More than a hundred people gathered in Bonn Square, Oxford, on 30 March and marched through the city centre carrying banners that read "Trans rights now" and "We decide our own fate." They passed St Aldate's Police Station and Oxford Magistrates Court. Thames Valley Police confirmed afterwards that there were no arrests and minimal disruption. That is the whole of the police story, and it is exactly as it should be.

The march was organised by Oxford 4 Trans Rights in direct response to the updated code of practice published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of "woman" under the Equality Act 2010. That code, which remains in draft form and does not yet carry the force of statutory guidance, has sent a shockwave through trans communities across the UK. People are frightened, and they are angry, and some of them are choosing to say so out loud in the streets of their own city. I find that genuinely moving.

What strikes me most about the Oxford march is not the numbers, though the numbers matter. It is the route. Bonn Square to a police station to a magistrates court. The people who organised this were not wandering; they were making a deliberate statement about power, about law, and about who gets to be protected by it. "We decide our own fate" is not an abstract slogan. It is a direct answer to a process that has been conducted largely without trans people's meaningful input, and that threatens to reshape public life in ways that will affect trans people every single day, from using a public toilet to accessing a refuge to feeling safe at work.

The EHRC's draft code has attracted serious criticism from legal scholars and equality experts who argue that it misreads the Supreme Court's ruling and goes further than the judgment requires. The court ruled on how "woman" is defined in a specific statutory context. It did not rule that trans women can be excluded from everywhere, and it did not alter the separate protections that trans people hold under the gender reassignment characteristic in the Equality Act. The EHRC's response to that ruling, translating it into sweeping guidance that points toward exclusion across a wide range of settings, is a policy choice, not a legal inevitability. People are entitled to march against a policy choice.

I have been thinking about what it takes to show up. Many of the people in that crowd will have weighed the decision carefully. Some will have worried about being photographed. Some will have come from places where being visibly trans still carries real risk. Some will have brought friends and family alongside them because solidarity matters on days like that. They came anyway. They carried their banners past a police station and a court and they said, plainly, that they are here and they are not going anywhere and this is their city too.

The police statement is worth reading for what it does not say as much as for what it does. No arrests. Minimal disruption. A peaceful demonstration, conducted lawfully, in a university city with a long tradition of people speaking up when they believe something is wrong. That is democracy working. What I hope now is that the people with actual power, the ministers, the EHRC itself, the MPs who will eventually have to vote on whatever guidance emerges from this process, are paying attention not just to the loudest voices in this debate, but to the people who turned out in Oxford on a Saturday afternoon because they needed someone to hear them.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the politics of inclusion.