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

[OhBuggerandArse]

Sorry if this has already been shared - here are the links to their letter and statement. Looking forward to the Mumsnet analysis :-)

https://goodlawproject.org/were-bringing-a-legal-challenge-to-the-ehrcs-interim-update

https://goodlawproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Letter-to-the-Equality-and-Human-Rights-Commission-16-May-2025_Redacted.pdf

As demonstrated, in repeated cases, you can take all this into court, explain it, go through it, write whole judgments on it, and it still isn't understood when things don't go as they are identified as going. It will just be explained that not enough/the right people were there to emote, that everyone is transphobic, that words meant something other than they were written....

this is the core issue of trying to engage using reality and process with a movement rooted in aversion to reality and personal facts. I don't know what the answer is really. Other than repeatedly putting it legally back behind the boundaries and huge costs to deter mindless followers, and accepting there are going to be endless teenaged type ranting about how nobody loves them or understands them.

Is the GLP's chance of winning in the room with us now?

The GLP describes itself: 'unlike many others it is both willing and able to litigate' 😄

I think that tells us all we need to know about their chances of success.

Jolyon has posted a video here for his fans: https://x.com/GoodLawProject/status/1923371695210893724

Well that video has me convinced 😆

So they're focussing on toilets? A man's right to pee alongside women? Will they be using their killer argument that as women can take their male babies into women's toilets that means that middle aged trans identifying men MUST be allowed to join the woman? 🤔

Minister for Women and Equalities will be asked to choose whether she abandons her statement that trans people must use the toilet of their “biological” sex or defend it as consistent with the UK’s human rights obligations.

Well that’s easy peasy to ‘defend’.

Single sex toilets are the best choice for Article 2, the Right to Life. Article 2 means ‘the Government should take appropriate measures to safeguard life by making laws to protect you and, in some circumstances, by taking steps to protect you if your life is at risk. Public authorities should also consider your right to life when making decisions that might put you in danger or that affect your life expectancy.’

The only government toilet design that can have door gaps is a single sex design. With the door gaps you can see if someone has collapsed on the floor. You can see how many people are in the cubicle. You can see if anyone’s life is in danger. It is right that governments have said that single sex toilets should be prioritised as they are the safest.

If there’s any ambiguity, then the design becomes private. All mixed sex, universal, or gender neutral designs do not have door gaps.

The safest choice for any person is to use a single sex public toilet but it is particularly important for woman and children (due to assaults) and those with medical conditions.
This completely aligns with Article 2 The Right to Life.

Is he an actual lawyer? I’m sorry but he could have made an effort to look a bit more professional. He looks like one of the blokes you get in a pub waffling about their next big win

I can't face reading all that verbiage at the moment, but I did see a bit about trans rights (TW, naturally) being thwarted by BTP suspending their policy of allowing trans officers to search the opposite sex.

That Maugham and his vanity project could even think of seeing men not being allowed to (intimately) search female detainees as a breach of men's rights is utterly unbelievable.

I've seen this before, of course, having knocked around here for a few years now, but to see it expressed in such a document is quite frightening.

Why are these men so hell bent on accessing women's spaces and the women in them? Its all profoundly disturbing. In order to support these men you must either be a raging misogynist who feels women shouldn't have any rights or be allowed to maintain their own dignity or you must actually believe that somehow a man, a fully adult male was somehow due to some administrative error by god or the stork born into the wrong body, in which case you are a raging idiot.

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.

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.

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

What does it say on their birth certificate?

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

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.

Good Laugh Project?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.