Just plopping this here as I did it up for the break it down 2 thread.
EA2010 EHCR GUIDANCE HISTORY SUMMARY
by KISHWER FALKNER AND AKUA REINDORF
5th August 2026
https://archive.is/iiXxD
This is a good short summary of the history of the guidance and how we got here
“The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) revised statutory code of practice for services, which is effective on Wednesday, is 342 pages long, but only a small part of it has received public attention: the section explaining how to implement the 2025 decision of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers.
The judgment did not change the law. It just clarified that in the Equality Act 2010 the words “woman”, “man” and “sex” refer to biological sex. On that point, the 2011 version of the code was wrong. It said that transgender people should generally be permitted to self-identify into single-sex services for the opposite sex.
It had been known that the old code was wrong since 2022, when another case established that “self-ID” is not the law. That is when hospitals should have stopped making female nurses share changing rooms with male colleagues who identify as women. It is when male prisoners who discovered a transgender identity between the courtroom and the prison cell should no longer have been placed into women’s jails. Female-only rape crisis centres should have refused entry to men who said they were women. And shops, leisure centres and pubs should have taken down the signs telling customers to use whichever toilets they felt comfortable with.
But those things did not stop. The law was widely ignored until the Supreme Court judgment hit the headlines. Legally, that judgment was about a minor issue: whether the 9,000 transgender people who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs) should be treated as their biological sex under the Equality Act, in the same way as transgender people who do not hold GRCs. The court decided that they should.
Stonewall quickly announced that the judgment was “not law” until the revised code took effect. That was irrefutably wrong, but it took hold. From the Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates policy for central government departments, to the Scottish parliament and government, to NHS bodies, police forces, local authorities and private sector businesses, organisations which were still operating on a self-ID model carried on, repeating the mantra that they were “waiting for the EHRC guidance”. So too did employers and unions, even though the code does not cover the law applicable to workplaces. “
And it continues on ..
“The code is finally coming into effect today. It feels like a victory for those of us who devoted months of anxious scrutiny to its creation.
But in reality it changes nothing. The law was already the law, and it will continue to be the law. It will still be disregarded by those who oppose it, especially if encouraged by continued government apathy about women’s rights to privacy, dignity and safety. And it will remain unenforced by the EHRC, which simply cannot take up the cudgels on its meagre funding.
It is not a historic day for women’s rights. But the code is at least a tool in the armoury of those women and grass-roots groups who will have to carry on fighting this uniquely ferocious war. We salute them.”