Trans+ Solidarity Alliance founder marks one year since Supreme Court gender ruling: ‘Our rights were dismantled’
"We have to stand up together and prove that the future is not fixed and rollbacks of rights are not inevitable," Jude Guaitamacchi writes
I remember the mood a year ago being one of not just fear, but isolation. The headlines after the Supreme Court judgment were crushing and inescapable, presenting it as not just a legal decision – but a total moral and philosophical victory against trans existence.
We were all already used to hostile media and political campaigns against our rights, but this felt different. For trans people, our worlds stopped turning, but for many others their lives continued blissfully unaware of what was happening to us. For those who welcomed the ruling, this was the final victory they needed to let any remnants of the mask slip – revelling in an end to paying any lip service to trans equality.
The aftermath was brutal, with the cruelty spelled out in plain sight without facade or subtlety. Not long after, our supposed human rights regulator the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) put forward proposed rules for our everyday lives that would have devastated us all.
Many of us struggled to find hope, scared for the future
The EHRC’s approach was transphobic from the outset, determined to turn our equality laws into a transgender bathroom ban and mandate our exclusion from a wide range of services, spaces and groups – regardless of their preference to remain inclusive.
Many of us struggled to find hope, scared for the future, as regulators talked up our exclusion and ministers suggested they planned to wave such proposals through, behind closed doors, as quickly as possible. We, as a community, don’t have the money and resources that anti-trans campaigners do – but we have managed something special.
A quiet, politically painless, death of trans rights in the UK was what the government seemed to expect – but they got something else entirely. The backlash against transphobia was immediate and fierce, and we came together to stand up and fight back. The first protests just after the ruling were huge and powerful, and we have continued since to make our voices heard – in our mass lobby of Parliament, in the streets, in Westminster, and in the media.
What we did was remarkable, but the fight is far from over and we cannot give up now
We have not let our rights slip away quietly, and we have moved the needle – one painful bit at a time. This week we found out that the government has decided to scrap the original EHRC Code of Practice, the one that set out to exclude us, in favour of a new amended version to address concerns from the government and the public. None of us will see the new guidance until the government intends to approve it in May, but killing off the original shows the real power of solidarity.
Whether the new guidance will be meaningfully better, we will be watching closely and will hold the government to account. This Labour government has completely lost the trust of the LGBTQ+ community on the issue, and many are asking who else they might decide to throw under the bus next for political convenience? But scrapping the original EHRC guidance is an achievement worth reflecting on, given how impossible it seemed at that time last year when we were convinced it would be nodded through immediately.
What we did was remarkable, but the fight is far from over and we cannot give up now. As a community, we held back the EHRC’s proposed guidance with our bare hands – without the budgets or power of the other side – and forced the government to hear us. Many are worried they still won’t do enough to meaningfully protect us, I am too, but we have to keep going.
Our rights must continue to be fought for, advanced and defended
Sadly, whatever happens with this guidance, we are now seeing the spread of the Supreme Court’s reductionist ruling across other areas of our lives. In workplaces, judges have endorsed our exclusion based on the ruling’s flawed definitions of gender – while trans kids have seen the cruelty of the ruling bleeding out into guidance affecting how they are treated in schools, treating them coming out as an outcome to be suppressed. We still have a lot to fix, but the powerful fight back that we have mounted together so far has shown me something vital: we are not voiceless, and we are not powerless.
As a non-binary person declared a ‘biological woman’ by the courts, my mental health has suffered like it has for so many of my trans siblings, but we have to remember to carry on fighting for a better world. As a community and a movement, we have all taken action in different ways and every single one of them has been vital to keeping the pressure up since last year. This pressure, with the help of our allies, has been the only thing holding back the tide since the first days after the Supreme Court ruling.
We have to stand up together and prove that the future is not fixed and rollbacks of rights are not inevitable. Our rights must continue to be fought for, advanced and defended. For those of you who care about trans rights, however you choose to protect them, keep going and don’t give up. We are going to need it.
Jude Guaitamacchi is the founder of Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, a campaigning nonprofit fighting for trans+ equality and working together to drive positive change. For more information, and to support their work, visit transsolidarityalliance.com.