The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is consulting on new guidance that would reshape access to single-sex services in the UK, but campaigners and researchers warn it’s not just a clarification of the law. It’s an assault on basic dignity. According to a detailed Equality Impact Assessment compiled by Coolwood Books, the EHRC’s draft proposals would do disproportionate harm not only to trans people but to millions of women, especially those who are black, disabled, neurodivergent, or gender non-conforming.
The EHRC has failed to publish a full Equality Impact Assessment (EIA), despite being legally required to assess how changes might affect protected groups. “Oops!” the Coolwood authors write pointedly, “but don’t worry, EHRC: we’ve done this for you.” To fill the gap, they applied established public policy tools—most notably Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs)—to model the impact of the proposed guidance. QALYs are not literal death counts; they are a way of estimating the overall reduction in quality and length of life across a population, used by the NHS, NICE, and HM Treasury to compare the harms and benefits of different policies. In this case, the authors estimate that the EHRC’s guidance would cause a net loss of well-being equivalent to 3,000 lives, primarily due to increased anxiety, humiliation, loss of access to essential services, and avoidable medical harms. These are policy-level estimates—not clinical predictions—but they offer a powerful warning: the costs of the EHRC’s approach could vastly outweigh any supposed benefits, and the burden will fall disproportionately on women who are not trans.
The central danger lies in the vague and passive language of the EHRC’s draft—phrases like “trans women should not be permitted” in women’s facilities—which the assessment argues effectively invites the public to police who belongs in a space. “By not saying who has the power to give or remove permission,” the authors warn, “you are inadvertently gifting power to any abusive man to enter women’s facilities by giving him the reasonable excuse he wishes to check whether someone he thinks might be trans is there.”
This isn’t just a risk for trans people. It creates a culture of suspicion that turns appearance into a threat. According to cited research, around 13% of women are misclassified as male based on visual cues like body shape or posture. That’s over 4 million women at potential risk of challenge or exclusion. And some groups are even more vulnerable: “Observers have difficulty correctly seeing black women’s bodies and gender presentations,” the analysis quotes from Kwate & Threadcraft (2016). Autistic women, too, are at risk: they tend to have “less feminine facial features” (Gilani et al., 2012), putting them at increased danger of being questioned or refused entry. The guidance, the authors conclude, “will necessarily put at risk anyone whose sex is sometimes or always mistaken.”
The proposals also ignore the real-world impracticality of enforcing sex-based access. The idea that people could prove their sex by carrying a birth certificate is not only absurd, it’s dangerous. Birth certificates are paper documents, easy to forge, legally accessible to anyone, and entirely unsuited to everyday identification. “They will become valuable if your guidance goes ahead, putting women at risk of robbery,” the authors note. Requiring people to carry them “in case they need the toilet while out, or in case they are rushed to hospital” places a disproportionate burden on those most likely to be misgendered, especially disabled people, people of colour, and trans people.
And what about trans people themselves? The analysis estimates that 45,000 new incidents of harassment, 28,000 threats of violence, and 3,000 sexual assaults on trans people could directly result from this guidance. It could also lead to 14,000 new urinary tract infections, as trans and disabled people are forced to wait longer for accessible facilities or avoid them altogether out of fear. Perhaps most concerning: “1 in 4 trans people will fear humiliation and violence or a lack of toilet facilities so much they stop leaving their homes regularly.”
Despite this, the EHRC provides almost no measurable benefit to offset the harm. The only argument offered is that some non-trans women feel discomfort around trans women. But as the analysis points out, “Discomfort is not a justification for disproportionate harm.” Even if you accept the worst-case (and discredited) readings of crime data often cited by anti-trans activists, the “benefit” of excluding trans women might amount to preventing 20 assaults per year, compared to the thousands likely to be enabled by the guidance itself.
Ultimately, this isn’t about safety. It’s about control. It’s about narrowing the boundaries of who counts as a woman, and who is allowed to move freely through public space without being interrogated. Trans people, already subject to intense public hostility, would be forced to out themselves every time they go to the toilet or seek medical care. But they’re not the only ones. The EHRC’s guidance “will cause grossly disproportionate suffering to hundreds of thousands of women, black people, disabled people, lesbians and trans people, of the order 10 times bigger than any benefits that might arise.”
The consultation is due to close on Monday, 30 June 2025. Anyone can respond, and you don’t have to be trans to oppose this. If you believe that privacy, dignity, and equal access shouldn’t depend on whether strangers think you “look right,” now is the time to act. The EHRC calls this guidance a clarification. In reality, it’s a license to harass.