On How England Can Go Fuck Itself to Be Quite Honest

The recent High Court decision to reject Liberty’s application for judicial review against the EHRC marks a sobering moment in the UK’s ongoing relationship with equality law. By affirming the EHRC’s reinterpretation of “sex” under the Equality Act, effectively narrowing protections for trans people, the ruling gestures not toward clarity, but toward exclusion under the guise of legal neutrality.

This isn’t merely a technical matter of statutory guidance, oh god no. It is the quiet codification of a political retreat: one that leverages the language of law to reframe trans existence as a legal ambiguity, not a lived reality. The EHRC, once envisioned as a rights-forward institution, increasingly functions as a tool of regression, weaponising institutional authority against the very communities it was meant to protect.

The echoes of Section 28 are unmistakable. Then, as now, state-backed narratives cast queer and trans lives as ideological, inappropriate, or inconvenient. I lived through it. I am scarred by it. The machinery is different, however, this time; less overt, more procedural. The logic is hauntingly familiar: suppress identity under the pretext of protecting norms. I have, first hand, seen this playbook before, and the harm it inflicts is neither abstract nor negligible.

That the UK continues to falter in its duty to safeguard all its citizens, especially the most vulnerable amongst us, is not merely a failure of policy but a failure of national memory. When the mechanisms of equality are co-opted for exclusion, we are not progressing. We are forgetting.

And yet, history also teaches us that such regressions are never the final word. Every attempt to erase has met resistance, organised, resilient, and loud. Time and time and time again. 

The arc bends only because people bend it. And we will.

We always fuckin' do.