It is Pride month, and while that should mean celebration, the UK is making it harder to celebrate. The government has laid guidance before parliament that would push trans people out of gendered services and facilities into "third spaces" that often do not exist. That guidance follows a Supreme Court judgment that was bad enough on its own terms, and has since been weaponised far beyond what the judges actually decided. I have watched this happen with a mixture of fury and grief. And then I read what the Good Law Project is doing, and I feel something else: hope.
Their framing is a quilt. Lots of small pieces, each meaningful on its own, held together to make something bigger. I find that image genuinely moving, partly because the Trans Unity Quilt they are carrying at London Trans+ Pride this year is a real object that real trans people have contributed to, and partly because the legal work it represents is exactly that kind of patient, cumulative, piece-by-piece effort. You do not win a fight like this with one case. You win it, if you win it, by building a body of law that becomes harder and harder to ignore.
What the EHRC challenge is actually about
The most significant piece of the legal quilt right now is the challenge to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the body that is supposed to protect everyone's rights. Days after the Supreme Court decision, the EHRC rushed out interim guidance telling employers and service providers to ban trans people from gendered facilities. Three claimants, a trans woman, a trans man, and an intersex person, were all told by their own employers that they could no longer use the appropriate toilets at work. That is the human reality behind the policy debate: real people, told they no longer belong in the space they have been using, probably for years.
The EHRC eventually withdrew that interim guidance, but the Good Law Project is right that withdrawal is not the same as repudiation. The guidance has already done its damage. Employers acted on it, and some are still acting as though it reflects the law. The High Court ruled against the challenge in February, finding that requiring trans people to use third spaces was justifiable, and comparing the risk of being outed at work to "workplace gossip". I cannot read that comparison without feeling the weight of what it means: being involuntarily outed as trans at work, stripped of privacy, exposed to potential harassment or worse, compared to idle chat. It is a failure of imagination, if not of something more serious.
The Good Law Project has applied for permission to appeal. I hope they get it. And there is something important buried in the High Court judgment itself: the Court found a strong argument that trans-inclusive toilets, spaces provided for both cis and trans women, could be entirely lawful and would not discriminate against cis men by excluding them. The EHRC and the government appear to have decided to ignore that finding entirely, claiming in their updated draft guidance that trans-inclusive women's services are "very likely" to discriminate against cis men. The Good Law Project wrote to Bridget Phillipson in February to flag exactly this problem. She has not, as far as I can see, responded in any way that acknowledges it.
The gym case, and what third spaces actually mean in practice
The Virgin Active case is another patch in the quilt, and it illustrates something that gets lost in the abstract policy conversation. Third spaces sound reasonable until you look at what they mean in a real building. Two trans gym members are suing Virgin Active, which introduced a trans exclusion policy after being threatened by GB News presenter Michelle Dewberry and the anti-trans group Sex Matters. The claimants are not just asked to use a different toilet: they cannot access the pool or the sauna, because those facilities can only be reached through the men's or women's changing rooms. They are paying members who cannot use what they are paying for. One has stopped using the gym almost entirely, out of fear of harassment. That is not a compromise, it is exclusion with extra steps.
The Women's Institute, Girlguiding, and Hampstead ponds
The Women's Institute and Girlguiding have both been threatened with legal action and responded by pushing out their trans members. The Good Law Project offered to defend both organisations and indemnify them against all costs. Thousands of people wrote to them, asking them to accept that offer. They declined. This is hard to understand. These are organisations with long histories of welcoming and championing women, and they have chosen, under pressure, to define that welcome more narrowly. Even the new EHRC guidance says that associations can offer membership to both cis and trans women without being required to admit cis men. The legal threat was, in the Good Law Project's view, unsupportable. And yet here we are.
Hampstead ponds is a different story, and it matters that it is. Following a public consultation in which 86% of respondents said they wanted the ponds to remain trans inclusive, and a petition signed by more than 14,000 people, the ponds stood firm. Sex Matters were initially refused permission to challenge that decision, then granted it on appeal. The Good Law Project plans to intervene, and has been gathering witness statements from people who swim at the ponds alongside trans people, often for decades. That evidence matters. It puts actual human experience into a legal argument that can otherwise become abstract very quickly.
Northern Ireland, and the bigger picture
The piece of the article that cuts off mid-sentence involves Northern Ireland, where the legal position is genuinely different: the relevant parts of the Equality Act 2010 do not apply there, so the Supreme Court ruling does not straightforwardly translate. The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has applied to its own High Court for clarification. This is the kind of complexity that rarely makes headlines but shapes people's daily lives in profound ways.
What strikes me most about everything the Good Law Project is doing is the patience of it. The commitment to going through domestic courts before going to Strasbourg, the willingness to gather witness statements and write letters to ministers and intervene in someone else's challenge as well as running their own. This is not glamorous work. It is the work of people who understand that rights are not won in a single moment but defended and extended through accumulated effort, case by case, piece by piece.
Trans people in the UK are being told, in more ways than one, that they do not belong. The Good Law Project is building a legal record that says otherwise. That record will matter, whether this fight is won quickly or slowly, here or in Strasbourg. I am glad someone is doing it.
If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.
