Equality Act protection now covers anyone with a quirky identity
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“it started as gender reassignment, which was someone definitely intending on surgery, and now what it is, is anyone who's sort of said, "Well, I'd like to dye my hair blue, and I once had a queer relationship", and now they're sort of included in that cohort.”
The claim that a protected characteristic has been quietly widened to include almost anyone sounds like a legitimate legal concern about scope creep, and the colourful example makes it feel concrete.
The Equality Act 2010 defines gender reassignment precisely: it protects anyone who is proposing to undergo, is undergoing, or has undergone a process of reassigning their sex. That is a statutory definition, and courts have applied it consistently, it has never been extended to cover hair colour or relationship history. The example is vivid, but it describes something the law simply does not protect, and no tribunal has ever found otherwise. What this framing actually does is make a well-defined legal protection sound ridiculous, which leaves the people it was designed to protect, trans people facing real discrimination at work, in healthcare, in housing, looking as though their rights rest on nothing serious at all.
Trans people whose genuine legal protections are made to sound absurd and illegitimate, and employers or service providers who may wrongly believe the law is unworkable.