Hunter Schafer slams UK’s ‘stupid’ trans bathroom guidance
Hunter Schafer (Getty Images)
Hunter Schafer has criticised UK single-sex bathroom guidance as misguided and unworkable, after revealing she underwent bottom surgery in December.
Asked about the guidance in the UK around single-sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms, the 27-year-old trans actor and model compared it to North Carolina’s HB2 “bathroom bill”.
Schafer told Elle: “That’s why these laws are so f****** stupid… It was the same thing with HB2 in North Carolina. You can make it the law, but are you deploying a little gender policeman to stand outside the bathrooms?”
The guidance states that people should use single-sex facilities, including changing rooms and public toilets, that align with their sex as assigned at birth. It followed an April 2025 Supreme Court ruling, which stated “the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.
Schafer has personal experience of bathroom-law fights. She was the youngest plaintiff, aged 17, in a legal challenge to North Carolina’s HB2, which was passed in 2016 and fully repealed in December 2020.
What did Hunter Schafer say about her bottom surgery?
In the same interview, Schafer spoke about having gender-affirming bottom surgery for the first time. She said: “I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much.”
She also spoke about how she now understands her gender identity as “flatter”, saying: “I’m a woman. I’m a girl … I feel like that’s the magical thing about queerness. On an ideological level, it’s about possibility and expansion and growth, and being on that journey and finding yourself.”
Schafer described recovery as intense, saying she was limited to about 150 steps a day. She said she rented a large apartment, where her friends and family came to visit her while she healed.
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