Today, the UK Minister for Equalities Bridget Phillipson MP and the EHRC have both released updates on the EHRC’s Code of Practice for services. The EHRC was updating the Code following last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act 2010.

All we know for sure is that:

• The Minister sent the code back to the EHRC asking for changes to be made
• The EHRC has now returned the newly updated code to the UK Government
• The Code won’t be laid in the UK Parliament until after the national elections in Scotland and Wales and across local authorities in England. In the middle of May at the earliest.

We don’t yet know what the updated Code says. The version that the EHRC consulted on last summer would have made trans people’s lives across Britain very much worse. It focused only on how to exclude and segregate us from services. In our view, it would have led to frequent and widespread breaches of our human rights.

Whatever the outcome, we will continue to make the case that trans people deserve the same access to safe, inclusive services as everyone else. We deserve to live free from discrimination, harassment and abuse, and to have our human rights protected.

If the Supreme Court judgment really has resulted in laws that mean that trans people must be excluded and segregated from services and spaces across public life, this has clearly turned the intention of Parliament, when it originally passed those laws, on its head. David Lammy MP, way back in 2004 as a Minister in a Labour Government said:

“The hon. Gentleman may well approach the issue on the basis of separate-but-equal treatment, but the Government entirely reject the implication of the new clause that transsexuals might set out to cause offence to others. That is not the Government’s experience, and we therefore reject the new clause. The Government also believe that separate facilities for minority groups are objectionable, and we urge the House to reject the proposal. For obvious reasons, many hon. Members fought to ensure that separate signs for minorities became a thing of the past in South Africa, and we did not engage in that fight in order to set up such prejudice over here.”

He is now Deputy Prime Minister. We hope that today’s UK Labour Government is not about to lay a Code of Practice at Parliament that encourages exactly the segregation he spoke out against then. It wasn’t right in 2004, and it wouldn’t be right now. If exclusion really is what the law now requires, then the law should be fixed to work how it was always intended do.

For now, we will just have to keep waiting until the Code is laid in May to know exactly what the situation is. On top of almost a whole year of uncertainty and fear, and a sense of things going backwards. Our solidarity and strength to all.

Read the Minister’s statement.

Read the EHRC’s update.