For Trans Allies: Petition to oppose draft Equality Act guidance on sex and gender

[HopefulPetitioner]

Petition: Disapprove the draft Equality Act 2010 guidance laid on 21 May 2026

“I want the House of Commons to disapprove the Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, 2026 laid on 21 May 2026”.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/770527

That's nice.

Still doesn't change the law.

There’s a petitions topic for promoting petitions- maybe ask MN to move it to the correct thread. Petitions aren’t generally allowed in other threads.

You need to petition to get the law changed, not to ignore the correct guidance as to how the law should be applied.

Good luck with that.

Whilst I don’t support the aims of your campaign, I support your right to campaign by legal means.

I am concerned that your aims as stated in the petition fail to take into account the equality rights as imbued by sex.

how do you propose to square that circle?

Hi, OP. We've moved your thread to our Petitions and Activism board now.

thanks op, seeing this reminded me to check the petitions board and I noticed one which would be good rather than bad for women
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/petitions_noticeboard/5543606-queues-at-the-ladies?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

Thanks for moving the thread.

Bump….

Let's be honest here. The petition opens with this statement.

We are concerned that the guidance published on 21 May 2016 could lead to women being excluded from women's spaces based on their appearance.

You aren't concerned about this one jot, never mind to the extent that you think it actually deserves to come first.

I'm one of the women you are trying to use "protect". I don't want your protection. I would rather be quizzed by any number of women than have any woman who doesn't want a person with a penis in her woman only space forced to put up with that situation. There is no prospect of any biological female being excluded from a woman only space.

For a laugh, I had a look at the heat map.

The red and dark red places...They wouldn't be Brighton and neighbouring districts, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, would they? The usual suspects?

Disapproving the guidance won't change the law, it will just mean that businesses and service providers have to pay for expensive individual lawyers to tell them what the law is (or risk being sued if they don't bother) rather than having publishrd guidance to tell them. The law is that in general men and women should be treated equally and together but when it is proportionate and justified to make provision separately for male and female, that division is by sex not gender. Including male people with a feminine gender identity into female services is nonsensical because there are no cases where the rationale for why the service is divided into male and female is based on gender - in each case the rationale is based on factors that derive from biological sex. Basing it on biological sex by definition upholds that female people do not need to present or perform femininity in order to be admitted.

This is a ridiculous petition, as is the related EDM in parliament. If you want the law changed to erase the concept of women as a category from all equalities protection (which is what would be required in order to give the trans lobby what they want and allow males free access to anything that is reserved for females) then you need to campaign for that openly and justify your misogyny. Being asked whether you are in the right place is no hardship, it's a perfectly normal part of life. As a woman whose presentation is around gender-neutral to masculine it could certainly happen to me, and I would feel no more "upset" than I would being asked to show my ticket for a cinema or train (not that I'd need to show ID because even the butchest woman, even with facial hair, is still clearly female at more than a glance - so I wouldn't be excluded, because I am female. It's ridiculous to suggest that any female people will suffer from male people being excluded from female spaces.

The whole point of sharing it more widely.

200 signatures in the last hour.

Ditto, I disagree with you but this is the right way. Debate and democracy.

But the bit you are missing is law. It’s surely the underlying legislation you really object to.

The guidance just states how the law has been since 2010, though previously misapplied.

So you're asking the government to disobey the law?

Something being legal doesn’t make it right.

Something being illegal doesn’t make it wrong.

Bad law makes problems worse, not better.

Luckily, we live in a democracy.

If the law isn’t fit for purpose it can be challenged and changed.

The petition isn't challenging the law though is it? Its challenging the guidance.
Even if you get the guidance changed, the law will still say services can be segregated by sex and men cant use or access facilities provided for women.
So what is the petition actually hoping to achieve?

This petition is not about changing the law it's only about not approving guidance. If you want to change the law why isn't the petition asking for the Equality Act to be changed. Not approving the guidance doesn't change the law as set out in th Equality Act.

You are worried that the guidance "could lead to women being excluded from women's spaces based on their appearance" but show no concern at all for the women that are already being excluded from services and spaces that they cannot trust to be single sex.

Don't pretend to care about women then argue against the legal protections that we have on the basis of sex.

Edited to change strange formatting.

Is there a reason as to why you didn’t start a petition when the Equality Act came into force in 2010? After all, that was when it was made clear that men could not enter single sex spaces / sport / competition etc.
Just because Stonewall decided to wrongly explain the law to any idiot who was willing to hand over loads of money to get their seal of approval doesnt mean the law has just been changed.

I hope you're spelling out exactly what will happen if gender identity trumps biological sex in determining who can access women's spaces and services. Here's one consequence, which fortunately the Scottish courts have belatedly acted (thanks to the incredible women of ForWomenScotland) to prevent. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4glne43101o

But this petition isn’t doing that. It’s virtue signalling, that’s all.
Do YOU think men should be allowed free access to women's spaces? If so, why?

Absolutely bloody not. I care about women's rights, dignity and privacy not the demands of mentally ill men.

No thanks

Absolutely not here either, you should feel ashamed of trying to throw women under the bus and set us back 200 years. Trans Allies indeed, what a load of rot.