What does the new EHRC Code of Practice actually say?

The EHRC's revised Code of Practice advises services and businesses to apply the Equality Act using biological sex rather than certificated gender. In practice, that means it now empowers those who want to exclude trans people from spaces and services, including placing trans people on hospital wards that do not match their gender. It is draft guidance, not statute, and it is being widely challenged. What part of it concerns you most?

Why are disability rights groups speaking up for trans people?

Because fifty-two percent of trans people are disabled, so these are often the same people. Disability Rights UK also recognises the tactic: using one marginalised group as a justification for excluding another, then letting them blame each other for a lack of resources. They have seen it before and they are not falling for it. Has the overlap between trans identity and disability affected you or someone you know?

Disability Rights UK stands with trans people against EHRC guidance

Disability Rights UK 5 June 2026

Disability Rights UK has responded to the EHRC's revised Code of Practice with unequivocal solidarity with trans people, rejecting the suggestion that trans people should use disabled toilets as a workaround and refusing to be divided from trans communities. They warn that reinterpreting the Equality Act for one protected characteristic sets a dangerous precedent for all of them.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published its revised Code of Practice following the Supreme Court's ruling on how to interpret "sex" in the Equality Act 2010, and Disability Rights UK has responded with something that stopped me in my tracks: unequivocal solidarity. No hedging, no both-sidesing, just a clear statement that trans people should not be forced to choose between risking harassment in public facilities or not using them at all. Coming from the organisation that created the original RADAR key in 1981, that carries real weight.

The RADAR key scheme was built on a straightforward idea: that accessible facilities are not a luxury but a condition of participating in ordinary life, of travelling, working, socialising, being a person in the world. Disability Rights UK knows, in their bones, what it means when the design of public space tells a group of people that they are not expected to be there. They have spent over forty years fighting that message. So when they say they recognise it in what is happening to trans people now, I believe them.

What they have called out with particular sharpness is the suggestion embedded in the new Code that trans people can simply use disabled toilets as a workaround. Disability Rights UK are not having it, and nor should any of us. It is not a solution. It is a way of making two groups of people feel as though the other is the problem, when the actual problem is decades of underinvestment in adequate facilities and a policy environment that is now actively making things worse. "We will not be used as a loophole in the wider erosion of trans rights" is not a diplomatic formulation. It is a refusal to be weaponised, and it matters enormously that they said it so plainly.

The Code's implications for hospital settings are, if anything, even more alarming. The guidance that trans and intersex people should be placed on wards corresponding to their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender is not a neutral administrative rule. It exposes people to stigma, to the wrong care environment, to the kind of medical negligence that trans people and disabled people have both learned to dread. Healthcare settings are already difficult enough for both groups. This makes them harder, and it does so deliberately, in the name of a policy choice dressed up as legal inevitability.

It is not legal inevitability. The Supreme Court interpreted the Equality Act; it did not rewrite it. Parliament passed both the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010 with the intention that people with a Gender Recognition Certificate would be recognised in their acquired gender across most areas of public life. The Court's ruling represents one reading of those statutes, and a contested one. The Code of Practice that followed it is draft guidance, not statute, and the EHRC's own legal basis for going as far as it has is being questioned by legal commentators, equality organisations, and trans rights groups alike.

Disability Rights UK makes one more point that I think deserves to be heard clearly. Fifty-two percent of trans people are disabled. These are not separate communities being asked to co-exist politely. They are the same people, living in the same bodies, navigating the same hostile systems, often at the same time. The attempt to separate their interests is not just tactically foolish; it is factually wrong.

And there is a broader warning in their statement that I think the whole disability rights movement, and every other equality movement, should take seriously. If the Equality Act can be reinterpreted in this way for one protected characteristic, the precedent is set. The argument that protected characteristics can be traded off against one another, ranked, used to justify exclusion, does not stop with trans people. Disability Rights UK can see exactly where this road leads because they have been on it before.

What strikes me most is the quality of the solidarity on display here. Not performative, not cautious, not carefully calibrated to avoid controversy. Just direct, grounded, and human: we know how this feels, we refuse to be divided, and we are standing with you. That is what equality movements are supposed to do for one another. I hope others follow their lead.

In response to: Disability Rights UK's Statement on the New EHRC Guidance (Disability Rights UK)