Since 5 August, when the EHRC’s Code of Practice on single-sex spaces came into force, human resources departments across the country have been drafting ‘compliant’ policies. Somewhere right now a manager is working out how to challenge a trans colleague’s use of the toilet or drawing up a procedure for ‘verifying’ someone’s sex before they can access a support group or a changing room. The Code hands employers a blueprint for discrimination dressed up as neutral legal guidance.
But this isn’t a legal dispute to be fought out in the courts while the rest of us wait for a verdict. It’s a workplace issue, right now, in every staffroom and shop floor where a trans worker can be asked to prove their sex.
The trade union movement must decide whether its response is thousands of separate workplaces improvising on their own, or something organised, coordinated and backed by real industrial weight. The Code is also only the workplace end of a much wider wave of reaction.
What the Code actually does
The Code follows the Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, which found that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means sex assigned at birth. A Gender Recognition Certificate no longer changes a person’s legal sex for any purpose under the Act.
Employers are told they may need to run single-sex facilities on that basis, and the Code all but invites them to demand ‘evidence’ of someone’s sex where doubt is raised—evidence that, as it admits, no official record in the UK can supply. In practice, trans people must either pass in stealth or out themselves on demand.
The Good Law Project’s challenge won a partial clarification on services, so trans-inclusive facilities aren’t banned outright. Workplaces fare worse. Employers may be required to segregate facilities on a trans-exclusionary basis unless every toilet and changing room is a lockable individual room, with the door reaching from floor to ceiling. For most workplaces that isn’t possible. Nor is it desirable, for example in cases of emergency. It amounts to a demand to segregate.
Lawfare in our unions
Across civil society, legal threats keep forcing retreats. Amnesty International UK has withdrawn two reports, while Girlguiding and the Women’s Institute have ended trans membership after decades of inclusion.
The same pressure has reached inside our own movement. At PCS conference, the Standing Orders Committee has repeatedly ruled trans solidarity motions out of order on ‘legal advice’ from the union’s solicitors. In 2025, the leadership also instructed conference delegates to use the facilities matching their gender assigned at birth, or the disabled toilets, claiming the law required it.
At Unison’s 2026 conference, delegates did pass motions defending trans workers, but an emergency motion campaigning against the EHRC’s guidance was ruled out on ‘legal jeopardy’ grounds. When Lambeth delegates handed out printed copies anyway, two were expelled from the hall and later from the conference itself.
This is lawfare within the trade union movement: leaderships and standing orders committees deciding, again and again, that the safest position is no position, with legal risk as the permanent excuse.
Guidance that entrenches discrimination is an attack which must be defied and made unworkable in practice, whatever the courts eventually rule. Union branches should organise to breach the Code wherever it demands discrimination, and standing orders committees should be told plainly that legal risk is not a licence to silence trans members. We should break the guidance in the workplace and demand, loudly and without apology, that the government changes the law behind it.
Generalise the pledges
Something else has been building behind the scenes. In workplaces across the country, individual pledges have been circulating: statements by workers that they will not police the gender of colleagues or the public, and will not act as an enforcement arm for the Code. They represent a practical refusal to do the discriminatory work the Code tries to offload onto ordinary staff.
But an individual pledge is also an individual risk. A worker who refuses a manager’s instruction on conscience alone can be disciplined unless they are backed up. If a branch adopts the pledge as policy, backing a refusal to police a colleague’s gender the way it would back a refusal to carry out an unsafe work instruction, the risk shifts to the collective, where it belongs.
Where employers push back, the pledge has to be supported by real industrial action: grievances raised collectively; branch motions committing to support anyone facing detriment or victimisation; and, where necessary, a commitment to ballot for strike action. A policy backed by that threat is a workplace where the Code cannot be imposed.
What unions must do
- Adopt clear demands. Back a common set of demands—reversing the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC Code, winning self-ID, and free trans healthcare on demand—as branch and national policy.
- Back the pledges collectively. Turn individual refusals to police gender into union policy, so members who refuse are protected, not exposed.
- Build the national link-up. Get behind the initiatives already building national coordination, push them to talk to each other, and call for a national assembly of the movement.
- Train reps now. Every rep should know what the Code does and doesn’t require, so employers cannot invoke it to justify more than the law demands.
- Refuse to let legal risk silence members. Don’t let standing orders committees use ‘legal jeopardy’ to block trans solidarity motions without full disclosure and a democratic vote.
- Commit to defending members. Agree in advance to raise grievances and ballot for action where members face victimisation or detriment for refusing to discriminate.
