#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.

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

13.179: There is no type of official record or document in the UK which provides reliable evidence of sex. [...] Therefore, it is unlikely to be proportionate or practical to ask for further evidence of a person’s sex.

This means that if someone comes up to you and says hey, there's a trans person using your loos, kick them out, you may have to ask the customer discreetly "hey, sorry, I got a complaint. Can you confirm you're using the right loo?" and if they say "Yeah I am" you are DONE.

That provides as much defence as you can get; you've asked, you got a confirmation, and after that point it is not your business. The customer can call the cops if they wanna make a big deal about it but if you go "hmm I don't believe you" and kick out a cis lady you'll be sued into fucking paste.

And I'm running a campaign to raise the chance of it being a cis person literally as high as I can get it, to be clear! Like, that's the stick, the Chaff Project and a high rate of false positives. Kicking someone out is a LEGAL RISK. Accepting the answer you're given is NOT.