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Latest 6 June 2025
Legal challenge: EHRC guidance is either wrong in law or breaches human rights
N.M.Bear / Shutterstock
Guidance that excludes trans people faces challenge in the High Court.
Good Law Project has filed an application for judicial review against the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the equalities minister Bridget Phillipson.
We’ve teamed up with trans and intersex people to challenge the interim guidance rushed out by the EHRC in the wake of the transphobic judgment handed down by the Supreme Court in April.
This guidance, adopted by Phillipson, requires people to use toilets based on their “biological sex”. But we argue it’s either wrong in law, or it breaches the UK’s obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998 – and the High Court should declare this breach.
Help us challenge the Supreme Court’s judgment on trans rightsChip in
We’ve been inundated with stories from the trans community about the impact this guidance has had on their lives.
Many people have told us they’ve been instructed to use different changing rooms and toilets at work, sometimes resulting in stress that has left them unfit to continue working. National associations have excluded them from sports – against the wishes of local people in those teams – and previously inclusive services and clubs have bowed to external pressure, making trans people feel ostracised from their communities. And they feel like they can no longer access public spaces, because of dodgy policies around toilet usage at everything from their local bar, to major music festivals.
In many of these cases, those excluding trans people have justified their decisions by pointing directly at the EHRC’s interim guidance.
According to Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, there’s “a kind of visceral cruelty” to the EHRC’s statement.
“We challenge that in legal terms,” Maugham said, “by pointing to the EHRC’s legal obligation to promote a world which is safe and kind for trans people. After all, it’s all that trans people – and those who love them – want. But the government – and the EHRC – seem to have forgotten it.”
It’s time to fight back. It’s time to stand together against the erosion of rights that trans people have depended on for years.
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