An Iceberg and a Witch Hunt — Joanne Lockwood

By Joanne Lockwood (she/her) FIEDP FRSA FPSA — Written from lived experience, not from the sidelines.

Teraina is 83 years old. She has lived as a woman for decades. She felt so strongly about what the EHRC’s new guidance might mean for someone like her that she discharged herself from a hospital bed — checked herself out, while unwell — to make sure her MP heard it directly. What frightened her was the prospect of being placed on a men’s ward.

She is not a hypothetical. She is not a slogan in anyone’s culture war. She is someone’s grandmother, well into her ninth decade, who decided that leaving hospital felt safer than trusting the law to treat her with dignity.

Trans inclusion is my work, and I write about it from lived experience, not the sidelines. Only last week I argued that the EHRC could have chosen dignity — that it was entirely possible to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling that “sex” means biological sex and still write guidance that was not cruel. I have rarely come across a detail that sits with me the way Teraina’s does. It surfaced on Tuesday afternoon, in a committee room of the House of Commons, during two hours that everyone in that room will remember and most of the country missed.

This is the first of five pieces about those two hours. Not because one committee session changes the law — it doesn’t — but because it showed us, with unusual clarity, what the law is about to do.

An ordinary Tuesday afternoon

On 9 June, the Equality and Human Rights Commission — the body that exists to protect all of us from discrimination — sat before the Women and Equalities Committee to answer for its new Code of Practice on services, public functions and associations.

The Code is the EHRC’s attempt to translate last year’s Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland — which held that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex — into something organisations can actually operate. It runs to more than 300 pages and covers eight protected characteristics. But only one small section of it has anyone’s attention, and it was the only section that mattered on Tuesday: what the Code means for trans people’s access to single‑sex spaces and services.

Appearing for the Commission were its new chair, Dr Mary‑Ann Stephenson, six months into the job, and its chief executive, John Kirkpatrick. Early on, Dr Stephenson reached for an image to describe the organisation she now leads.

“It is a bit like an iceberg: there is a little that you see on the surface.”

She meant it as a plea for perspective — look at all the work you don’t see. But the metaphor did other work too. Because what sat beneath the surface of this session was not the breadth of the EHRC’s remit. It was the weight of what its Code does to real people, and how little the Commission seemed able to say about it.

The Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May. It is not yet in force. Parliament has a window to object — and that, as we’ll see, is the part most people don’t realise is still open.

The questions came from her own side

Here is the thing that should make everyone pay attention, whatever they think about the underlying argument.

The sharpest scrutiny did not come from the opposition benches. It came from inside the governing party. Labour backbenchers — Nadia Whittome, Rachel Taylor, Kim Leadbeater, the former nurse Kevin McKenna — pressed the regulator hardest, joined by two members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and by Liberal Democrat voices. Question after question went to the same place: how is any of this supposed to work, and what happens to the people it shuts out?

That is not the room the EHRC would have expected a year ago.

I want to be fair about what else was in that room, because this series will be worthless if it isn’t accurate. Two MPs — Rebecca Paul and Rosie Duffield — pushed from the opposite direction, pressing the Commission to enforce the law harder for women and girls, and the interests they raised are real ones. Women’s dignity in a refuge or a hospital ward is not a trivial concern, and the meaning of “sex” that started all this was settled by the Supreme Court, not invented by the EHRC.

So Dr Stephenson and Mr Kirkpatrick spent two hours squeezed from both sides: too harsh for one half of the room, too slow for the other. And under that pressure, the same phrases kept coming back — we don’t make the law, we only explain it; it depends on the circumstances; that has to be proportionate. By the end, those phrases had started to sound less like answers and more like a place to stand while the questions kept landing.

One of those questions arrived in the form of an email. Rachel Taylor read out a message from a constituent — a trans woman, an HGV driver, whom she called Emma:

“When the new EHRC code comes into force, there will be a witch hunt against trans people… I swore on oath to the British Government that I would spend the rest of my life living full‑time as a woman. It is a shame the British Government did not keep their promise.”

Emma is making plans to move to Ireland. She no longer feels safe here.

“I’m not sure we’ve made life better for anybody”

You could feel the session searching for a defender of the outcome, and not quite finding one.

The most damning line of the afternoon was not an attack. It came from Kim Leadbeater — measured, sympathetic to the witnesses, no firebrand — reflecting on everything she’d heard:

“It certainly does not feel like we have made life better for trans people; I am not sure if we have made life better for anybody.”

Sit with that, because it is the whole session in a sentence. A new Code, years in the making, 300 pages long, fought over by everyone — and a thoughtful legislator’s honest verdict is that she cannot identify who it is for.

The evidence behind that verdict piled up as the afternoon went on. The LGBT+ charity Galop told one MP that out of 170 referrals this year, it had not been able to place a single trans woman into secure refuge accommodation — leaving those women, in Galop’s account, with their abusers or on the street. The Code’s answer to that is “alternative provision.” The trouble, as the next few days of this series will show, is that the alternative keeps turning out not to exist.

And running underneath it all was Teraina, and Emma, and the quiet sense that the people most affected by this Code were the people least able to make themselves heard in the room where it was being defended.

What happens next — and why it isn’t over

Here is the part that matters most, and the part that almost no coverage has made clear.

The Code is not law yet. It was laid before Parliament on 21 May, and Parliament has roughly forty sitting days to object before it takes effect. More than 110 MPs have already signed a motion — tabled by Nadia Whittome — calling for it to be rejected. Whatever happens, this is a live decision, not a settled one.

That changes what this moment asks of us. It is not yet time to mourn a done deal. It is time to understand exactly what is in the Code, while there is still a chance to say so — to an MP, in a consultation response, in public, out loud.

So that is what this series will do. Over the next four days I’ll take you inside the four things this session exposed, one at a time:

Tuesday — the “common‑sense” test for deciding who counts as which sex, and why it is the regulator’s invention, not the Supreme Court’s.
Wednesday — “alternative provision,” and the quiet economics that turn a promise of inclusion into exclusion by attrition.
Thursday — a regulator that won’t, in the end, regulate: guidance with no framework, and judgments handed down to nurses and small charities to make alone.
Friday — whose harm counts, and the single most uncomfortable fact of all: that the Government’s own impact assessment already admitted what was coming.

Teraina checked herself out of a hospital bed to be heard. The very least the rest of us can do is read the thing that frightened her before it becomes the law of the land.

And now what?

This is part one of The Dignity Gap — five pieces across five days. Over the coming week I’ll take the session apart piece by piece — the test, the funding, the accountability, and whose harm the Code was ever willing to count. Subscribe so the rest lands in your inbox, and if it makes you pause, or even disagree, say so. Better conversations are the whole point.