Fitness influencer Natalee Barnett has come under fire for the trans-exclusionary stance of her new women’s-only gym. Named The Girls Spot and located in Wandsworth, in South West London, the gym is due to open in spring 2025.
For context, Barnett spent four years fundraising to create the space, generating over £22,900 via GoFund Me. In a tweet from 2021, the influencer shared a trans-inclusive message and implied that her forthcoming gym would welcome trans women, writing; “Respectfully, if you have a problem with trans women attending my gym then you can find another gym to train at. I have discussed this several times before, trans women are women and also a minority that need to be protected. Please keep your transphobia away.”
However, over the weekend, Barnett shared a (since deleted) post on X which stated the gym would only be for ‘biological’ women. "The Girls Spot operates as a female-only gym for biological women, tackling harassment, sexual assault & violence that women face inside the gym. The tweet circling was made four years ago and I was in the very early stages of creating a concept,” she wrote.
The post has attracted significant backlash online — both from trans women sharing their disappointment at being excluded and allies speaking up for the need for trans inclusion.
Barnett has since shared a video stating that the decision was “not made lightly” but that the gym would be operating as a “single sex space” and would not be trans-inclusive.
It’s sad to see a gym committed to inclusivity fall into the trap of excluding trans women — and, no doubt, extremely painful for trans women to see their validity as women called into question.
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It's important to remember that trans women are in need of safe spaces with other women — they’re not a threat to the safety of women’s-only spaces. Academic research suggests that between 50 and 66 per cent of trans people experience some form of sexual abuse or sexual assault in their lifetime and are four times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than cis people.
However, Barnett’s gym policy is just one small piece in a much broader picture of anti-trans sentiment and transmisogyny (misogyny aimed at trans women).
The policing of trans women’s inclusion in sport and continued efforts to push them out of women’s spaces is often justified under the banner of ‘protecting biological women’.
But when we fall into the trap of defining women in strictly biological terms, we harm all women — reinforcing restrictive definitions of womanhood and encouraging greater scrutiny of gender norms.
Just as we saw in the Olympics with the social media attacks on Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer who was wrongly accused of being trans, attempting to enforce an anti-trans stance can escalate into transphobic harassment even of cis women.
Ultimately, trans women are women: that shouldn't be a controversial thing to say. We need to accept that ‘woman’ doesn’t mean any one thing: it’s multifaceted, fluid and contains so much beautiful diversity.
Megan Wallace (they/them) is Cosmopolitan UK’s Former Sex and Relationships Editor covering sexual pleasure, sex toys, LGBTQIA+ identity, dating and romance. They have covered sexuality and relationships for over five years and are the founder of the PULP zine, which publishes essays on culture and sex. In their spare time, they can be found exploring the London kink scene and planning dates on Feeld.
