During a protest on Saturday, several statues in Parliament Square were vandalised, including one honoring women’s suffrage advocate Dame Millicent Fawcett.

Transgender activists gathered outside of Parliament to express their discontent regarding a Supreme Court decision made on Wednesday, which stated that biological sex is the defining characteristic of a woman under the Equality Act.

According to the Metropolitan Police, seven statues sustained damage, and they have launched an investigation into the incidents as acts of criminal damage, although no arrests have yet been made.

One of the damaged statues, commemorating World War One South African figure Jan Smuts, was sprayed with the message “trans rights are human rights.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling specified that transgender women in possession of a gender recognition certificate may be excluded from single-sex spaces if such exclusion is deemed “proportionate.”

The judges unanimously concluded that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex instead of “certificated sex.”

Additional protests against the ruling occurred on the same day in Reading, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.

The Metropolitan Police stated that their officers were present in Parliament Square to oversee the protest; however, they did not witness the acts of vandalism, as the area was crowded with thousands of demonstrators, and no reports were filed at the time.

They confirmed that they are treating the graffiti as criminal damage and that no arrests have been made so far.

Chief Superintendent Stuart Bell, who was overseeing the policing of the protest, expressed disappointment over the damage inflicted on seven statues and nearby property during the event.

“While we uphold the right to protest, actions like this are entirely unacceptable,” he remarked.

The statue of Dame Millicent Fawcett, created by artist Gillian Wearing, is notable for being the only statue of a woman in Parliament Square, where other memorials include prominent global figures such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, along with former prime ministers Sir Winston Churchill and David Lloyd-George.

Unveiled in 2018, it also stands as the sole statue by a female artist in the square, a result of a campaign and petition led by feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez.