Young trans activists occupy the EHRC’s London offices to protest the flawed interim guidance, pressuring them to listen to trans voices

LONDON, 26 May 2025, 10:00AM - A group of trans youth have begun an occupation outside of the EHRC’s London offices at Tintagel House, intending to stay there overnight, in order to protest the upcoming release of the EHRC’s guidance about the Supreme Court’s ruling that “sex”, within the Equality Act, refers to birth sex.

The young activists confronting the EHRC have attached a banner that reads “LISTEN TO US.” to the bollards in front of the entrance to the building, telling the EHRC directly that they demand to be given a voice in guidance made about trans people. In the leaflets they are handing out, they have also stated their demands:

“Dignity: We demand to see a change to the guidance between the interim report and publication, where it focuses on protecting trans people rather than isolating them.

Voice: We demand that the EHRC conducts a proper consultation with trans organisations on their heavily flawed guidance.

Respect: We demand that the changes trans people make to their biological sex are respected, rather than insisting that “biological sex” is a synonym for “sex assigned at birth”. We demand that the Gender Recognition Act is respected, and therefore that legal sex is valued over sex assigned at birth.

Listen to us.”

One of the activists involved, Blue (she/her), stated, “the EHRC are complicit in and responsible for enabling the ongoing erasure of transgender youth in the UK, which is incredibly ironic considering that they’re meant to be the ones protecting OUR rights! I’m taking part in this action because the time for waving placards is over – the time for action is now.”

The interim update, released by the EHRC on 25/04/25, insists, like the Supreme Court, that biological sex is the same thing as sex assigned at birth, completely ignoring the many changes trans people can make to their biological sex through hormone replacement therapy and surgery. They completely ignore intersex people, whose sex will also typically be different to what it was assigned at birth. The interim guidance states that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change a trans person’s legal sex for the purposes of the Equality Act - namely, that trans people should not use the correct single-sex facilities, but also can be barred from those of their sex assigned at birth. It is unclear how organisations are expected to police single-sex spaces to exclude trans people, as it is illegal to ask for evidence of a Gender Recognition Certificate, all other documents can be changed to match the person’s gender, and visible sex characteristics can be modified to align with gender. This flawed guidance also repeatedly refers to trans people by their sex assigned at birth, (e.g. “trans men (biological women)”), as if they need to make it perfectly clear that they do not see trans people as the gender they are, but instead as the sex that they may not even fall under anymore.

The code of practice consultation, released by the EHRC on 20/05/25, tells service providers that they should request a birth certificate if they think someone is lying about their sex assigned at birth, and that “additional requests” regarding “confirmation as to whether a person has a GRC” should be made. It is not legal for an employer or service provider to ask to see a GRC, as this is considered protected information. In the Equality Act, it also replaces “homosexual” with “lesbian woman or gay man”, using the definition that a “woman” is someone assigned female at birth and vice versa for “man”, so trans gay people are considered straight, and are only protected from sexual orientation discrimination in the same way a straight person would be.

Find footage and photos here.