The Guardian reports* that Akua Reindorf, the Equalities Commissioner, has claimed that trans people “must accept a reduction in their rights” because we “have been lied to over many years” about what our human rights are. The Equality Act and the EHRC’s guidance on it, Reindorf essentially argues, were really a bathroom ban that nobody noticed for 15 years.

At least she’s consistent: she represented an anti-trans activist (and LGB Alliance co-founder) who was suing the EHRC to try and reduce trans people’s rights in 2020; her interpretation of the law, which she argued meant service providers should exclude trans women, was dismissed by the judge. Reindorf’s interpretation was “wrong in law”.

Reindorf was hired shortly afterwards to, er, interpret the law at the EHRC.

Reindorf’s interpretation of the law is absolute bullshit, of course, and combined with her evident lack of understanding of the other key legislation, such as the Gender Recognition Act, and of case law such as Croft v Royal Mail 2003, it should result in her termination.

But it won’t, because the EHRC is a transphobic organisation: an equalities watchdog now dedicated to creating inequality.

The blatantly bigoted head of the EHRC, Kishner Falkner, reaches the end of her contract later this year; Labour could have ended her contract last year and started to undo the damage she’s done, but chose to renew her contract instead. And the replacement favoured by the Labour government is, like her, closely linked with anti-trans hate groups.

Mary-Ann Stephenson, the preferred candidate, contributed to the LGB Alliance co-founder’s legal action against Stonewall, one of the organisations the EHRC is supposed to consult with, and has spoken at anti-trans organisations’ events. Her Bluesky following list – which I’m sure is about to be sanitised** now the news of her proposed appointment has been published – is a who’s who of UK anti-trans journalists, activists and pressure groups.

This is what institutional capture looks like: a small number of people in positions of power dismantling decades of progress and taking a wrecking ball to human rights.

The EHRC is dismantling the Equality Act. The previous Tory government started that; the current Labour government is happy to continue it.

As ever, trans people are only the first targets. We won’t be the last.

* Reindorf is now claiming that the article is defamatory and that “trans people’s rights haven’t been reduced”. The Guardian, pathetically, has now changed “reduction in their rights” to “perceived reduction in their rights” in its opening paragraph.
** It has now been sanitised.

Multiple Scots LGBTQ+ organisations have published a joint statement about responding to the EHRC consultation regarding its Equality Act guidance, and having read the consultation documents in detail I think they’re right: the proposed guidance is focused exclusively on segregating trans people, makes no attempt to protect their human rights or dignity, provides no useful information to service providers who wish to remain inclusive, and runs counter to the spirit of the law, to other related legislation and to the EHRC’s public sector equality duties. That means engaging with it, while necessary, is not the be-all and end-all.

The EHRC draft guidance has been published and as expected, it’s an incoherent and in many places illegal shitshow that appears to have been written by the same anti-trans groups the EHRC chair and commissioner are close friends of. But it’s achieving its goal, which is to get the newspapers to tell their readers that trans women must be excluded from public spaces or gendered toilets, which is not what the Supreme Court ruled and is not what the law says.

I’m not a lawyer, but even I can see that a lot of the guidance in the consultation document misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users. And the papers’ reporting of it is even worse, with the likes of The Telegraph saying that retailers must interrogate trans customers (or suspected trans customers) who want to use changing rooms and to demand birth certificates to prove customers’ sex.

It’s a mess, it’ll harm people, and it’s going to get retailers and other service providers sued. The EHRC chair and commissioners are malevolent and incompetent, and should be replaced before they cause even more chaos.

Let’s talk about tits, shall we? Both literally, as in breasts, and metaphorically, as in bigoted men making complete tits of themselves.

This weekend, a group of Scots trans women held a topless protest outside Holyrood over the Supreme Court verdict and its aftermath. With some irony, the very newspapers that love to call trans women men blurred their breasts so as not to fall foul of obscenity complaints.

The photos of the event have caused some confusion among the genital-obsessed weirdos crowd, with figures such as disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan taking time out from court appearances (harassment and property damage here, defamation there) to opine that some of the women must have been cisgender women pretending to be trans.

“OMG uncensored picture of the boob protest,” the man who used to write words for a living typed. “Eh, is it just me or is there an actual woman in here pretending to be a transwoman? Because the men are easy to spot.”

So much for “we can always tell”.

The woman in question is a trans woman – and like many young trans women, and many young women who aren’t trans, she’s very good-looking.

Linehan’s rather grubby response – essentially “she can’t be trans, I like her tits” – does help prove the point the women were trying to make (as well as emphasise yet again how little the genital-obsessed weirdos know about trans people’s bodies): the anti-trans mob cannot, in fact, always tell.

That’s important, because if the UK’s proposed bathroom ban is implemented then women of all shapes and sizes, almost all of whom won’t be trans, will be judged and in some cases punished by witless misogynists and other bullies based on a very arbitrary set of beauty standards.

If you’d rather not have your access to spaces and public life conditional on whether lonely old men think you’re fuckable, you might want to write to your MP to demand an end to this idiotic campaign to segregate trans people and create a legion of self-appointed toilet cops.