‘Kind of humiliating’: trans community responds to EHRC’s new code of practice

For some transgender men and women – and the campaigners who support them – the updated guidance confirms their worst fears Stephen Whittle was visiting the Chelsea flower show as a birthday treat with his wife on Thursday afternoon. At around the same time, the updated code of practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission was published. It confirmed, among myriad updates, that single-sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms must be used on the basis of biological sex, and that transgender people may not access those that accord with their lived gender. Among the floral displays, 70-year-old Whittle did not stray from habit. “Of course I used the male facilities, as I have done for the last 50 years. Can you imagine what the guy on security would have said if I’d gone to the ladies?” Whittle, who spearheaded the campaign for gender recognition across the UK in the 1990s, has witnessed the significant advances, both legal and social, in the intervening years, and on Friday his focus was “trying to calm people down and say: ‘Stay cool; we’ll get through this’”. For many in the trans and wider LGBTQ+ community, as well as those running businesses and