Writing to my MP about trans rights ...again

Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson, in her role as Minister “for Women and Equalities” laid a new code of practice before Parliament. As it’s still transphobic bullshit, we wrote to our MP again.

Dear Stephen Doughty,

You may recall we wrote to you in April last year about the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers; there is a copy of the text on my website at https://owen.blacker.me.uk/posts/blog/2025-04-17-trans-rights/

We are sure you will be aware that, immediately before you rose for Whitsun recess, the Education Secretary laid before Parliament a new Code of Practice for Services from the EHRC: guidance regarding gendered terms and gendered spaces. While some changes have been made from the draft, the guidance is still fundamentally flawed and represents a transphobic perspective on gender, wrongly posing the rights of trans people as being in opposition to the right of cis-gendered women, when all the evidence shows that the rights of the underprivileged are always aligned.

As we told you previously, as a queer cis woman who does not always conform to stereotypical expectations of femininity, this leaves ██████ less safe and embolden violent bigots potentially to assault her for potentially not meeting their definition of womanhood. As a queer cis man, this leaves Owen worrying for transmasc and enby friends and family and women — cis and trans alike — who are less safe now than they were before the For Women Scotland ruling.

Most importantly, of course, this ruling leaves our trans friends and family at an even higher risk of harassment and violence simply for existing in public. It is hard to argue that we are abiding by the ECHR’s article 8 right to a private and family life and by the judgment in Goodwin v United Kingdom.

We welcomed your strong words in Parliament 18 months ago about Georgia’s oppression of LGBTQ+ people; we hope you can see the parallels here, given the UK’s slide down the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map over the last decade, largely due to our treatment of trans people and of queer asylum seekers.

While we know that your ministerial position means that your ability to defy the government is very limited, we implore you (at least behind closed doors) to make the case for this guidance to be rejected by your fellow MPs and for the government to push legislation to ensure that the legislative intent of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 be restored by overriding the For Women Scotland judgment and repeating that a holder of a gender recognition certificate be considered in their acquired sex “for all purposes”, including for the Equality Act 2010.

As we wrote before, you, like us, grew up during the Section 28 era; we three know how damaging that was to young queer people of our generation. We remember the hostility our community faced during the 1980s and 1990s. The media landscape here is almost universally hostile to trans people, in ways that directly parallel what we faced back then.

Please do everything you can to reverse the hate and bigotry of a small, loud minority that is oppressing and rolling back the rights of fellow members of our queer community.

Yours,

██████ and Owen Blacker