This interview in the The Times was an interesting read:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/20b84c9d-97ae-4df2-9190-870488c25d3a?shareToken=a34c469509b4a7e7917001bee5f6828a
‘Women means women’: ex-commissioner lambasts delays on trans guidance
Akua Reindorf, former commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that the war on self-ID has been won — now it’s about the backlash
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Ministers are undermining the independence of Britain’s equality watchdog by delaying guidance that would ban transgender women from single-sex female spaces, the lawyer who helped write the guidance has said.
Akua Reindorf, who until last year was a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the government was inventing “procedural hurdles” to avoid a political row over sex and gender.
In her first interview since leaving the regulator, Reindorf said that it was not for the government to decide on guidance.
She claimed her appointment to the commission in 2020 provoked internal opposition from staff at the equalities watchdog almost immediately, and likened the actions of some members of staff, most of whom no longer work for the organisation, to “sabotage”.
The updated guidance on how the Equality Act is applied to services was submitted to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, four months ago. However, it has not yet been laid before parliament, and ministers have said they need more time to consider its impact on businesses and ensure it is “right”.
“It’s not for them to get it right or wrong,” Reindorf said. “It’s for them to like it or lump it. They either say it’s fine and put it before parliament or they send it back.
“It’s the commission’s code of practice. It’s not their code of practice. That’s why the commission exists — to do things like that.”
Reindorf said it was “immediately clear” that she had been appointed to overhaul the regulator’s approach to sex and gender alongside Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the chairwoman, whose term also concluded in December last year.
“That was a shock,” Reindorf said. “That you turn up at this organisation and not only are you maybe fighting groups from the outside, actually you’re fighting within the organisation.”
She said that there was a feeling some staff “were there to pursue some social justice agenda” rather than apply equality law.
“It was like banging your head against a brick wall,” she said. “There was insubordination, essentially.”
She said that lawyers instructed by the board were ignored, alternative counsel was brought in and agreed changes were not implemented. “You’d just find that things weren’t done,” she said.
Although she feels that while the “war” over biological sex has been won, she said that the “battle” would continue for another decade.
Phillipson has told the EHRC that it must produce an assessment of the burden on businesses caused by the guidance, which sets out how organisations should interpret the Supreme Court’s ruling in April 2025 that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is defined by biology.
However, the EHRC is understood to believe it should not be required to carry out such an assessment because the guidance does not create new obligations, but explains existing law. Any costs faced by businesses therefore flow from the ruling itself rather than the document it has produced.
Reindorf said the government’s demand for costings was unprecedented.
“When’s that ever been done for a code of practice before?” she said. “None of this drama has occurred in relation to any of them. And what was the cost to business of letting men use women’s facilities ten years ago when people started behaving as if that was an entitlement in law, which it never was?”
She said ministers were effectively asking how much it would cost organisations to comply with the law after years of being misled into breaking it.
Reindorf said that the EHRC had spent years trying to repair the “damage”, first through single-sex services guidance and then through a full rewrite of the code of practice, which was last updated in 2011 and is still in force.
The new code was sent to ministers before the Supreme Court ruled in the For Women Scotland case in April, with further changes made after the judgment. Those changes, she said, amounted to only about 11 pages, largely dealing with the position of people with gender recognition certificates.
“They’re reading eleven pages of stuff and deciding whether or not they think it’s something they want to lay before parliament,” she said. “If they don’t, send it back. But they’re not doing either of those things.”
Reindorf believed the reason for the delay was that ministers had been waiting out the end of Baroness Falkner’s term and were wary of igniting opposition within Labour. She said that briefings suggesting the commission was acting in bad faith over the code were “absolutely shocking”.
“What the commission did was try to get the law right,” she said. “We took advice and worked on the basis of specialist legal advice. We hammered through difficult issues. We got second opinions where there were issues.”
Reindorf, a KC who specialises in employment, discrimination and human rights, said that there was also the issue of organisations across Britain having embedded what she called “Stonewall law” into their policies: the belief that self-identification gave access to single-sex spaces.
She said she had been particularly disappointed by the reaction of some of those in the legal profession.
“There was a lot of advice being put out on social media that was just plain wrong,” she said, with particular anger at the Good Law Project, which has brought a judicial review against the EHRC interim update, published shortly after the court ruling.
“Self-ID was never ever the law. Women means women, and that’s the end of it. If you’re male, you use the men’s, if you’re female, you use the women’s,” Reindorf said. “There’s usually a unisex option of one sort or another, for those who aren’t comfortable with that.”
But while the Supreme Court’s ruling should have settled the issue, it instead promoted an “astonishing” backlash, she believes because “people were led to believe they had rights that they didn’t have”.
“I was surprised first of all, in the aftermath of the judgement, that there was any pushback really at all because I thought it was clear,” she said. “I understood that people would be upset, but I thought they might understand that this was the law.”
Jo Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, said: “In our legal system the working out in subsequent cases of the consequences of a final court of appeal decision is entirely routine.”
A spokesperson for the government said: “We know how important it is that women have access to safe spaces. That is the basis on which we are taking things forward. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has submitted a draft Code of Practice to Ministers, and we are working as quickly as we can to review it with the care it deserves.
“Understanding impacts is a routine and regular aspect of decision making. It is right and responsible that we take due care when it comes to guidance and fully understand its practical implications for public services, businesses and others that will be required to follow it.”
Reindorf said she believed the fight would continue for another decade because gender ideology was so deeply embedded. “There’s a great deal of work to do,” she said.
However, she added: “The war is won. At the moment it’s just a question of mopping up and dealing with the backlash.”