The EHRC's New Code of Practice Is in Parliament. Here's What It Actually Says About Trans People.

On May 21, 2026, Bridget Phillipson — the Minister for Women and Equalities — laid a 196-page document before Parliament that has been waiting in the wings since the Supreme Court ruled, more than a year ago, on what the word “sex” means inside the Equality Act 2010. The document is the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated statutory Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations. Parliament now has forty days to disapprove it. If it does not, the government will set a commencement date and the code becomes the official guide for how every service provider in Britain — toilets, hospitals, gyms, charities, refuges, support groups — applies the law.

This piece is meant to be useful rather than alarming, so it sticks to what the code actually says, what it does not say, and where the practical fights are likely to be.

The ruling the code is built on

In April 2025, the Supreme Court decided For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers. The unanimous judgment held that when the Equality Act uses the words “sex,” “man,” and “woman,” it means biological sex — and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change that interpretation. The judgment did not abolish the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It did not strip trans people of their existing protections against discrimination. What it did was settle a long-running interpretive question about which of the Act’s two characteristics — sex or gender reassignment — governs in specific contexts.

The EHRC, which produces statutory codes that courts and tribunals must “take into account,” then had to translate that ruling into the everyday language of who can use which toilet, who can join which group, and what counts as a lawful single-sex service. The new code is the result.

What the code says about single-sex services

The headline rule is unchanged in spirit from the ruling but is now stated as operational guidance. A service can be provided as single-sex only if it is provided on the basis of biological sex. If a service that holds itself out as women-only admits trans women, the code says, it may stop counting as a single-sex service under the Act. The same logic applies to men-only services and trans men.

The code is careful to say this is not automatically discriminatory against trans people. Refusing or modifying access to a single-sex service for someone of the opposite biological sex — including a trans person — can be lawful when it is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.” That is the same proportionality test the Equality Act has always used. The shift is that providers no longer need to wonder which sex applies; the code tells them it is biological.

What the code adds, and what has drawn the most attention from trans advocates, is the requirement on the other side of that line. For services that everyone needs — toilets being the obvious example — providers cannot leave trans people with no facility they are allowed to use. The code says trans people in those situations must be offered a third or gender-neutral space. That is a new affirmative duty on providers, and it is going to fall hardest on small organisations that have one men’s room and one women’s room and no third option.

Where the code is more nuanced than the headlines

Most of the coverage has focused on the line about toilets, but the code goes further than a single rule. It draws distinctions between the kind of service being provided, the risk involved, and the size of the organisation, and it gives examples of what proportionality looks like in each.

A refuge for women fleeing domestic violence, the code suggests, can lawfully restrict access to biological women given the trauma profile of its users — that is a context in which exclusion has a clear legitimate aim. A communal changing room at a leisure centre is a different proportionality calculation. So is a women’s networking event at a workplace. The code does not give a yes/no answer in any of these cases; it walks providers through the questions to ask.

The code also restates, in plain terms, that gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic in its own right. A trans person cannot be harassed, refused employment, or denied a service because they are trans, except where one of the Act’s specific exceptions applies. The fact that trans people may now be excluded from some single-sex spaces does not mean providers can treat them differently in any other context — and the code includes worked examples of that distinction too.

What still has to be decided

Two things the code does not resolve. First, it is the services code, not the employment code. A separate EHRC code covering workplaces has been signalled but not laid. Employers asking whether they can run women-only training sessions, or how to handle changing facilities in a small office, are going to be working from older guidance for a while yet.

Second, the code does not settle how it interacts with hate crime law, with the Gender Recognition Act, or with the privacy protections that GRC holders have had since 2004. Those questions sit outside the Equality Act and will get worked out, slowly, in tribunals and courts.

What happens next

Parliament’s forty-day window runs until early July. Either House can move to disapprove the code; if neither does, the government schedules a commencement date and the code takes effect. Stonewall, TransActual and several other trans-led organisations have already said they will lobby MPs and peers to disapprove. Sex Matters, the For Women Scotland campaign and others have said the code does not go far enough in the other direction. The political maths in both Houses suggests disapproval is unlikely, but the lobbying around it is going to be the loudest forty days the EHRC has had in a long time.

For trans people in Britain, the immediate practical change is small: nothing in the code takes effect until commencement. The medium-term change is that providers — schools, gyms, hospitals, the NHS, prisons, refuges, sports clubs — now have a statutory text to point at when they decide how to provide their services. Some will use it to draw lines that hurt trans people unnecessarily. Some will use the same text to build the third spaces the code now requires. Which way each one tips is going to be the story of the next year.