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It starts with a quiet email. No warning. No phone call. Just a notice that your account is under review—or worse, closed.
That’s what’s happening to women’s health and sexual wellness companies across the United Kingdom and Europe. Not because they’ve broken laws. Not because they’ve done anything shady. But because somewhere in a compliance department, someone ticked the wrong box and labeled them “adult content.”
New research from two U.K.-based advocacy groups, CensHERship and The Case For Her, digs into what’s really going on. And it’s uncomfortable reading. The report argues that women’s health innovators are being misclassified in financial systems, triggering debanking and account shutdowns that can stall or even sink young companies.
“What we find is that misclassification, over-compliance, cultural discomfort, and outdated policy language combine to create structural barriers for women’s health innovation, and that the identified structural barriers tend to fall into two forms,” the research explains.
Those two forms? “Misclassification” and “misunderstanding.”
Misclassification is described as “where women’s health and sexual wellbeing are misread as adult content. This is the most visible and well-documented form of bias.”
Misunderstanding, on the other hand, is “where women’s health is overlooked as too new, complex, or unfamiliar to fit existing risk templates. These cases are harder to surface because they are often resolved quietly or never formally recorded.”
That second one hits differently. It’s the kind of bias that doesn’t shout. It just shrugs. Too new. Too complex. Too awkward. Next.
Some of the companies affected are household names in the space, including SheSpot, a widely recognized brand. These aren’t fringe operators. They’re mainstream wellness businesses trying to build products around bodies that, frankly, have been underserved for generations.
The report goes further: “Because most financial institutions have never explicitly defined women’s health or FemTech within their risk frameworks, systems default to the nearest analogue—typically adult content, vice categories, or other ‘sensitive’ sectors.”
That line sticks. Systems default. That’s how it happens. No villain twirling a mustache. Just outdated templates and risk models built in eras when women’s sexual health was barely discussed in polite company. So instead of creating a new category, institutions drag these companies into old ones—adult content, vice, high-risk.
It’s lazy. It’s structural. And it’s expensive.
Both CensHERship and The Case For Her argue that outdated classification systems, cultural discomfort, and unconscious bias are creating real barriers to growth. Being labeled “adult content” or “adult services” doesn’t just sound insulting—it places these businesses in a “high-risk sector” alongside firearms manufacturing and tobacco cultivation and marketing.
Think about that for a second. A company developing pelvic health tools or hormone-tracking tech ends up sitting in the same risk bucket as cigarette production.
This isn’t just semantics. Risk labels determine whether you can open a bank account, process payments, attract investors, or scale internationally. When the system quietly decides your innovation is morally adjacent to vice, you feel it everywhere.
Honestly, it raises a bigger question: if financial institutions can’t tell the difference between sexual wellness and adult entertainment, what does that say about the frameworks we’re still operating under?
Maybe the real issue isn’t that women’s health is “too new.” Maybe it’s that the systems judging it are too old.
