#ehrc

Illustration: Ella Baron/The Guardian

Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has a decision to make. The EHRC, a regulator mired in controversy over anti-trans views, has sent a new draft Code of Practice to our Equality Act which would lead to the exclusion of trans people from public life.

Their draft tried to turn our equality laws into a bathroom ban, mandating the blanket exclusion of trans people from gendered spaces and services. Even if a business or association wants to remain trans-inclusive, they’d be told they must exclude us.

The EHRC rushed through more than 50,000 responses to its consultation on this draft using AI, and have now sent their final proposals to the government. We don’t get to see their final draft until it’s been decided on behind closed doors, but media leaks and the EHRC’s own public statements make one thing clear: they haven’t changed course.

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Things are bad for trans folks in the UK right now. A hate organisation playing dress-up as a human rights org called the EHRC that the government uses to create advice on following the equality act and surrounding legal infrastructure issued a code of practice for businesses last year following the ruling that the equality act's definition of woman and lesbian does not include trans women. This code was only a draft, meant to tell businesses what legally complying with this ruling would look like, and would have encouraged businesses to act as gender police in bathrooms and other "single sex" spaces, creating a very unsafe environment for trans people, massively infringing on our rights to exist as ourselves in public. It is this generation's Section 28. It is segregation and it is part of the ongoing trans genocide by the UK government.

After a mass lobby, many people writing to their MPs, the goodlawproject getting involved, and warnings from the UN and many human rights orgs and businesses, our equalities minister rejected the draft. However, a new version just released that she has approved, and it's almost identical to the original. This guidance confusing, contradictory, and dangerous. And we have less than 40 days to convince our MPs to vote against it.

What you can do 🏳️‍⚧️

Attend the mass lobby on the 25th of June. Call your MP first to make sure they'll be there. More info on the trans actual Instagram/website.

Email your MP. Look up their email (gov.uk has a tool) and send them an urgent, polite email now asking them to vote against this guidance

Also, email your MP to ask for a meeting. They legally have to meet with you. Give the issue you want to talk about, your name, address, and contact number.

If you're not in the UK, share this post, and tell your UK friends about the mass lobby. We need as many of us as we can get.

Check in on your trans friends. We are in a sea of hate right now; community, love, and companionship are sorely needed, and always appreciated.

Where to learn more

The non binary barrister on Instagram has done some great videos on this, as has the good law project.

Important reminder

I know this is a scary time, but we fought this before, and we'll keep fighting. We've got each other's backs. Our community is strong and we will survive this as long as we celebrate and lean on each other.

Don't make eachother more scared than we need to be - avoid the misinformation. Remember, this is not law. This is statutory guidance. Even if it passes, it is a document which may be used in court if a business is brought into a lawsuit over their gender policies in their single sex spaces. This guidance passing does not make it illegal to use the bathroom. It does not even make it illegal for a business to have trans inclusive bathrooms etc. It advises on whether that business should be considered to be illegally non-complying with the equality act in the event of a case.

Specifically this:

13.145 If it is justified to provide a separate or single-sex service, then it will not be unlawful discrimination because of gender reassignment to prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to the service for their own sex, as long as doing so is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim (schedule 3, paragraph 28).

13.146 For example, a trans man might be excluded from the women-only service if the service provider decides that, because he presents as a man, other service users could reasonably object to his presence, and excluding him is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. 

If it is otherwise policy that our assigned sex determines which single-sex spaces we have access to, regardless of our gender identity, and that anyone assigned female at birth should therefore be treated as a woman, then it follows from these points that a woman can be effectively stripped of access to women's spaces based purely on presentation. Either there is a threshold of masculinity in appearance over which a cis woman's entitlement to women's spaces can officially be objected to by others, or gender identity does matter but only in situations like this where it can be used to exclude people, and the latter would make the EHRC's stances even more incoherent and discriminatory.

If you're a Brit please consider writing to your MP and explaining why this is unenforceable in any way that preserves our dignity and privacy, and why it is going to unfairly impact gnc people, both cis and trans, with no measurable benefit to the safety of anyone.

I'd recommend giving the guidance and the consultation reports a read to ensure your points aren't redundant or incorrect.

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-centre/news/draft-services-code-practice-laid-parliament