THE head of Barclays has confirmed that the bank will bar trans women from using women’s toilets in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Group chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan told reporters on a media call: “Following the Supreme Court ruling … we believe that we have to comply with that by not allowing trans women to use female bathrooms.

“We strive in every way to make the appropriate facilities available in a comfortable way for people to use and to provide equality of opportunities and development.”

Britain’s highest court ruled last month that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”

After the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services, such as shops and hospitals.

At the weekend, doctors at the British Medical Association condemned the ruling as “biologically nonsensical” and “scientifically illiterate.” 

At the union’s resident doctors conference, a motion was passed stating: “We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people.”

A BMA spokesperson confirmed today, however, that union-wide policy won’t be set until the next annual representative meeting in June.

The Good Law Project has said that it intends to challenge the Supreme Court’s judgment, saying that it believes Britain to be in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights. It has so far crowdfunded £280,000 to support the legal action. 

The organisation will be supporting Victoria McCloud, Britain’s first trans judge, now retired, to launch the case.

Giving evidence to the joint committee on human rights on Wednesday, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that it is “absolutely unacceptable” to question the validity of the Supreme Court ruling.

Ms Mahmood told MPs and peers: “I think they’ve done their job and I think they’ve sought to do it in a way that recognises that we’re talking about a balance of rights, but sought to give confidence to a minority community that they still have protections.”