The EHRC's draft guidance, released in May 2026 and due to come into effect in mid-July 2026, would require trans people to use single-sex spaces based on their sex assigned at birth, including hospital wards, bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports clubs. It is draft guidance, not new statute, and it has been widely criticised by legal scholars, equality organisations, and healthcare professionals. Trans people remain protected from discrimination under the Equality Act through the characteristic of gender reassignment.

What the guidance actually says

The Supreme Court, in April 2025, issued an interpretation of the Equality Act 2010. It concluded that for the purposes of that Act, the words "man", "woman", and "sex" refer to biological sex. That is a court's reading of existing legislation. It is not a new law. Parliament did not pass anything new. The Equality Act itself has not been amended.

What followed was the EHRC producing draft guidance based on that interpretation. That guidance is not yet in force, it is contested, and it has been criticised as inconsistent with what Parliament actually intended when it passed both the Equality Act 2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004 together. Those two pieces of legislation were designed to work alongside each other, and many legal experts argue that separating them the way this ruling does is simply wrong.

None of that makes the guidance harmless. Draft or not, services read guidance and change their policies. That is already happening. And the practical consequence for a trans woman being directed to a male hospital ward, or a trans man being told to use a women's changing room, is not abstract. It is frightening, humiliating, and for many people, dangerous.

The healthcare picture is already bleak

The Revolutionary Communist Group piece that prompted this review cites figures I recognise from conversations with trans people across many years: 70% reporting transphobia when accessing general healthcare, 57% avoiding their doctor for fear of it, waiting times for transition-related surgery stretching beyond three years, and 85% of those waiting describing negative consequences for their mental health. I cannot point you to a single current source for each of those figures, so take them as indicative rather than precise, but the direction they describe is entirely consistent with what trans people tell me.

What the new EHRC guidance threatens to do, in healthcare specifically, is make default policy out of something that was previously an exception. Trans patients could previously be moved to single-person rooms at the request of other patients. Under the guidance, moving trans patients out of wards matching their gender becomes the starting position. Think about what that means in an already stretched NHS, where single-person rooms are scarce, where staff are undertrained on trans healthcare, and where being visibly trans already draws unwanted attention. A trans woman placed on a male ward is not simply inconvenienced. She is exposed, vulnerable, and potentially unsafe.

Forced outing is the real harm

This is the part of the guidance that I think gets underplayed in the political noise around it. When a trans person is directed to a space that does not match their gender, they are outed. Not by choice, not on their own terms, but by institutional policy. In a hospital, that could mean being outed to other patients, to visiting family members, to staff who were not previously aware. In a changing room or sports setting, the same.

The people who designed this guidance may genuinely believe it is about protecting privacy and dignity. But the privacy and dignity it fails to protect are those of trans people, many of whom have spent years building the confidence to exist in public life, and who now face having that stripped away by a form they filled in at reception.

Where the source article goes wrong, and where it goes right

The piece from the Revolutionary Communist Group is driven by a political framework I do not share, and its conclusion, that trans liberation requires socialism and that Revolutionary Cuba is the model to follow, is not a case I would make. Cuba's record on LGBTQ+ rights is genuinely complicated and has involved significant historical persecution, and pointing to any single political system as the answer to discrimination is not analysis I find convincing.

But the factual core of the piece, that the EHRC guidance will harm trans people in healthcare, that trans people are already facing serious barriers to care, and that this guidance makes those barriers worse, is sound. The criticism of the guidance as something that will functionally out trans people in medical settings, and that this is a harm rather than a protection, is accurate. The observation that the NHS is under-resourced to implement any "safe provisions" as a result is also true. You do not need to be a Marxist to see that an already struggling health service, told to implement a significant policy shift for a vulnerable group, without the staff, the training, or the capacity to do it safely, will produce bad outcomes for that group.

Trans people deserve better than this

What I keep returning to is this: trans people are not asking for anything extraordinary. They want to use a bathroom, be treated on the right ward, get changed before a swim. The things the rest of us do without a second thought. The guidance wraps the denial of those ordinary things in the language of rights and protection, and that framing is wrong. Protecting women does not require exposing trans women to danger. These are not competing goods. They are the same good, applied consistently.

The guidance is draft. It can still be challenged, resisted, and changed. Legal challenges are possible. Employers and services are not required to implement it wholesale before it is finalised or before those challenges are heard. If you are dealing with a service that has already changed its policy in response to this guidance, and you have been affected, that is worth documenting and, where possible, challenging.