The Liberal Democrats have rejected official guidance by the equalities watchdog on how organisations should implement the supreme court ruling on transgender people, calling it “discriminatory and unworkable”.
The motion, passed overwhelmingly at the party’s annual conference in Brighton, makes the Lib Dems the first of the big three parties in parliament to call for a new approach to implementing last year’s ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only. The Greens have previously done so.
Formal guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), put out in May, is intended to tell service providers and others how they must balance the rights of trans people with the requirement for some spaces to be single sex.
It has attracted criticism for being a de facto bar on trans people being in many public spaces by setting out that single-sex toilets and changing rooms must exclude transgender men and women, with gender neutral facilities not always available.
The motion to the conference called the EHRC’s code “discriminatory and unworkable”, saying it “places an undue burden on service providers”. It calls for a revised code, plus a dedicated cross-party parliamentary committee “to review how the law should better protect trans people’s rights”.
Proposing the motion, the party member Lucas North condemned the EHRC guidance and noted a rise in anti-trans hate crimes. They added: “The rights of women and the rights of trans people do not have to be placed on opposite sides of a manufactured culture war.”
Another speaker for the motion Rebecca Jones said that as a trans woman she was “tired of being a culture war prop”.
She said: “You now fear using public spaces. You fear anyone that looks at you too much in case they hate trans people enough that they put you at risk. All whilst your government repeats the words dignity and respect, whilst doing everything in their power to ensure trans people do not have them.”
But the councillor Mark Johnston from Reigate in Surrey said the motion would distract the party from the “realism” needed to ensure Nigel Farage did not become PM: “That realism means accepting the supreme court determination last year is unassailable.
“Are we going back to our constituencies to prepare for government, or are we going back to our bedrooms to prepare for irrelevance?”
Party activist Zoe Hollowood said the party should accept the supreme court ruling: “If we pass this motion, we are telling women we think they are second-class citizens … This policy is totally out of touch with both public sentiment and public priorities.”
The mood in the conference hall was strongly in favour of the motion, which was passed easily on a show of hands.
Earlier in the day the party leader, Ed Davey, told the BBC he broadly supported the motion, calling the EHRC guidance not “fit for purpose”.
