Trans people must accept loss of rights, says EHRC commissioner

Trans people must accept a reduction in their rights following the supreme court decision on gender because they "have been lied to over many years" about what their rights actually were, one of the commissioners drawing up the official post-ruling guidance has said.

- Peter Walker

Speaking at a debate about the repercussions of April's ruling that "woman" in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman, Akua Reindorf said trans people had been misled about their rights and there "has to be a period of correction".

Reindorf, a barrister who is one of eight commissioners at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), who was speaking in a personal capacity, said she believed the fault lay with trans lobbyists.

However, the human rights campaign groups Liberty and Amnesty called on the EHRC to make sure the rights of trans people were properly considered when it drew up guidance for public bodies on how to implement the changed legal landscape.

A director of the trans campaign group TransActual said Reindorf's remarks were profoundly unhelpful.

Speaking at the event, organised by the London School of Economics law school, Reindorf argued that the impact of the ruling was very clear, condemning what she called "this huge farce with organisations up and down the country wringing their hands and creating working groups and so on, and people in society worrying that they will have nowhere to go to the toilet".