Good Law Project suing the EHRC and Bridget Phillipson - letter before action

Is it all about transwomen, or do transmen get a look in?

Doesn’t Foxy have two daughters who both claim to be transmen? So you’d think he’d be concerned about them.

That's silly. Not only guilty people find themselves involved with the police. You can be suspected of something you didn't actually do. Not to mention criminals also have human rights and deserve to be treated with dignity.

We rightly wouldn't accept the argument that if women don't want to be searched by male officers or imprisoned with male prisoners, they should just not commit crimes. We shouldn't make this argument either.

The point is that it's not a violation of your rights to be treated like any other member of your sex.

Maugham is not just a former tax lawyer. Although he doesn't practise as a barrister any more he still identifies as a KC, i.e. supposedly one of the most senior and skilled barristers in the UK. In other circumstances, I suppose he might have tried to become a judge, so we should probably be very grateful that he's gone off in this other direction.

Haven't watched the video or read the letter. There seems little point. Is it all about transwomen, or do transmen get a look in?

If I had a young girl or woman close to me who identified as male or non-binary, I would be worried sick about her going into male changing rooms, toilets etc, over and above all the worry about possible medical and surgical treatments she might want to inflict on herself. I can't imagine advocating for reverting to the pre-SC days when Stonewall law said transmen were fine in all-male settings. But there we are, we're all different.

Or d) transwomen have a really really good try at not committing crimes, and thereby never need to be searched by anyone?

"Why aren't they fundraising and campaigning for, say, awareness-raising about how gender-non-conforming men in men's spaces shouldn't be subjected to violence or ridicule?"

@LittleBitofBread Because where is the fun in that for them? Will they get a euphoria boner from being accepted by other men? Will being accepted as a gender non conforming male allow them to shit on women and use them or their spaces for validation, no to all of that. Their fury at the SC ruling and their fight to be able to access women's spaces regardless is all about male sexual rights and gratification which to the male brain should held as sacred above all else.

Precisely this. What a lot of sound and fury. Why aren't they fundraising and campaigning for, say, awareness-raising about how gender-non-conforming men in men's spaces shouldn't be subjected to violence or ridicule? I mean, I might even support that.

I suppose anything is possible, as the past decade or so has horrifyingly demonstrated..

But stepping back and trying to be objective - this is all about toilets??
It's not about not being allowed vote, or only being allowed to shop for groceries between the hours of 8am and 9.30am, or having to step off the pavement to allow Gender Critical woman to pass, or being forced to tidy litter from the side of the A13 for 10 hours a day using only a hall-marked silver Georgian sugar tongs...

It's not even about toilets, as in 'we physically can't use them' - which was the origin of the campaign for accessible toilets for disabled people which started in the 1960s - it's about which toilets they prefer to use, for very their own very abstract reasons.

I'd like to think that they'll be told to feck off and stop bothering us reframe their trauma that they don't have a case, but like I said, anything is possible🙄

I think this just shows how blind they are. We read that and think ‘well yes, obviously only women should search women’. And put ourselves in the position of either a woman forced to be searched by a man, or a woman forced to search a man.

They see it purely from the viewpoint, I presume, of being a transwoman and so convinced that you are a woman that you feel violated by being searched by a man.

Which, for certain transwomen, I have a degree of sympathy with.

But, being female, my solution is not that strip searches should be by gender, because of the problems for women identified above.

My solutions are either:
a) tough. The greater good requires only same sex searches.
b) transwomen can choose, if they wish, to be searched by a transwoman. They might need to wait longer.
c) We propose to the general public that the police stop searching transwomen altogether, on the basis that there are only a few of them, no one would ever pretend to be one when they are not, and they are uniquely vulnerable and deserve special treatment. Police officers hold consultations on this with the public, see if people can see any flaws in it, and then decide on the policy after that.

I am being charitable and presuming no one could possibly be insisting on the right of men to strip search women.

What are they actually suing for? What has been the damage? As far I know (IANAL) you cannot sue for something that has not happened to you, can you?

That makes sense. It's the only explanation.

I don’t understand it either.

I wondered if it was a way of making all toilet cubicles private as there was a big debate in 2003/4 when the government made it illegal to have sex in a public toilet. There was lots of upset and talk of what was private/semi-private then. At least one MP was upset arguing it discriminated against men. He reckoned most public toilets were unisex and private anyway back then which I don’t think is true.

Toilets have always been very political and some men seem very invested in controlling what happens in them.

I think that the angle they prefer is that men who are to be intimately searched should have the right to make a female officer perform that search.

Obviously both sides of the equation are equally repulsive once you couch them in accurate language, but they prefer to focus on the hypothetical of a male being searched as opposed to a male officer performing a search.

Does the GLP not see how sinister statements like this sound-

"..reports soon emerged that employers and service providers were beginning to adopt policies that wholly disregarded the rights and needs of trans people ......For example, the British Transport Police amended its strip-searching policy to state that searches in custody would be conducted “in accordance with the biological sex of the detainee”.

So men have the right and need to strip search women. Why do they need it so desperately? It makes me really uncomfortable

Sigh. Having witnessed this sort of thing from the 'inside', my heart sinks at the knowledge of how much official time and energy will be diverted to dealing with this rather than the many other things that government ought to be focusing on.

On the plus side, I note from one of his footnotes that Kew Gardens now offers single sex toilets again. Hurrah for that.

ChatGPT says:

Yes, UK case law has established that failing to provide single-sex toilet facilitiesoffering only unisex optionscan constitute direct sex discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.

Key Case Law

Earl Shilton Town Council v Miller [2023] EAT 5

In this case, Ms. Miller, a female employee, was required to use either a shared toilet used by a children’s playgroup or a cubicle within the men’s toilets, which lacked privacy and sanitary facilities. The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) upheld that these arrangements subjected her to less favourable treatment compared to male colleagues, amounting to direct sex discrimination.

Abbas v ISS Facility Services

Miss Abbas, the sole female employee at her site, had access only to a men’s washroom and a shared accessible toilet, which lacked proper locks and hygiene standards. The tribunal found that the absence of a dedicated female facility constituted direct sex discrimination.

Legal and Regulatory Context

Under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, employers are required to provide separate toilet facilities for men and women unless each facility is in a separate room and can be locked from the inside. The Equality Act 2010 allows for single-sex services when they are a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, such as ensuring privacy and dignity.

Recent Developments

A UK Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 clarified that “sex” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. Following this, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) advised that eliminating single-sex toilets in favor of unisex facilities could lead to indirect sex discrimination against women.

Conclusion

Providing only unisex toilets without single-sex options can be discriminatory, particularly if it compromises privacy or dignity. Employers and service providers should ensure compliance with legal requirements by offering appropriate single-sex facilities.

But is there not case law where not providing single sex toilets in a workplace and only having unisex is discriminatory? Disclaimer: IANAL

Maugham has a trans child (at a school near me where Mrs Maugham has her claws firmly in the PTA) and he’s one of those parents who’ve lashed themselves firmly to the trans mast and will go down with the sinking ship. He can’t admit he’s got it very very wrong. These parents are utterly messianic.

The letter lost me when it said this:

"The Fourth Claimant: Good Law Project Limited. The Fourth Claimant is perhaps the largest advocate for transgender rights in the United Kingdom. It has litigated or supported almost all of the leading public law cases on trans rights since 2020."

Sadly the Fourth Claimant omitted to to reveal its success rate in court, which is, as far as I understand it, a big, fat zero.

Maybe he means that BP saying ‘trans people must use the toilet of their biological sex’ could be understood to mean ‘trans people must not use unisex toilets, but only the toilets of their biological sex’?? I mean, it is a fairly bizarre reading of it. Along the lines of ‘I wasn’t born a man because a man is an adult’. But a quick clarification that of course trans people can use unisex toilets should therefore suffice.

Good Laugh Project?

Having read it, I think what he is saying is ‘the Workplace Regulations say unisex ‘whole room toilets are OK’. The interim guidance says single sex toilets must be provided. Therefore the interim guidance is wrong, because it should say unisex toilets are OK.

On that bit I think I am with him.

However, there is also the fact that the new building regulations (which I presume apply to new large workplaces?) say single sex toilets must be provided in addition to unisex.

But I lose him a bit where he starts to say that transgender people must be able to use opposite sex toilets.

He is right, there are a number of cases where women’s rights seem to have been completely ignored in favour of transwomen. But I they are mostly either about particular employment situations, or from a time when it wasn’t so obvious that trans people couldn’t be assumed to be vanishingly small in number that things could be brushed under the carpet.

I am all in favour of a very clear discussion and debate about this. We know what the polls say. The government is hugely relieved to be able to say ‘the Supreme Court has brought clarity’ because it knows that standing up and saying ‘yes it is our policy that women must get changed in front of men’ is not going to go down well.

Yes he's a TAX lawyer not a human rights lawyer

Does this supposed intersex person actually have a DSD or do they just "identity as intersex"?

What does it say on their birth certificate?

Foran covers the possibilities to challenge based on treaty obligations at some length, so nothing to worry about.

and to add one has to seek permission of the Court to proceed so it is very possible that the application is thrown out as without merit.

He's a tax lawyer. Tax and Toilets both start with a T, as does Trans. It's a tenuous link but all I've got.