The ECHR's updated Code of Practice is going to cause irreparable harm to trans and gender non-conforming people in the UK.
What the Code actually does
The Code is the EHRC’s interpretation of the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. That ruling redefined “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean biological sex. The EHRC was always going to update the Code. The question was how.
The answer arrived on 21 May, and the answer is: badly.
The Code defines “woman” as “biological woman.” It defines “man” as “biological man.” For the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means sex at birth. End of.
That definition then cascades. Single-sex spaces, the Code says, must be operated on the basis of biological sex. Trans people “should be offered” a third or gender-neutral space. Trans women can be excluded from women-only associations. Trans people are excluded from single-sex competitions for the gender they live in. If a women-only service chooses to admit trans women, it may legally cease to qualify as a single-sex service at all.
That last bit goes unsaid in most of the coverage. Read it again. A women’s group that has been trans-inclusive for twenty years, run by women who voted democratically to be trans-inclusive, can now lose its legal protection as a single-sex service because of who its members chose to include. A small group of self-styled women’s rights campaigners can threaten a much larger women’s organisation with court action for being too welcoming. That is the policy. It is being sold as protection. It is, in practice, a way of bullying women out of running the kinds of services women have chosen to run.
The Code does not stop at toilets and refuges. It limits access to healthcare. To housing. To social care. To gyms, pools, spas.
And then, quietly, it rewrites what “lesbian” and “gay” mean in law.
Paragraph 2.50 of the Code says, in plain text: “a trans man with a GRC is a woman and a trans woman with a GRC is a man, for the purposes of the Act.” Paragraph 2.92 then defines sexual orientation: “a person’s sexual orientation towards persons of the same sex (the person is a lesbian woman or a gay man).” And paragraph 2.96 closes the back door: “Gender reassignment is a separate protected characteristic and unrelated to sexual orientation.”
Stitch those three together and the consequence is unavoidable. A trans woman in a relationship with a cis woman is legally, under this Code, a man in a relationship with a woman. Heterosexual. Not a lesbian couple. Not protected as one. I had to read that twice. It is in the document the government has just laid before Parliament. You can read it yourself on gov.uk.
Taken from: https://biminibabes.substack.com/p/write-the-letter-babes
I don't tend to write posts like this, but this is something that is going to harm me and so many others in the UK.
Please share this link around if you're not from the UK, and if you are - click on it. It'll give you the link to a petition and it will help you send a letter to your MP asking them to vote against this.
EDM 240 / prayer motion is live. Your MP needs to sign it. Two taps via the coalition tool.
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