there was malice, you know, if somebody was purposefully misgendering me,

Gosh, it takes me about a millisecond to pick up on that. You know, somebody could be saying something really lovely in terms of words. But if I know they're just taking the piss, I know it within a millisecond because that's how humans communicate with each other. So just remember that when you're speaking to people. So when we talk about supporting people, we talk about things like authenticity and being genuine.

in terms of your communications. Then if you've made a mistake with those parameters, then, you know, it's going to be a learning experience, you know, first and foremost. It's going to be a learning experience for you because you'll think, oh, that was terrible. I can't believe I've done that. Probably quite embarrassed. The person will be feeling kind of hurt,

but also a little bit embarrassed for you probably. And then you can just talk about that

have a learning experience and move on. And that's the point. Inclusion isn't about getting everything perfect. It's about building a culture where people feel safe enough to show up as they are and supported enough to keep showing up even when things go wrong. So if you're a leader, ask yourself this, when was the last time someone told you the truth about how they feel at work? Because that's where real change starts, not with policy, not with a workshop, but with trust and

and trust is built one moment at a time. This is Truth, Lies and Work. We'll see you next week.