On Thursday 21 May 2026, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, laid before Parliament the EHRC’s draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations. If approved, it will give statutory force to guidance excluding trans people across England, Wales and Scotland from single-sex toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges and sports facilities matching their gender identity.
The Code follows last year’s Supreme Court ruling that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex, which Workers Power warned was a major attack on trans rights. It tells service providers, public bodies and associations that if they admit trans women or trans men to a single-sex service matching their gender identity, that service will no longer count as single-sex in law and is ‘very likely’ to expose them to legal challenge. It also legitimises suspicion based on ‘physical appearance’ or ‘behaviour’, creating a framework for the policing of anyone who does not conform to narrow gender stereotypes.
The practical reality is a state-sanctioned regime of surveillance, harassment and exclusion. Toilets are the symbolic issue through which this policy is being sold, but the real objective is much wider: to normalise the exclusion of trans people from public life and to legitimise wider policing of sex, gender and appearance. The claim that trans women can simply use men’s toilets is absurd. In practice it means forcing them into spaces where humiliation, abuse and violence are predictable. Many will therefore stop using public facilities altogether, avoid workplaces, colleges, hospitals and social venues where they may be challenged, and be pushed further into isolation. Trans men will face the same coercive policing in reverse, while cis women whose appearance does not conform to a narrow stereotype of femininity will also be challenged at toilet doors. The government’s own Equality Impact Assessment admits the likely negative impact on trans people, the danger of ‘double exclusion’ from both women’s and men’s spaces, and the wider ‘policing’ of gender presentation.
This is Labour’s Section 28 moment. Starmer’s government has not merely implemented a Tory court judgment; it has chosen the most restrictive interpretation available and shepherded it through Whitehall while doctors strike, councils go bankrupt and Reform UK builds in the wreckage. Phillipson, who once styled herself a defender of equalities, is now the author of the most significant rollback of trans rights in British history.
Labour is retreating in advance of a reactionary panic whipped up by the growing far right, the Tory press and the gender-critical campaign apparatus. Reform has built its momentum by translating social collapse into nationalist, racist and authoritarian politics; Labour’s answer is to chase that agenda rather than confront it.
The target today is trans people, but the project is wider: to reassert the discipline of the family, the policing of bodies and fixed gender roles over all women and men. Once the state licences officials to decide who counts as a ‘real’ woman or man, it arms every boss, manager, landlord and bigot with a new weapon against anyone whose body, clothing, sexuality or behaviour breaks the norm.
Trans people are the sharp end of a broader offensive against women’s autonomy, queer liberation and the right of working-class people to live without state and employer surveillance. That is why socialists must reject every version of the right’s ‘war on woke’.
There is no genuine ‘conflict’ between women’s rights and trans rights. Women’s services have been destroyed by fifteen years of austerity, not by trans women. Refuges are closing because Tory and Labour councils have shut them, not because anyone used the wrong toilet. The bosses, landlords and warmongers gain from every hour the labour movement spends fighting on terrain chosen by the right.
Workers Power calls on the labour movement, the trade unions and the wider left to build a united front against the Code. MPs and peers have 40 days to force its rejection. Unions should instruct members not to participate in gender policing, defend any worker disciplined for refusing to harass colleagues or service users, and demand that employers adopt policies protecting trans people from exclusion and abuse.
As we have argued before, defending trans rights at work means organising members, confronting management policy changes and refusing to leave trans colleagues isolated. Workplaces, colleges, hospitals and public services must refuse to police colleagues and service users. Protests were organised at short notice in London and Manchester last weekend. A national demonstration, called jointly by trans organisations and the labour movement, would put the question where it belongs: on the streets.
