For the past few years, trans people in Northern Ireland have had their rights slowly stripped. This is largely due to the country’s oversight by the UK government. It began with Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government commissioning the Cass Review and the follow-through from the Labour government under Starmer to ban puberty blockers for transgender minors.

But the attack on trans rights has been taken to a new level after the UK Supreme Court ruled on the definition of ‘sex’ and ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010. The case For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers was brought before the courts by the organisation For Women Scotland, which appealed to the UK Supreme Court regarding the legal recognition of trans women who have a full gender recognition certificate (GRC) as women for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

The ruling then resulted in the creation of the Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, 2026 (henceforth called the Draft Code of Practice, or the draft code). The document is meant to provide guidance on how to apply the Supreme Court ruling in practice.

To quote the Draft Code of Practice, “The judgment held that ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ mean, respectively, biological sex, biological woman and biological man for the purposes of the Equality Act. The judgment uses the expression ‘biological sex’ to describe the sex of a person at birth. The phrase ‘biological sex’ has the same meaning when used throughout this Code.”

In practice, what this means is that regardless of a person having a Gender Recognition Certificate or having undergone medical transition, their sex will continue to be legally recognised as their sex assigned at birth.

The Draft Code of Practice provides examples of changes, one being that it is now lawful to ban a trans woman from joining women-only associations due to her being transgender, as she would not “share the protected characteristic.”

It also outlines that “trans people should not be included in single-sex or separate-sex competitions for the sex with which they identify” and that trans people should not use single-sex spaces aligning with their gender, stating that they may face danger and intense distress when using single-sex facilities. To many LGBTQ+ rights organisations and individuals, this indicated explicitly that this code is not fit for use due to its seeming acknowledgement and acceptance of its harm against the transgender community.

Another example in the code outlines how a community centre may use its disabled toilet as its only mixed-sex toilet. According to the guidance, this would constitute an appropriate provision of care to both the trans and disabled communities.

This particular point was flagged by Disability Rights UK, which stated: “It is a vain attempt to get two marginalised groups to blame one another for our lack of facilities, when the blame lies firmly at the feet of policymakers. […] We will not be used as a ‘loophole’ in the wider erosion of trans rights. […] Trans rights do not come at the expense of Disabled, nor anyone else’s.”

In the same statement, Disability Rights UK also touched on the troubling precedent this interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 presents: if the rights of trans individuals could be reworked and limited in this way, what is there to say that this can’t happen to other marginalised groups?

There are extremely small but relevant silver linings to be found in the Draft Code of Practice. There is now clarification that includes non-binary and genderfluid people as being able to have the “protected characteristic of gender reassignment.” Previously, they were completely without acknowledgement and protection in the Equality Act 2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

This protected characteristic can apply to people who have not “completed stage[s]” of transition according to the draft code, including those who have not obtained a GRC or undergone medical transition. What this means in practice is incredibly unclear, especially in Northern Ireland, where there is no legislation specifically for hate crimes, leaving trans people (especially trans women) incredibly vulnerable.

The Draft Code of Practice is still just that, a draft code. However, concerns have been raised by people from Scotland all the way to the North of Ireland. It seems obvious that trans women will be the most harshly hit by this guidance, as they were the original target of the For Women Scotland case.

In Northern Ireland, however, our political state is different. Even if the Draft Code of Practice comes into effect in England, it cannot simply be pasted over here without Stormont’s approval.

This was made clear by the Rainbow Project via a statement shared on Instagram. In it, they clarify that Northern Ireland has its own Equality Commission and that “trans people are shielded from a diminution of rights under Article 2 of the Windsor Framework.”

 

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A post shared by The Rainbow Project (@therainbowprojectni)

This framework, which emerged post-Brexit, is what protects the rights of people, the trading of goods and services, and safe passage with no hard border with the Republic of Ireland, as it is also entwined with the Good Friday Agreement. It has been our saving grace in recent years as the state of our rights in England and the rest of the UK deteriorates.

This is not to say that all is well here, or that trans people (especially trans women) in Northern Ireland won’t see an increase in harm due to this guidance, but it is to say that there is no legal backbone behind it at present. This is also not to say that Stormont will not bring forth this decision of their own volition.

After all, there was not a single elected individual in Stormont who outright opposed the ban on puberty blockers in the North of Ireland, a decision that was made in mainland UK, which we were reassured would have no impact on life here by LGBTQ+ rights organisations. Additionally, when our local gender clinic seemed not to be affected by the controversial Cass Review, our Health Minister Mike Nesbitt went out of his way to commission Hilary Cass to review our youth gender service.

These are not events that the trans community or wider queer community have taken lying down. Every move to erode our rights has been met with outrage, whether by the review committee of service users, parents and LGBTQ+ rights organisations, or by Prides across the entirety of Northern Ireland, which moved to ban politicians from representing their parties at their parades. Causeway Pride, the first to make this move, described the community as “left feeling abandoned and exploited”, which still rings true a year later.

In short, do not despair but err on the side of caution. This is a moment in which our cisgender allies need to stand by us, and in which we as trans people must stand by one another. As Gendered Intelligence remarked in their response to the draft code, “Remember: there is no toilet police.”