‘How dare Sex Matters try to deny my right to use Hampstead Ponds’

Trans journalist Amelia Hansford explains why she has as a right to use Hampstead Heath’s women-only ponds.

I’m planning to go to Hampstead Ponds next week. I’ve bought myself a wetsuit and one of those far-too-tight Neoprene caps, and I’m going to brave the late January cold to take a dip in Kenwood Ladies’ Pond; the heath’s women-only bathing pond.

I’m not hugely passionate about pond bathing; I get incredibly cold swimming outdoors – my post-swim shivers could help power a small dam – and I am certainly no prize-winning swimmer. However, I feel it’s something I need, for myself and my womanhood, particularly after Sex Matters tried and failed to stop me and all trans women from doing so.

The incessant bickering by the ‘gender-critical’ crowd has raged on for nearly a decade. It first began in 2019 after the City of London Corporation (CoLC) confirmed trans women had as much a right to use Kenwood Ladies’ Pond as anyone else, cisgender, intersex, or otherwise.

Now, I want to be incredibly crystal clear – the CoLC’s confirmation was just that, a confirmation. It did not retract from previous policy, nor was it a knee-jerk reaction to ideological pressure as some have suggested. Trans women have used the ponds since they first opened, nothing has ever told them they can’t.

Over the next few years, Kenwood Ladies’ Pond – or, more specifically, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association (KLPA) – became a battleground between women who simply wanted to go bathing as they always had, and those who insisted that trans women must be excluded. A who’s who of gender-critical naysayers began filling seats at KLPA meetings, regularly interrupting to tout their fallacious beliefs that trans women are a scourge and a danger to women – you know, unless you look at the evidence.

All of this leads to Saturday, 23 August 2025; Sex Matters, a controversial charity and prominent player in the gender-critical world, announces it has petitioned the High Court, in a lawsuit against the CoLC, to legally prevent trans women from using Kenwood Ladies’ Pond.

I’m not going to bore you with a timeline leading up to the judgment – all there is to tell is that Sex Matters brought a case so deeply-rooted in its own ideological presumptions about equality law, the trans community, and reality, that the only reasonable outcome would have been, and indeed was, dismissal.

You see, Sex Matters, like most ‘gender-critical’ groups, likes to believe it is a voice for women. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of engaging with them knows this well. Their rhetoric, branding – even the X chromosome featured in their logo – are indicative of this belief that it is a women’s rights organisation above all else.

The problem is that, in this and so many other cases, it wasn’t the voice of women.

I and the rest of the PinkNews team covered this story incredibly closely. I worked with amazing journalists like Sophie Perry and Chantelle Billson who, like I, wanted to report on developments with gravitas and journalistic integrity. I firmly believe we succeeded in that endeavour.

What we saw was years-worth of failures by fringe trans-exclusionary outsiders fruitlessly pleading to women they saw as allies, in a community that so many of them didn’t belong, to believe them that trans women are somehow the biggest threat to fourth-wave feminism in the modern era. They invaded a women’s space and poisoned it with their ideology.

Both the CoLC and KLPC have held votes on this matter – one in 2023, 2024 and another this week as part of a consultation that is due to conclude in the near future. Every time, members overwhelmingly voted that they want to keep the pond trans-inclusive.

As this went on, I began to form a strange personal relationship with Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. I’ve never been there – hell, I’ve never been to Hampstead Heath – my aforementioned reluctance to bathe outdoors would have, in any other world, kept me from going. As I learned about its history I developed this unique, unexpected bond with it.

Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond first officially opened to the public in the 1920s. Originally a private estate dating back to the 17th century, it became a popular public attraction after the 1st Earl of Iveagh bought and donated it to the nation in the 1927. It was taken over by the City of London in 2003.

In that time, it has become more than a single-sex bathing pond – it’s a sanctuary. It’s a place for women, secluded from the work-a-day world of London and the prying eyes of men, to submerge themselves in brisk solace, protecting them from a world that continues to oppress and kill them. It’s a portal to another world where patriarchy is fiction and women are just people.

For so long, I felt subconsciously forbidden from identifying with this. Yes, I am a woman – I don’t doubt that for a second – but I cannot help but feel like an outsider when writing about Kenwood, even now. Some might criticise me for that, but I think it’s foolish to ignore the deep ostracisation trans women feel living under political systems that speak about us, without us, as though we’re a problem to be dealt with.

But you know what? I’ve had it. I’m not letting this deeply-unpopular rhetoric plague my self-esteem any more. How dare Sex Matters try to deny me my womanhood. How dare they try to separate me from my history. How absolutely dare they let their disgust of people like me trick them into believing they have more of a right to these spaces than I do. While we’re at it, how dare Keir Starmer’s government take them seriously as though their beliefs aren’t built on misinformation.

Sex Matters are the outsiders here, not as women and not even as rightful patrons of Kenwood, but as compassionate human beings. Their supporters stood in meetings, wearing embarrassing copies of the pond’s ‘Women Only’ sign around their necks, pitching their beliefs to a crowd whose only interest in their speeches was the time at which they ended.

I’m going to swim in Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, as the women whose pain I share have done before me. I will feel the cold water against my skin, look up at the cloudy winter sky, and temporarily free myself of these patriarchal chains. For a brief moment, I will forget the trauma I have faced as a woman; the sexual assaults against me, the opportunities that I was denied, the men who took and abused my femininity like so many others.

When I do, despite every single disgusting lie that bigots spout about my community in the misguided name of feminism, no one will get hurt.

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