THE Good Law Project is set to lodge a formal complaint with the Charity Commission after accusing an anti-trans campaign group of describing "women who are trans using women's spaces as 'deviants".
The remark from Sex Matters came in the wake of the UK Government's publication of the long-awaited guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which bans trans women from using female toilets, changing facilities and sports teams.
The repeatedly delayed Code of Practice follows the Supreme Court ruling in April last year which said that a woman is defined by biological sex under the Equality Act 2010.
It contains instructions for businesses and public bodies on how to operate under the law following the judgment, and explicitly states that in separate or single-sex service “a trans man will be excluded from the men-only service because his sex is female, and a trans woman will be excluded from the women-only service because her sex is male.”
The guidance also states that trans people “should not be included in single-sex or separate-sex competitions for the sex with which they identify."
The 340-page document was published on Thursday evening as the House of Commons rose for recess.
In its assessment of the EHRC guidance, Sex Matters took issue with the following phrase: "It is unlikely to be either practical or appropriate to approach any particular individual to make enquiries about their sex in relation to facilities, such as toilets, which are incidental to the primary service.”
The sex-based rights group responded in a publication entitled "Sex is not a 'special category' data", saying: "There is no legal basis for this instruction, which in effect licenses men to enter women’s facilities and claim that it is inappropriate, possibly unlawful and a breach of their human rights to challenge them."
The group further stated: "Telling staff supervising single-sex spaces that they must second-guess themselves when they become aware of a man engaging in the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space, or risk breaching data-protection law, will lead to unwanted conduct related to the protected characteristic of sex that is likely to meet the definition of harassment in the Equality Act. It 'violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment'."
Now, Joylon Maugham KC, founder and director of the Good Law Project, has said a complaint will be lodged with the Charity Commission over the statement.
In a post on Bluesky, Maugham wrote: "We're complaining to the Charity Commission about Sex Matters describing women who are trans using women's spaces as 'deviants'.
"The language is unacceptable (and the statement is wrong in law)."
Both Sex Matters and the Charity Commission have been approached for comment.
The National previously told how advocacy group TransActual UK warned that the new EHRC guidance leaves transgender people with "less rights than they had prior to last year’s Supreme Court ruling”.
The group added: “Not only does this new guidance fail to protect the rights and dignity of transgender people, but appears to have weakened protections for the LGBT+ community as a whole.”
Meanwhile, the Good Law Project said that there had been “big changes” since the previous “transphobic draft”, but that the code was “not good enough”.
