Single-sex toilets and changing rooms in England, Wales and Scotland must exclude transgender men and women, according to a new code of practice from the equalities watchdog.<\/p>\n
But the long-awaited guidance also says that businesses and service providers have to offer practical alternatives such as gender-neutral toilets for people who do not wish to use services for their biological sex.<\/p>\n
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) document sets out how public bodies, businesses and other service providers should respond in practical terms to April 2025\u2019s landmark supreme court ruling<\/a> that sex in the Equality Act refers only to biological sex.<\/p>\n The guidance will be seen as an incremental victory for gender-critical campaigners, who have long argued that trans women specifically should be excluded from women-only services. But critics fear it will consolidate a chilling effect as trans people avoid public places altogether.<\/p>\n Trans advocacy groups had hoped that amendments made to the code by the EHRC in April, after feedback from the government, as well as consultation responses and extra legal advice, might result in a less blanket exclusion.<\/p>\n The guidance does suggest it is feasible for clubs and associations to remain trans inclusive, by making themselves open to several protected characteristics at once, for example women or men and trans people.<\/p>\n But in healthcare, where mixed-sex accommodation is not available, trans patients must be accommodated on the single-sex ward that accords with their biological sex. But the code also states it would not be proportionate to exclude a trans man from obstetrics and gynaecology outpatient services based on the objections of female patients.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s own equality impact assessment that accompanies the updated code acknowledges that the likely impact on transgender people is \u201cnegative\u201d, but highlights mitigating factors like the ability of services to create \u201cthird-space\u201d provision.<\/p>\n The guidance is clear that if a service provider admits a trans person to a service that aligns to their lived gender, that service can no longer be described as single sex and the provider is \u201cvery likely\u201d to be at risk of legal challenge.<\/p>\n The chair of the EHRC, Mary-Ann Stephenson, said: \u201cThe supreme court was very clear \u2026 if you are providing separate toilets for women and men, that has to be on the basis of biological sex.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephenson suggested that people had \u201cgot caught up in a hyperfocus on: which toilets can trans women use?\u201d<\/p>\n She said: \u201cIt would take a lot of the heat out and we might be able to provide some solutions if we could take a bigger step back and say: \u2018Lots of us have different needs in terms of accessing toilets.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n She called for a \u201cwider conversation about how we make that work in practice\u201d, referring to services supporting women who are escaping violence, where a provider will often provide a variety of accommodation including communal space and self-contained accommodation, which it might offer to women who have teenage sons, for example, or to trans women.<\/p>\n While campaign groups continued to digest the 340-page document on Thursday evening, early responses reflected continued divisions over how to interpret the supreme court ruling.<\/p>\n The Trans+ Solidarity Alliance director, Alexandra Parmar-Yee, said the guidance was \u201ca section 28 moment for this Labour<\/a> government\u201d and \u201cworryingly similar to a US bathroom ban condemned by the UK Foreign Office in 2016\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe law here is a mess, and clearly many businesses will just go gender neutral to avoid the headache, but the government risks pushing trans people yet further out of public life.\u201d<\/p>\n