The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has formally condemned the EHRC's updated Code of Practice as genocidal, arguing it forces trans and intersex people out of public life by making inclusive toilets legally risky for service providers and effectively criminalising trans existence in shared spaces.

Who is saying this, and why it matters

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is not a campaign group and it is not a trans rights organisation. It is a body whose entire purpose is to study, name, and prevent genocide. When an organisation with that mandate looks at what is happening to trans and intersex people in the UK and reaches for the word genocidal, that deserves more than a dismissive glance.

In a statement published on 20 June 2026, the Institute condemned the EHRC's updated Code of Practice, which was presented to the UK Parliament on 21 May 2026. The statement is precise, detailed, and unflinching. The Institute had already condemned the interim guidance issued in April 2025, just nine days after the Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. This latest statement responds to the finalised Code, which the Institute says made things worse, not better, in direct defiance of a High Court ruling that found excluding trans people from bathrooms could itself constitute discrimination.

What the code actually does

The Code of Practice tells service providers that if they allow trans women to use women's facilities, they risk a claim of sex discrimination from cis men. Read that again slowly. A cis man could claim sex discrimination because a trans woman used a women's toilet. The EHRC appears to have concluded that women's spaces cease to be single-sex the moment a trans woman enters them, which is a definition that has no basis in law, logic, or the lived reality of anyone who has ever actually used a public toilet.

The consequences for trans and intersex people are not theoretical. Trans men assigned female at birth could be excluded from women's toilets as too disruptive to cis women's comfort, and could simultaneously be excluded from men's toilets. Trans women could be directed into men's toilets. The EHRC's own Code acknowledges that a situation where a trans or intersex person has no toilet available to them is possible, and then offers no suggestion for how to prevent it. The Institute puts it plainly: this is abhorrent, and it is a failure to consider the most basic needs of human beings.

The treatment of intersex people in the Code is, if anything, even more revealing. When the EHRC's chair was asked directly about intersex people, she pushed back on the terminology, despite it being the term intersex-led organisations consistently use and the term used by the Council of Europe as recently as October 2025 in a recommendation the UK itself supported. She then suggested intersex people might use unisex spaces. The Institute's reading is that the UK has simply abandoned the commitment it made to intersex people at the Council of Europe, and is not particularly bothered about hiding that fact.

The ninth pattern

The Lemkin Institute frames all of this within a specific analytical structure. I want to quote their statement directly, because it deserves to be heard in their words rather than filtered through mine:

"This is consistent with the 9th Pattern of Genocide: Denial and/or Prevention of Identity. The message to the trans and intersex communities is clear: Cease to exist as a trans person unless you want to be accused of harassment for trying to use a public toilet that matches your identity. For service providers, the message becomes quite threatening: being inclusive of trans people might result in claims of sex discrimination by cis people. In both instances trans existence is criminalized, which is a very common component of genocidal processes."

The criminalization of existence. Not behaviour, not action, not harm caused to anyone. Existence. The EHRC has produced a Code of Practice in which the simple fact of being trans in a public space becomes a legal liability, either for the trans person or for the service provider trying to include them. The Institute is right that this is a recognisable pattern. It has appeared before, in other places, against other groups, and it has never ended well.

The invented danger

The entire structure of this Code rests on the premise that trans women in women's spaces are dangerous to cis women. The Lemkin Institute states plainly that this danger is invented. I agree with them. There is no credible evidence base for it. Every time this claim has been examined, it has not survived contact with data. The danger runs the other way: trans people, particularly trans women and trans women of colour, face disproportionate rates of violence, harassment, and assault. Forcing trans women into men's toilets does not protect anyone. It puts trans women at risk.

The gender-critical movement has spent years building a political consensus around an imagined threat, and the EHRC has now written that imagined threat into guidance that courts and tribunals must consider. The Institute calls this scapegoating, and uses the word genocidal to describe what it produces. Those are not casual choices of language from an organisation that exists to prevent mass atrocity.

What should be said out loud

I have spent years hearing from trans and intersex people about what it costs them to exist in public. The anxiety before entering a bathroom. The rapid calculations about risk. The humiliation of being challenged, questioned, or followed. The decision, made again and again, to simply stay home. This Code of Practice does not solve a problem. It makes that daily calculation harder, more dangerous, and more likely to go wrong.

The EHRC was not required to produce guidance this hostile. The High Court had already told it that excluding trans people from toilets could amount to discrimination. It chose to produce this Code anyway. The Lemkin Institute has named what that choice looks like from the outside, using the framework they were built to apply. The UK should listen.