A friend of mine runs a residential writing retreat attended by women with experience of trauma and abuse. It is vital to those who take part that it is female only: past attenders have told her it enables them to talk about their experiences in a way they couldn’t if men were present. But she has begun to worry whether excluding all men – regardless of how they identify – might put her at risk of legal action.
I put her in touch with an expert to explain the law in this area. The upshot: it isn’t clear exactly when it is lawful to operate female-only services, and that ambiguity means she is right to consider the risk of being sued. For a freelancer it could ultimately be catastrophic. She has been agonising about this since and may stop running the retreat.
