UK Equality Regulator Claims Transgender Rights Never Existed
The equality regulator now seeks to erase trans rights past, present, and future
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered.” — George Orwell, 1984
They’re not just downplaying the removal of transgender people’s rights; they’re rewriting history.
Speaking a few days ago at a debate held by the London School of Economics (LSE), Akua Reindorf said that trans people “have been lied to over many years about what their rights are.”
Reindorf is a lawyer and King’s Counsel (KC) and has been an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) commissioner since 2021. She says it was the EHRC, as well as lobbyists and activists, who “lied” to trans people.
Other senior members of the UK EHRC have aligned themselves with Reindorf’s message, following April’s Supreme Court ruling on the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act (2010).
Reindorf claims that transgender people have never had the right to use single-sex services and spaces according to their gender identity, and that such spaces should be used on the basis of “biological sex”, or sex assigned at birth, according to the Supreme Court.
“Biological sex” isn’t defined in either the Equality Act or the Supreme Court judgement.
Commissioner Reindorf also said that “there has to be a period of correction” in which transgender people accept this loss of rights — rights which the EHRC now claim didn’t exist at all, despite the EHRC saying they did exist for nearly fifteen years in their statutory legal guidance.
That guidance is still available on the EHRC’s website, and it clearly states:
If a service provider provides single- or separate sex services for women and men, or provides services differently to women and men, they should treat transsexual people according to the gender role in which they present.
The guidance goes on to say that trans people can be excluded under certain exceptional circumstances, but only on a case-by-case basis, not in a blanket way, as Commissioner Reindorf has claimed.
Reindorf’s comments have been reiterated by Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), who said during a select committee hearing that “trans people have not lost any rights, as the supreme court has informed us and the whole country”.
It was put to Baroness Falkner that forcing trans people to use a different bathroom, either according to their sex assigned at birth or, as Falkner has herself suggested, a “third space”, would forcibly “out” them as transgender and breach Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention, the right to privacy.
Falkner replied that the EHRC didn’t believe the right to privacy applied to trans people, nor presumably to cisgender people, in the context of having to reveal details about their sex or gender history.
All of this is pretty astonishing from the body tasked with ensuring rights under the Equality Act are upheld.
Even more bizarrely, Commissioner Reindorf has said that any organisation that followed the legal, statutory fifteen-year-old EHRC guidance “only has themselves to blame”.
… for following the law.
It’s astonishing that senior members of the EHRC, responsible for upholding the rights of marginalised groups, including transgender people, would seriously argue that a decade and a half of rights just… didn’t exist.
It’s an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history to obfuscate the very obvious fact that the Supreme Court and the EHRC are removing rights from transgender people, despite their claims to the contrary.
Why is the equality regulator telling a minority, which it has a legal duty to protect from discrimination, that they have fewer rights than just two months ago, while gaslighting us by telling us those rights didn’t exist in the first place?
It doesn’t make sense.
At least, it doesn’t make sense until you understand just how much Akua Reindorf, Baroness Falkner, the EHRC, and arguably the Supreme Court, have been influenced by the ‘gender critical’ ideology of anti-trans groups.
The recent Supreme Court ruling was brought against the Scottish Government by the anti-trans campaign group For Women Scotland. Another anti-trans group, Sex Matters, was an intervener in the case, as was the LGB Alliance and several other anti-trans groups, and the EHRC.
No pro-trans groups were heard from as part of the case — in fact, they were denied without any reason being given. Neither were there any trans-inclusive women’s groups, nor any women’s groups whose focus isn’t primarily opposing transgender rights.
Akua Reindorf has previously represented Sex Matters, along with several other anti-trans groups and activists, including the LGB Alliance, Michael Biggs, and Julie Bindel. She has even represented these groups during her time as an EHRC commissioner, which is a clear conflict of interest.
Also speaking at the LSE event were Ben Cooper KC, who represented Sex Matters in the recent Supreme Court case, and Naomi Cunningham, the chair of Sex Matters.
And it was all very friendly, celebratory even; another speaker, Sarah Vine KC, of the anti-trans group Legal Feminist, wore a t-shirt with “victory” plastered across it. They apparently all went to the pub afterwards. Less a debate, more a cosy, transphobic chat hosted by one of the UK’s most elite educational institutions. I’ll let you decide what that says about the state of transphobia in British academia.
Recent documents obtained by the Trans Advocacy and Complaints Collective (TACC) via an FOI request show that the current chair of the EHRC, Baroness Kishwer Falkner, along with several unnamed EHRC commissioners (quite possibly Reindorf, though the commissioners’ names are redacted), met with Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater.
In private correspondence to Baroness Falkner, Forstater outlines suggestions for changing the wording of the EHRC’s legal guidance to more easily exclude transgender people from single-sex spaces, in ways which seem to be echoed by the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgement and the subsequent EHRC interim guidance.
It looks a lot like the EHRC, including Baroness Falkner and Aku Reindorf, are singing from Sex Matters’ anti-trans hymn sheet. Commissioner Reindorf certainly talks the talk.
The EHRC has been compromised by hate
During the debate, Sex Matters’ chair Naomi Cunningham referred to transgender people as a “cult” suffering from “mass delusion”.
In addition to such obviously transphobic language, all the panel members, including Reindorf, used the anti-trans dog-whistle “trans identified men” to refer to trans women throughout the discussion.
Later in the discussion, in response to a question about school children’s pronoun use, Commissioner Reindorf replied to an audience member, “look at Sex Matters’ website, is usually what I say to people when I don’t know the answer”.
That’s an EHRC commissioner, whose job is to uphold anti-discrimination laws for, among others, transgender people, openly admitting to deferring to the legal opinion of an anti-trans hate group.
During the select committee hearing, Baroness Falkner was quick to raise ‘gender critical’ talking points on transgender people in sport and other “issues”, to the point she was scolded by the committee chair for going off-topic.
The entire reasoning of the EHRC’s actions rests on the assumption that trans rights and women’s rights are in conflict; “other people have rights”, says Commissioner Reindorf — not trans people, apparently.
This is a claim often made by anti-trans groups, without evidence. It hasn’t been an issue for the majority of the fifteen years the Equality Act has been in operation, and only came to be seen as a problem due to the efforts of anti-trans activists. Really, it’s a solution — the exclusion and erasure of trans people, sought by anti-trans groups — seeking a problem to justify it.
It’s clear that the EHRC has collaborated with anti-trans groups to remove trans rights — past, present and future — and is being driven by transphobic ideologues.
And there could be no greater symbol of this collusion than this image, taken from the footage of the select committee hearing.
At the front sits Kishwer Falkner, chair of the EHRC, behind her sits Akua Reindorf. And behind them both, peering over Falkner’s shoulder as she defends the EHRC’s anti-trans agenda? Maya Forstater, the founder and CEO of Sex Matters. And just to top it off, Fiona McAnena, Sex Matters’ Director of Campaigns, is there as well.
By forcing through its strict transphobic interpretation of what was already an anti-trans Supreme Court judgement (which they influenced), the EHRC is doing its best to twist reality and rewrite history and erase trans people’s rights.
The equality regulator has been compromised by hate and turned into a paradoxical perversion of what it was founded to do — uphold people’s rights, not remove them.
The EHRC is no longer fit for purpose.
I saw the headline and predicted the quote you opened with. Your point of these people seeing women's rights and trans rights as in conflict is a really simple way to put down how they can feel so righteous about their hate. Thank you for this article 🩷🤍🩵 stay safe & sane!