Andrea Williams responds to the publishing of the EHRC guidance on single-sex women’s spaces
25 years ago, it would have been unthinkable that men would have the right to use women’s toilets and changing rooms simply because they identified as women.
Two years ago, it was just as unthinkable that anyone would stop them.
That is the context for what the new EHRC Code, laid in Parliament last week, says about single-sex spaces.
In the shorter term, it marks a significant step forwards. It applies the law in a way that strongly suggests that women-only changing rooms should be for real, biological women only. Likewise, it states that women’s sports is for women. Given the contempt that women like the Darlington Nurses and Sandie Peggie have been through in recent years, it is a landmark moment.
But all is not yet rosy in the new code or in single-sex spaces.
The EHRC code is constrained – for better and for worse
The code’s purpose is to give authoritative guidance on what equality law says about these contested issues. It must not contradict or go further than the law as it stands.
On one level, this is a positive. The revised code is severely constrained by the Supreme Court’s landmark 2025 decision in For Women Scotland clarifying that ‘woman’ means ‘woman’. There are many people within the government and within our institutions who would have preferred this not to have been the case. The Supreme Court’s judgment directly led to this code being stronger on single-sex spaces than previous advice.
Also crucial was our case supporting the Darlington Nurses. The logic given by the Employment Tribunal judgment delivered in January as it ruled in favour of the nurses is closely followed within the new code. Privacy and dignity matter. Services that open up women’s changing rooms to biological males are at serious risk of legal consequences. No organisation can read the new code and seriously think that it can dismiss the concerns of women about their spaces.
All that said, the code, constrained by the law as it stands, falls well short of properly protecting women in these spaces. All such spaces should have the simple, common sense policy that only women are allowed in women’s spaces. Yet time after time, this policy is presented as one which is likely justified rather than the obvious, default, correct position.
This is because equality law is a mess. The Equality Act says that Gender Reassignment is a protected characteristic. To some degree it protects a legal fiction that in any some sense, a man can become a woman or vice versa. And when you base your society on a lie, you will cause all kinds of problems for yourself – and in this case, for women. This code cannot give the full backing to women that it should, because the law still recognises false transgender ideology.
Spreading uncertainty about challenging someone’s biological sex
As a chief executive of a conscientious not-for-profit organisation, I know that little throws more uncertainty into a conversation than the letters GDPR.
The new code asserts with complete confidence that data protection rules treat biological sex as special category data. Under GDPR, special category data requires extra justification because storing and using it may cause risk to a person’s fundamental rights and freedoms.
But as Sex Matters has pointed out, the claim that someone’s biological sex carries this extra level of protection is highly dubious at best. The Information Commissioner’s Office, which is responsible for overseeing GDPR, never seems to have made this claim. You would think that if it really were special category data, someone would have pointed this out at some point in the last 8 years.
Even if it were special category data, protecting women’s spaces by asking a simple question can easily be justified in law. But raising this issue in the code, dealing with an area outside the EHRC’s ordinary competence, has a strong whiff of political interference, as Claire Coutinho has noted.
It looks like this is an attempt to cause uncertainty for services in how they implement single-sex spaces – thereby creating excuses to continue dogmatic support for trans-ideology-inspired policies.
Back to created reality
We must look back at the last two years and be grateful to God for the enormous progress made on this front. The new code is a significant improvement and every service provider will be at significant risk if it does not take adequate steps to protect women’s dignity and safety.
But we need to go further.
Law should not be based on lies. False gender designations that are propped up by the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act must be undone. No one has the right to be treated as something they are not.
Only a return to the truth will do. And if Jesus is the Truth, it means returning to him too.