For trans people, the right to exist freely is being stripped away

An unremarkable date, you might think. But for the trans & non-binary community it’s a date that casts into doubt our ability to traverse UK society, as this is the date the EHRC’s updated statutory code of practice comes into force.

The code constitutes guidance to service providers regarding what they can and can’t do if they wish to avoid being potentially sued. And following 2025’s Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act, the updated code tells service providers that single sex services must be delivered according to ‘biological sex’.

This means that, for example, a transgender woman who’s been using the ladies' toilet for the last 20 years can be barred from doing so. But she could also be barred from the gents if her appearance might make people uncomfortable there, let alone how humiliating that would be for her. The code recommends she should be segregated. The situation is the same for transgender men, who face being excluded from both men’s spaces and also women’s spaces due to their masculine appearance.

This imposition on trans people’s ability to live our lives is dire enough, but I work with trans survivors of abuse. In a sector where services and refuges are frequently gendered, the stark fact is trans people are facing being left with nowhere to go. We operate the only dedicated refuge for trans people in the country and there is no extra provision for trans people being funded.

And what of other vulnerable people? If a transgender person needs, for example, inpatient psychiatric care, where will they now be accommodated? Will they even feel able to reach out to services for help if they know they might be placed in a situation they find humiliating and degrading?

Trans people are just regular people trying to negotiate society as the people we’ve always known ourselves to be, as we’ve done unproblematically for years. Now our basic right of recognition has been torn away, yet scant thought seems to have been given to the practical consequences.

Recently, Andy Burnham promised to “restore hope.” The UK’s trans & non-binary community badly needs him to send some of this hope in our direction. We need the UK government to step up and take legislative action to restore our right to exist fully as ourselves in UK society. At the very least, we need urgent action to ensure services are available to our community that treat us with the barest minimum of dignity. If nothing else, we need more specialist services to be funded.

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Melissa Dee is the chief operating officer of Loving Me, the UK's only transgender and non-binary domestic violence shelter, which is releasing research into their work with the trans and non-binary community on 10 August.

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