The EHRC Has Drawn a Line Around Trans Lives, and It Runs Through Every Toilet Door in Britain
The Equality and Human Rights Commission laid its final draft Code of Practice before Parliament on 21 May, and if you are a trans person living in the United Kingdom, the document reads less like guidance and more like a slow, bureaucratic eviction notice from public life.
The code follows the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, which determined that "sex" under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex rather than any gender recognition certificate a person might hold. That ruling was made without hearing from a single trans witness about the lived reality of what it would mean in practice. The British Medical Association, representing some 50,000 members, called the judgment "scientifically illiterate." None of that, it seems, gave the EHRC pause.
Under the new guidance, service providers are told that they may lawfully exclude trans women from female-only spaces, including toilets, changing rooms, shelters and hospital wards, where other users could "reasonably object" to sharing the space with someone who "appears to be of the opposite sex." The language is revealing. It is not predicated on any demonstrated risk, any incident, any evidence base whatsoever. It is predicated on discomfort, on perception, on the idea that a person's appearance might be sufficiently unsettling to those around them that their exclusion becomes proportionate. That is not safeguarding. That is segregation dressed in the language of reasonableness.
The code does acknowledge that trans people remain protected from discrimination under the Equality Act. But in practice, the protections it offers are largely theoretical. TransActual, one of the UK's leading trans advocacy organisations, has warned that the guidance effectively creates a "third gender" by recommending that service providers offer separate facilities for trans users. Where once a trans woman might have used the women's toilets without incident, as millions have done for decades, she is now directed towards a gender-neutral "alternative provision" that may or may not exist, that may or may not be accessible, and that in many cases will amount to a locked cupboard with a sign on the door.
The implications extend well beyond bathrooms. The guidance covers domestic violence refuges, hospital wards, sports, and associations. It sets a framework within which organisations that have been trans-inclusive for years will now be invited to reconsider, and in which those that were already hostile will feel vindicated. ILGA-Europe, the continent's leading LGBTQ+ rights body, has already reclassified the United Kingdom as having "no functioning legal or administrative process for legal gender recognition," placing it in the same category as Hungary and Russia. That is not hyperbole. That is a formal assessment from the organisation that benchmarks LGBTQ+ rights across 49 European countries.
The Good Law Project challenged the EHRC's earlier interim guidance in the High Court, arguing that its interpretation was unlawful. In February 2026, the court found that the EHRC had not technically misinterpreted the law, but also confirmed that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans women from women's facilities. The final code of practice is not law; it is statutory guidance. It can be challenged, and it will be. But the damage of its publication, the signal it sends to every employer, every council, every leisure centre and GP surgery in England, is already done.
Pride month begins in a matter of days. The EHRC's guidance is not a gift. It is a provocation.
