UK: EHRC guidance will push trans people out of public life
The UK’s new draft EHRC Code of Practice marks a profound setback for transgender people in Great Britain. The country is facing public bathroom Apartheid for trans people.
Presented by the government as “clear” and “practical” guidance after the Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex, the code would in practice make ordinary public life far more hostile for trans people.
The most alarming consequence is the treatment of single-sex spaces. According to the guidance, if a women’s service admits a trans woman, or a men’s service admits a trans man, it may no longer count as single-sex and could face legal challenge.
Toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, gyms, refuges and associations may therefore feel pressured to exclude trans people from spaces matching their lived gender.
The code says providers should consider alternatives, such as gender-neutral facilities, and that it is unlikely to be proportionate to leave a trans person with no toilet at all.
But this is cold comfort. Many buildings lack suitable “third spaces”, and making trans people use separate or accessible toilets risks outing them, marking them as different, and exposing them to harassment.
The government’s own equality impact assessment acknowledges potential “double exclusion”, involuntary disclosure and gender policing.
This is not merely a technical legal clarification. It tells trans people that their presence in public may be treated as a problem to be managed. A trans woman entering a women’s changing room, or a trans man using a men’s facility, could now trigger suspicion, complaint or exclusion. The result will be fear, self-censorship and withdrawal from public life.
We can call this Restroom Apartheid, because the use of restrooms for segregation and harassment was a tool used by racists to control people of color, both in South Africa and in the American South.
The "logic" is as follows: People of color and trans people are different and therefore dangerous. We cannot allow them to get close to our women and children (i.e. the property of men), and we must therefore purify all intimate spaces used by cishet white women and their children.
A humane equality law should protect dignity, safety and participation. This guidance will do the opposite.
Single-sex toilets must exclude transgender people, says EHRC
How the United Kingdom’s ‘trans code’ will bar trans people from public spaces
The UK government has introduced don’t ask, don’t tell for trans people.
Toilets and changing rooms must be used on basis of biological sex, guidance confirms
UK Gov press release: Organisations receive clear, accessible guidance on how to implement equality law in updated draft Code of Practice
Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash
