There is something I find genuinely moving about people gathering in a city square on a Saturday afternoon to say, simply, that their friends and family deserve to exist with dignity. That is what is happening in Oxford this weekend, and I am glad it is.

Oxford 4 Trans Rights is meeting at Bonn Square at 3pm on Saturday to protest the updated Equality and Human Rights Commission code of practice, which followed last year's Supreme Court ruling that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. The group's statement is direct: "Now is the time to stand up for ourselves, and for our friends, family and community to send a message that we will relentlessly resist trans exclusion and discrimination." I could not have put it better myself.

The EHRC guidance covers all nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act, but most people know exactly why this particular update has drawn attention. It gives service providers practical examples for applying the Supreme Court ruling to single-sex spaces, including refuges and toilets, and it is explicit that admitting a trans person to a service aligned with their lived gender means that service can no longer be described as single sex. The guidance is currently in draft form, which matters: draft guidance does not carry the force of law, and it can still be changed. That is precisely why protest and response right now are not symbolic gestures; they are part of a process that is still open.

What the guidance actually does

The Supreme Court ruling interpreted the Equality Act's definition of "woman" for the purposes of that statute. It did not remove trans people's protections under the Equality Act, which remain in place through the characteristic of gender reassignment. It did not make trans women men in the eyes of society, medicine, or everyday life. What it did do is give service providers a legal basis for exclusion that many will now feel compelled to use, whatever their own values, because the code tells them that inclusion puts them "very likely" at risk of legal challenge.

That is the mechanism doing the harm here. Not the statute itself, which is genuinely ambiguous and contested, but the guidance built on top of one reading of it, presented as settled fact, and handed to services that are now afraid of getting it wrong. A trans woman turned away from a refuge is not an abstraction. She is a real woman, often in real danger, who has just been told the door is closed. The guidance does not ask services to weigh that against the harm of exclusion. It does not ask them to think about who is actually made safer by her absence. It simply hands them cover.

Why showing up matters

I understand why some people feel protest is futile when the formal processes, the courts, the equalities watchdog, even some of the institutions that were supposed to be on our side, seem to have moved in a hostile direction. The feeling is real and I do not dismiss it. But the formal processes are not the only ones that matter, and they are not the only ones that are still open.

Public sentiment matters. Political will matters. The visibility of ordinary trans people and the people who love them, standing in a square on a Saturday, matters. Movements do not win at the point when the law first turns against them. They win when enough people have seen clearly what is at stake, and when the cost of continuing exclusion becomes higher than the cost of changing course.

Oxford 4 Trans Rights is doing something that sounds simple and is actually quite brave: showing their faces, saying their names, and asking their community to stand with them. If you are anywhere near Bonn Square at 3pm on Saturday, I hope you will go.

And if you are a trans person watching from a distance, or someone who loves one, I want you to know that what feels like a tide running against you is not the whole picture. There are a great many people who see you clearly and are not going anywhere.