The EHRC Code of Practice 2026: What It Actually Means for Us

The EHRC Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026. It is subject to the statutory parliamentary procedure for codes of practice and is not yet in force. Everything below reflects the Code as written and its likely legal effect once commenced.

I‘m a dermatologist, not a lawyer. What I can do is read primary sources carefully, understand evidence, and translate complexity without distorting it. That’s what this is.

I’ve read the Code. I’ve read the legal analysis. Here is what it actually says, what it actually means, and where genuine uncertainty remains.

Our protection under the Equality Act has not been removed

This is the most important thing to understand, and it is being misrepresented in both directions.

The For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling did not remove gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. The Code does not remove it either. Trans people remain legally protected from discrimination, harassment and victimisation under the Equality Act 2010.

What the Code does is reframe how specific exceptions to that protection operate – particularly around single-sex services. That is a meaningful change. It is not the same thing as the protected characteristic itself being removed.

The draft Code states that trans people remain protected from discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment whether or not they hold a Gender Recognition Certificate, and from sex discrimination based on both their sex at birth and their perceived sex in their acquired gender.

The Supreme Court says “sex” means biological sex across the Equality Act

The Supreme Court held in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, “sex” means biological sex throughout the Act. The Court explicitly rejected the argument that “woman” and “sex” could mean biological sex in some sections of the Act and certificated sex in others. It is a single, consistent definition throughout.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in For Women Scotland, a Gender Recognition Certificate does not alter a person’s sex for Equality Act purposes. Unless overturned by later legislation or a higher court, that is the authoritative interpretation currently binding on lower courts.

A Gender Recognition Certificate no longer determines access to single-sex services

For many people with a GRC, this is likely to be the most practically significant change.

A GRC no longer changes our legal sex for Equality Act purposes. Biological sex at birth remains our sex under the Act regardless of certification status.

This does not make a GRC meaningless across all of law – the Code itself only addresses its effect for Equality Act purposes and says nothing about its effect elsewhere. A GRC continues to carry real legal weight outside the Equality Act: GOV.UK confirms it allows you to update your birth or adoption certificate (where registered in the UK), marry or form a civil partnership in your affirmed gender, update a marriage or civil partnership certificate (where registered in the UK), and have your affirmed gender recorded on your death certificate. It does not change your legal status as a child’s parent. But in disputes about single-sex service access specifically – the subject of this Code – it no longer functions as it previously did.

Single-sex services are expected to operate on the basis of biological sex

Where a service is lawfully operated as single-sex for women under the Equality Act, the draft Code says trans women should not be admitted to it as women. This is conditional, not automatic: it depends on the service actually qualifying for the single-sex exception in the first place, which itself requires proportionality and context (covered below) – it is not a rule that applies regardless of circumstances.

Examples discussed in the Code include toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges and other settings where the Equality Act permits separate or single-sex provision.

This is where the Code has its most direct practical effect on our daily lives. But it does not operate as a blanket rule without conditions.

Admitting trans women doesn’t destroy a service – but it’s a real legal risk, not a safe default

This distinction matters and is being consistently muddied in public commentary.

The accurate legal position is more exposed than “it becomes mixed-sex and that’s fine” suggests. A service that admits trans women to a women-only service cannot rely on the Equality Act’s single-sex service exception as its legal basis. It does become a mixed-sex service – but the draft Code states, at paragraph 13.131, that a service limited to women and trans women, while still excluding men generally, is “very likely” to amount to unlawful sex discrimination against the men who are excluded from it. The draft Code adds that such a service could separately be unlawful sex discrimination, or lead to unlawful harassment, against the women who use it.

Some lawyers and campaigners dispute this reading, arguing it sits uneasily with the High Court’s comments in Good Law Project v EHRC about “different but not less favourable treatment.” That argument has not been tested or accepted by any court. As things stand, the Code’s own text treats inclusion of trans women in a women-only service as a serious legal exposure, not a safe default – and a service provider relying on the opposite reading is taking a real risk, not a settled position.

A service provider who excludes trans women is not automatically acting lawfully either – exclusion still has to be justified as proportionate. The Code creates a framework with risk on both sides, not a binary where one option is safe and the other isn’t.

The provider must justify the single-sex service, and any exclusion, as proportionate

This is where the law places a genuine check on the Code’s direction of travel, though it is not the case that every individual decision requires a fresh, bespoke assessment from scratch each time.

Service providers must be able to show that providing a separate or single-sex service, and any exclusion that flows from it, is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. That test underpins the exception throughout – it cannot be satisfied by policy alone, divorced from the actual context the service operates in.

Critically, the draft Code expressly recognises that people should not be left without access to any toilet facilities at all, and more generally that trans people must not be left in a position where no service of any kind is available to them. A blanket exclusion that leaves someone with nowhere to go is not proportionate under the Code’s own terms.

Contexts involving intimate care, communal changing, and services designed for survivors of sexual violence are often cited as situations in which the case for separate-sex provision is strongest. Outside those contexts, the justification may be harder to establish and will be more fact-sensitive – not unlawful by default, but requiring a more careful case to be made.

Alternative facilities are contemplated – with a significant caveat

The Code suggests that a proportionate approach often involves offering a mix of provision: single-sex services alongside mixed-sex or gender-neutral alternatives.

The legal intent is to mitigate disadvantage to trans people while preserving the single-sex exemption for those who rely on it.

The lived reality concern is legitimate: the government’s own equality impact assessment acknowledges that the proposed mitigation of third-space provision is frequently not financially viable, particularly for smaller organisations. What looks like a solution on paper may translate into inadequate or non-existent alternatives in practice.

A contested provision: when does our protection begin?

This issue is absent from most public commentary but is legally significant and worth understanding.

Paragraph 2.46 of the Code has been read by some legal commentators, including the trans advocacy organisation Translucent in their formal response to the draft Code, as introducing requirements for “permanence” and “consistency of presentation” before a person can be considered protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment. On that reading, it sits awkwardly alongside Section 7 of the Equality Act, which protects individuals from the moment they propose to undergo transition – no threshold of permanence required, no consistency of presentation test.

The Code’s own text is more equivocal than that critique suggests. Paragraph 2.46 describes reassignment as “likely to at least involve more permanent changes” – language that describes a typical pattern rather than explicitly imposing a legal threshold – and the Code separately confirms, at paragraph 2.39, that a trans person is protected at any stage of transition, “even if they have only started but not completed a stage,” from the moment of proposing to reassign their sex.

The practical risk Translucent and others have identified is real: service providers reading 2.46 in isolation, without 2.39’s clearer “from the moment of proposing” protection, could unlawfully challenge the protected status of trans people who are early in transition. But this is genuinely contested, has not been tested in court, and should not be treated as settled law by anyone relying on it – in either direction.

Competitive sport follows biological sex

The Code sets out the circumstances in which exclusion from competitive sport may be lawful, and the considerations that should apply to policy decisions affecting trans people.

For most of us, the practical effect is that restrictions in competitive sport continue much as they have since individual sporting bodies began moving in this direction from 2021 onwards. This is the area where law and policy have been most consistently aligned for longest.

Workplaces and services: a contested distinction

This is where commentary on the Code is most polarised, and it’s worth being precise about why – because the picture is genuinely murkier than most summaries, including earlier drafts of this one, suggest.

The High Court ruling in Good Law Project and others v EHRC (13 February 2026) is being read in opposite directions by different sides. Good Law Project’s own public statements on the judgment say the Court found that services may lawfully allow trans women to use women’s facilities without being forced to open them to cis men, and frame the decision as undermining the EHRC’s draft Code.

But the judgment itself reads differently to several legal commentators and lawyers who reported on it directly, and to the EHRC, which was the defendant in the case, and Sex Matters, which intervened in support of the EHRC’s position. Mr Justice Swift rejected the challenge that the interim update misstated the law – finding that the EHRC’s approach did not give rise to legal error, rather than affirmatively endorsing every detail of it as the single correct reading. That interim update, which the Court found disclosed no error of law, stated that in both workplaces and services open to the public, trans women should not be permitted to use women’s facilities, because doing so would mean the facility was no longer single-sex and would have to be opened to all users of the opposite sex. On that reading, the ruling did not carve out services as more permissive than workplaces. Instead, it found no legal error in the EHRC’s position that exclusion from both could be lawful, while leaving room for proportionate exceptions and additional mixed-sex provision where possible.

It is also important to be precise about what the case actually decided. The judgment concerned the EHRC’s interim update, published in April 2025, not the new Code of Practice itself, which had not yet been laid before Parliament when the case was heard. The Code’s own lawfulness has not been separately tested in court. Good Law Project has applied for permission to appeal the interim update decision, arguing the Court underweighted trans people’s rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That appeal has not yet been heard.

Until the Court of Appeal rules on the interim update, and until any future challenge to the Code itself runs its course, the practical legal position remains genuinely unsettled – and confident claims about what the Good Law Project case “established,” in either direction, should be treated with caution.

What is consistent across every reading: the same proportionality principle applies in both contexts. The draft Code’s own language, and the proportionality analysis underlying it, point strongly towards offering alternative facilities where practicable, and away from any arrangement that leaves a trans person with no usable provision of any kind. On that narrower point – zero provision – the draft Code’s own wording, at paragraph 13.148, is that it is “very unlikely to be proportionate” to leave a trans person with no service they are allowed to use at all, and at 13.149 that failing to act proportionately is “very likely” to amount to unlawful discrimination. That is a strong steer rather than an absolute rule. Beyond that, exactly what counts as “suitable alternative provision” in any given case is genuinely more open and fact-dependent.

The Code is not yet law – and some organisations are implementing policies in anticipation of it

The Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026. It is subject to the statutory parliamentary procedure for codes of practice, and only takes legal effect once Parliament does not disapprove it and a separate commencement order is made by the Minister. Even once commenced, courts remain free to depart from the Code where it is inconsistent with the Equality Act itself, which takes precedence. A statutory Code of Practice is persuasive and must be taken into account by courts and tribunals – but it does not override primary legislation.

This means that organisations already implementing sweeping exclusions solely on the basis of the Code are currently doing so ahead of any legal obligation – and in many cases, in ways that go further than the Code itself actually requires. Service providers should not treat the Code as currently binding, and decisions affecting individual trans people should not be made solely by reference to it.

None of this means every organisation will make the same choices. The Code creates a framework, but the lived reality for trans people will depend heavily on how individual employers, service providers and courts interpret and apply it.

What this actually means for us

The EHRC Code does not remove our legal protections. What it does is substantially strengthen the legal basis for operating sex-segregated services according to biological sex – making access for trans women more contingent, less predictable, and more dependent on individual organisational policy than it was previously.

Several provisions, particularly around the threshold for protection and the proportionality of exclusion, remain legally contested and are likely to face further court challenge. The legal landscape is not settled. It is in motion. The Code itself is not the final word: courts interpret statutes, and Codes of Practice guide that interpretation, but do not replace it.

Some things will change. Some already have. But the degree of change – and whether the worst-case readings of the Code become reality – depends significantly on how courts respond to challenges that are still working their way through the system, and on how individual organisations choose to implement guidance that is, in important ways, still being tested.

Full legal resources and organisations that can help are linked in my bio.

I’m a dermatologist, not a lawyer. This article is intended to provide clear, evidence-based information about the legal framework as it currently stands. It is not legal advice. If you are affected by specific decisions made about your access to services, seek advice from a qualified legal professional or contact a trans rights organisation – links in bio.

Sources

Primary sources

• Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations (2026) – GOV.UK, the Code text itself, including paragraphs 2.39, 2.46 and 13.130-13.149
• Code of practice for services, public functions and associations – EHRC, official status and timeline of the Code
• High Court judgment summary: Good Law Project v Equality and Human Rights Commission – EHRC’s own summary, including confirmation that the case concerned the interim update, not the draft Code
• R (Good Law Project and others) v Equality and Human Rights Commission [2026] EWHC 279 (Admin) – full text of Mr Justice Swift’s judgment, 13 February 2026
• Apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate: Overview – GOV.UK, what a GRC does and does not change outside the Equality Act

Legal analysis and commentary

• What is in the new guidance? – Sex Matters
• High Court rules: EHRC guidance lawful – Sex Matters
• Case update: Good Law Project Limited & Ors v EHRC – Bates Wells
• EHRC’s updated statutory code of practice laid before parliament – Hill Dickinson
• Beyond the headlines: six things in the updated EHRC Code you should not miss – Thrive Law
• The Code of Practice: what you need to know – Good Law Project
• High Court rules on lawfulness of the EHRC’s interim guidance – Good Law Project
• EHRC guidance: we’re launching our appeal on the High Court’s decision – Good Law Project
• Our Thoughts on the EHRC’s Updated Code of Practice – May 2026 – Scottish Trans
• Translucent Response to the EHRC Draft Code of Practice (2026) – Translucent

News reporting

• Trans people can be barred from gendered spaces in EHRC update – PinkNews
• High Court ruling on EHRC trans guidance heads to Court of Appeal – PinkNews
• Biological sex determines use of toilets and changing rooms, equalities watchdog says – LBC

Last verified: 19 June 2026. Given the parliamentary review period and pending appeal, check primary sources for the current status before relying on any specific provision.