At the Pond

It was 27°C in London on Friday, 20 June, and I was looking forward to cooling off with a swim at the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. The first time I visited the pond I felt as if I’d walked into the Garden of Eden. A breeze rippled through the foliage that obscured the upper meadow from outside eyes. Lily pads floated on the water. Women, alone with a book or in groups, were dotted around, lounging in the sun or shade. Amplified sound is forbidden, so the murmurs of conversation and the birds were all you could hear. A space without men allows for a different type of relaxation, a kind of whole body letting go.

Following the recent UK Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v. The Scottish Ministers, the City of London Corporation, which owns Hampstead Heath and manages the ponds, announced that it would be ‘reviewing its access policies’ but in the meantime ‘current arrangements remain in place.’ Under existing policy, all women, including trans women, may use the Ladies’ Pond. As the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association told the Ham & High:

The Ladies’ Pond is open to all women and girls over the age of eight and, according to the lifeguards, trans women have been swimming there for many years without incident.

On 20 June, relaxing in the meadow after a swim with friends, I heard raised voices and turned to see a middle-aged woman shouting. ‘You’re a man!’ she screamed at a woman who was walking across the meadow towards the pond. ‘You shouldn’t be here! This is a women’s space!’ A multitude of voices rose up immediately in protest. Once I got over my initial shock, I joined them. The aggressor continued shouting. The woman who was being verbally abused stared straight back and replied: ‘I am a woman.’ The other woman shouted that she wasn’t and that she ‘can tell’. ‘Would you like to check?’ asked the woman being attacked.

As she walked away for her swim, I went to report the incident. I was shaking. Other women also came to report it, and they said they were trembling too, our previously relaxed bodies now on high alert. A felt memory resurfaced of all the times when, growing up as a Muslim wearing hijab, I’d had racist abuse shouted at me in the street, or the occasion when a middle-aged white women turned on me in a bookshop café to start a tirade against ‘your kind’. I was twelve.

The staff at the pond said this wasn’t the first time that the woman we were complaining about had done this. She was part of a group who would break the rules by bringing amplified music and chairs, and would generally boss people around and try to police the meadow. They have apparently been emboldened by the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s anti-trans ‘interim update on the practical implications of the UK Supreme Court judgment’ (one of the things she shouted repeatedly was ‘it’s the law’).

The City of London Corporation took the decision to keep the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond a trans inclusive space (for now) despite the interim EHRC guidance, much to the ire of the transphobic lobby. In a vox pop by the Standard, visitors to the Ladies’ Pond overwhelmingly agreed with the decision to remain trans inclusive. Many of the people who pitch up to hurl abuse at women and disrupt the space aren’t even swimmers. They don’t sunbathe either, or use the meadow as a safe place to experience greater bodily autonomy. Instead, they infiltrate the space to abuse women – precisely the charge they level at trans women.

After I reported the incident, the staff at the pond asked the woman who had behaved abusively to leave, but she refused. The lifeguards and ticket office staff have no powers of enforcement, so the abuser stayed while the rest of us slowly packed up and left in dribs and drabs, the atmosphere now tense and darkened. A cloud hung over me for the rest of the day and that night I was tearful as I thought back to the sense of powerlessness I had felt. It was a familiar feeling from the years I worked in domestic and sexual abuse support services.

But the cloud lifted the next day at the London Dyke March, when the victim of the abuse happened to notice the friend I was with, who had also intervened. She came over to thank us for stepping in, and we agreed on the need to organise to protect the space. Those who frequent the Ladies’ Pond come from many different walks of life – that is part of what gives the place its unique character. It is also the reason that acceptance, decency and mutual respect are the values which must continue to undergird it.