The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has finalised its updated Code of Practice, advising services and businesses on how to interpret the Equality Act 2010. It does not change the law, but it shapes how courts apply it, and for trans people in the UK the picture is mixed: some genuine protections remain, some hard-won ground has been given away, and the wider chilling effect on trans people's participation in public life is real and growing. Gendered Intelligence has published a detailed response to the Code, and I want to bring their analysis into our own words here, because it deserves a wider audience.
What is the EHRC Code of Practice?
The Code of Practice is guidance published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the body responsible for enforcing equality law in Great Britain. It tells employers, service providers, public bodies, and businesses how the EHRC interprets the Equality Act 2010, and courts are expected to take it into account when cases come before them. It does not have the force of statute, but in practice it carries real weight: an organisation following the Code is unlikely to face a successful legal challenge, and an organisation departing from it will need a clear justification.
The Code has been updated following the Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (2025), which found that for the purposes of the Equality Act, the terms "woman" and "sex" refer to biological sex rather than certificated sex. That ruling did not change the Equality Act; it offered one interpretation of it, and a contested one at that. The updated Code reflects that interpretation and builds guidance around it.
What Gendered Intelligence found: the good
Gendered Intelligence's response identifies several things in the Code that are worth acknowledging. Non-binary people are explicitly recognised. Trans children are explicitly recognised. The Code confirms that gendered groups, such as women's groups or men's networks, can include trans women where the service provider chooses to include them. And, critically, the Code makes clear that there should be no ID checks for access to toilets and basic services. Nobody should be demanding that you prove your gender or sex before you use a toilet. If someone harasses or humiliates you in an attempt to make you do so, that is discrimination, and the Code says so.
These are not small things. They reflect the basic reality that trans people exist, that non-binary people exist, that trans children exist, and that inclusion is a legitimate choice for any service provider to make. That recognition matters, even in a document that gives ground in other places.
What Gendered Intelligence found: the bad
The Code also empowers those who want to exclude trans people, and that is where the real damage lies. Services that have been including trans women without any difficulty, domestic violence refuges being perhaps the clearest example, now face a legal landscape in which continuing to do so requires them to document justification and navigate a more complex compliance path. The Code creates work and uncertainty for organisations that were doing the right thing already. Businesses and workplaces face incentives to go gender-neutral rather than take on that complexity, sometimes at considerable cost, simply to avoid the risk of litigation.
The deeper problem, which Gendered Intelligence names directly, is that the Code treats trans people as a third sex: neither fully covered by the protections attached to the sex they live as, nor simply protected as themselves. This sets up a hierarchy of protected characteristics in which gender reassignment sits below sex, and where the practical effect is that a trans woman can be lawfully excluded from women-only spaces in ways that a cisgender woman cannot. That is a structural weakening of trans people's rights, not a neutral clarification of the law.
What Gendered Intelligence found: the ugly
The ugliest part of all this, as Gendered Intelligence puts it, is the chilling effect. Trans people are already withdrawing from public life: from sport, from education, from healthcare, because the atmosphere of fear around basic access has become too heavy. The Code, rather than reducing that fear, intensifies it. It creates a culture in which people feel licensed to police others on the basis of how they present their gender, and it uses the law to encourage that policing. That threatens to undo decades of hard-won equality, not just for trans people but for anyone who does not conform neatly to gender expectations.
And as Gendered Intelligence notes, none of this addresses the root problem: well-funded and organised litigation campaigns whose purpose is to attack the rights of marginalised people. The Code responds to the outcome of those campaigns rather than challenging them, and in doing so it hands those campaigns their next set of tools.
Where we are one year on from the Supreme Court ruling
The calls for legislative resistance have grown steadily since the Supreme Court ruling. Legal scholars, equality organisations, trans community groups, and a significant number of parliamentarians have argued that the ruling misreads Parliamentary intent, and that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and Equality Act 2010 were always designed to operate together: a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate was meant to be recognised in their acquired gender across most areas of public life, including within equality law. The EHRC's updated Code of Practice embeds the Supreme Court's interpretation rather than leaving space for Parliament to revisit it, and critics argue that this is the wrong direction: that the answer to a contested court ruling is legislation that makes Parliament's intent clear, not guidance that locks in the ruling before Parliament has spoken.
Those calls for repeal and reform are legitimate. Trans people's vulnerability in the current legal landscape is real, and guidance cannot substitute for statutory protection. What I hear from trans people across the country is a mixture of exhaustion, anger, and a quiet, stubborn determination not to be moved. That combination is the right one.
What this means for you, practically
If you are a trans person living your life in the UK right now, here is what the Code actually means in practice. Nobody can demand that you prove your gender or sex to access a toilet or a basic service. Harassment or humiliation on that basis is discrimination, and the Code itself says so. There is no enforcement mechanism that will stop you using the loo, going to the gym, or walking through the world as you are. There is no realistic mechanism for blanket exclusion, even if some people would like one.
Services that want to include trans people can still do so, and many will. Organisations that care about trans inclusion are already working out how to document and justify that inclusion under the new framework, and they will find a way. Gendered Intelligence has committed to publishing revised guidance for services on how to keep including trans people while navigating the legal landscape, and that work will matter.
You are under no obligation to answer questions about your gender or sex. Your identity, your existence, and your rights are worth defending. The community has survived hostile legal environments before, and it will again.
My own view
I have spent a long time in this work, and I have heard some things that have genuinely shocked me: the lengths people will go to in order to exclude trans people, the cruelty dressed up as concern, the bureaucratic energy directed at making trans people's lives smaller. And I find myself thinking, again and again, that trans people have always existed. They existed before the Equality Act, before the Gender Recognition Act, before any of this machinery. The law is always catching up with reality, and sometimes it catches up badly.
What I know is this: inclusion is not a threat. A trans woman using a women's toilet, a trans man using a men's changing room, a non-binary person navigating spaces that were never really designed for them, none of that is the problem. The problem is a legal and political climate that has decided trans people are a useful target, and a set of institutions that have responded to sustained pressure by giving ground they did not need to give.
The EHRC Code of Practice is not the end of this story. Parliament can legislate. Courts can rule differently. Organisations can choose inclusion. And trans people, as they always have, will keep living their lives. Stand firm. Hold your head up. Be you.
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Written by Dr Helen Webberley, gender specialist, educator, and advocate.