Write the Letter, Babes
The EHRC just opened a 40-day window. Here is what you do with it.
Write the Letter, Babes
The EHRC just opened a 40-day window. Here is what you do with it.
Last Wednesday, while half the country watched the King’s Speech and the other half was at work, the Minister for Women and Equalities laid the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated Code of Practice before Parliament. 21 May. The story barely registered.
It needs to register.
If neither House of Parliament rejects this Code within forty days, it becomes statutory guidance. End of June, roughly. And then a single document, drafted by a body that is supposed to defend our rights, rewrites who counts as what in law. Trans people. Lesbian women. Gay men. Anyone who has ever needed a refuge. Anyone who has ever used a public loo on a long bus journey. Anyone who plays Sunday-league football. Anyone in a relationship that does not fit the new legal definitions of “woman” and “man.”
So. Let’s look at it together, babes.
What the Code actually does
The Code is the EHRC’s interpretation of the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. That ruling redefined “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean biological sex. The EHRC was always going to update the Code. The question was how.
The answer arrived on 21 May, and the answer is: badly.
The Code defines “woman” as “biological woman.” It defines “man” as “biological man.” For the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means sex at birth. End of.
That definition then cascades. Single-sex spaces, the Code says, must be operated on the basis of biological sex. Trans people “should be offered” a third or gender-neutral space. Trans women can be excluded from women-only associations. Trans people are excluded from single-sex competitions for the gender they live in. If a women-only service chooses to admit trans women, it may legally cease to qualify as a single-sex service at all.
That last bit goes unsaid in most of the coverage. Read it again. A women’s group that has been trans-inclusive for twenty years, run by women who voted democratically to be trans-inclusive, can now lose its legal protection as a single-sex service because of who its members chose to include. A small group of self-styled women’s rights campaigners can threaten a much larger women’s organisation with court action for being too welcoming. That is the policy. It is being sold as protection. It is, in practice, a way of bullying women out of running the kinds of services women have chosen to run.
The Code does not stop at toilets and refuges. It limits access to healthcare. To housing. To social care. To gyms, pools, spas.
And then, quietly, it rewrites what “lesbian” and “gay” mean in law.
Paragraph 2.50 of the Code says, in plain text: “a trans man with a GRC is a woman and a trans woman with a GRC is a man, for the purposes of the Act.” Paragraph 2.92 then defines sexual orientation: “a person’s sexual orientation towards persons of the same sex (the person is a lesbian woman or a gay man).” And paragraph 2.96 closes the back door: “Gender reassignment is a separate protected characteristic and unrelated to sexual orientation.”
Stitch those three together and the consequence is unavoidable. A trans woman in a relationship with a cis woman is legally, under this Code, a man in a relationship with a woman. Heterosexual. Not a lesbian couple. Not protected as one. I had to read that twice. It is in the document the government has just laid before Parliament. You can read it yourself on gov.uk.
Who is speaking
Not just me. Not just the organisations everyone expects.
The Scottish Human Rights Commission has formally raised concerns about “basic rights to dignity and respect for all.” The Equality Commission of Northern Ireland has flagged that the Code may conflict with the Windsor Framework and the Good Friday Agreement’s commitments on equality. Eighteen UN Independent Human Rights Experts have warned of “legal uncertainty and rights implications.” Good Law Project is appealing the High Court’s earlier decision on the EHRC’s interim guidance.
TransActual says the Code leaves trans people in the UK with fewer rights than they had before the Supreme Court ruling. The LGBTIQA+ Greens have called it “intolerable.” Byline Times have called it, plainly, “a hostile environment.” The UK has dropped to its lowest-ever position on the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map, named alongside Bulgaria, Russia, Hungary and Slovakia as countries with legal restrictions that make gender recognition practically impossible. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, the body named after the legal scholar who coined the word “genocide” in 1944, issued a Red Flag Alert on the UK in June 2025. They classified UK state actions toward trans and intersex people as fitting the “9th Pattern of Genocide: Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.”
This is not fringe. This is the chorus.
The window
This is the bit that matters more than the rage.
Parliament has forty days. The Code was laid on 21 May. The clock runs out around 30 June. During that window, either House can disapprove the Code. Individual MPs can table objection motions. The Code can be sent back, debated, scrutinised, voted on.
It will not be, unless we ask.
The “negative procedure” the government has chosen means that, under normal conditions, this Code becomes statutory guidance with no parliamentary debate. No vote. No scrutiny. It just passes, and your MP, the one you voted for, has no say in the most consequential equality law change in fifteen years.
Unless they choose to make one.
That is what the letter is for.
Write the letter
Trans Legal Clinic has published a template letter and it is good. The shorter version of what you do:
Go to members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP and put in your postcode.
Copy the letter. It is on slides 4, 5 and 6 of my most recent Instagram post. Screenshot them, then use Live Text on iPhone or Google Lens on Android to pull the text out.
Put your full name and your postal address at the top. This matters. MPs are not allowed to reply to constituents whose address they cannot verify.
Personalise the bits in brackets. Tell your MP, in one or two sentences, why this hits home. A name. A friend. A daughter. A loo you stopped using. Something specific. Form letters get filed. Specific letters get read.
Email it. Print it and post it if you want to be extra. Some MPs read post first.
The ask in the letter has two layers. The first is the one ally MPs will say yes to immediately: stand with trans, non-binary and LGBT+ people, write to the Minister, support any motion that objects.
The second is the cleverer one, and it is for MPs who are not yet allies: demand full parliamentary scrutiny, proper debate, and a free vote on the Code. That is a procedural request, not an ideological one. It is what every MP, regardless of where they sit, is supposed to want. Centrist MPs find it very hard to say no to that one. Quote the procedure back at them.
What about a petition
Two are now in motion. A petition on parliament.uk asks both Houses to disapprove the Code under the 40-day procedure; it is currently in moderation and I will update this post the moment it is live. A Change.org petition is live now, link below, for the visible counter and the wider share. Both will live in my Instagram bio.
Sign whichever is available. It takes three minutes. Then email your MP. The petition tells Parliament how many of us there are. The letter tells your MP, by name, that one of those numbers is you.
A reminder, before you close this tab
This is not abstract. This is not “the discourse.” A friend of mine has stopped using the loos at her gym because the new interim guidance gave staff cover to challenge her. A trans man I know is being asked to use the women’s loos at work, which is a sentence I never thought I would type. A women’s refuge that has been trans-inclusive for years is being threatened with legal action for being too welcoming.
These are not theoretical harms. They are happening, in this country, this week, under a government that ran on a manifesto of competence and decency, and so far that competence has meant letting an unelected commission rewrite human rights law on a forty-day deadline that almost nobody has heard of.
Three weeks left, babes. We have time. The job is to use it.
Find your MP. Write the letter. Sign the petitions. Send this post to two people who do not know any of it yet.
I refuse to leave the ladder any higher than I found it.
Bimini x
Sources for everything above: the EHRC’s updated statutory Code of Practice laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026 (UK Parliament Written Statement HCWS67, Hill Dickinson legal briefing). Full text of the Draft Code at GOV.UK. PinkNews on the implications. TransActual’s response. Good Law Project’s explainer of the Code. Byline Times on the hostile environment framing. LGBTIQA+ Greens statement. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention Red Flag Alert on the UK. ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map 2026. MP letter template from Trans Legal Clinic. Find your MP at members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP.