Resisting Transphobia in Edinburgh applauds the City of Edinburgh Council for voting today, by an overwhelming majority, to condemn the transphobic new guidance from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

We are grateful to Councillors Alex Staniforth and Alys Mumford whose motion not only included powerful and unequivocal language calling the guidance “discriminatory, unworkable, and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights,” but also laid out several concrete actions for the Council to take in response.

We were proud to send a deputation to speak at the meeting. Zoe Harding delivered a blistering speech on our behalf that made clear the genocidal intent of the EHRC’s latest move, along with heartbreaking testimony that laid bare the harm already being done.

We were also glad to hear the forceful and moving deputations from Scottish Trans, Trans Pride Scotland, and the Education Institute Scotland, as well as the impassioned speeches from the Scottish Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party Councillors supporting the motion.

The EHRC’s new code of practice is nothing short of an attempt to erase trans people from public life. It mandates discrimination, promotes hostility, and shreds human rights that have been settled for decades. It also raises potential threats to gender non-conforming women, in particular women of colour, and threatens women’s equality with its narrow definition of womanhood. Just the threat of its implementation has already caused material, physical harm to trans people across Edinburgh and the UK. People we know. People we love. Adults and children alike. Today Edinburgh Council responded to the guidance with exactly the energy it deserves – a full-throated rebuke. We hope other local authorities across the UK soon follow suit.

Links:

Full text of Councillor Staniforth’s motion: https://democracy.edinburgh.gov.uk/documents/s100347/Item%208.8%20-%20By%20Councillor%20Staniforth%20-%20CECs%20Response%20to%20the%20Equalities%20and%20Human%20Rights%20Commissions.html?CT=2

Full agenda, including a link to the webcast: https://democracy.edinburgh.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=150&MId=7607

Full text of Zoe Harding’s speech:

• Thank you chair, councillors, staff and visitors. My name is Zoe Harding and I’m here to represent Resisting Transphobia in Edinburgh.
• It’s been more than a year since the first draft of this guidance. We’re already seeing the effects of organisations complying with it in advance. 
• We have members who have been forced to leave their jobs, who have been harassed at work, who have become physically ill from trying to comply with inadequate toilet provision caused by management botching response to this guidance.
• The revised form is no better than the original. This is a fundamentally flawed, prejudiced and unfair piece of legislation.
• It was not, despite the claims supporting it, written to protect women’s rights, safety or dignity. It was not intended to fix some glaring flaw in the existing legislation, nor to address a real issue in society. 
• The EHRC has been subject to institutional capture from the kind of prejudice it was intended to combat. 
• This guidance is intended to provide an excuse for transphobic, prejudicial segregation. We do not use that word lightly. Functionally, this guidance provides an excuse to exclude transgender people like me and our members from public life. That is it’s purpose. That is what it does.
• We have seen the people who support and defend it. Sneering bullies, far-right bigots. People so blinded by fear and hatred that they’ll sign their own rights away to hurt a vulnerable minority group. The attack on Friday? I see the same people spitting at us. 
• We are vulnerable. Trans people are a small minority. Many of us have specialised healthcare needs. We experience systemic and individual prejudice daily. 
• Especially over the past year, we struggle to find employment. 
• With the rise in far-right hatred and increased visibility in the last five years, we are already fighting for survival. 
• The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a statement on Saturday calling the EHRC guidance ‘genocidal in nature in its attempt to erase trans and intersex people from public life.’
• That is what we are fighting. Genocide. That is what we are asking you to support, in supporting this proposed action and rejecting this hate.
• We need the institutions that represent us to make public spaces as inclusive as possible. And we need them to make that inclusion visible – to advertise it – so that everyone knows we belong here just as much as anyone else.
• We need equal access to council services, same as everyone else. 
• Implementing the EHRC guidance, rejecting this action, will have an exclusionary effect on transgender people. It is already hard for us to access Council services. It will get harder.
• We need our governments – from local to national – to be louder in affirming our protections under the Equality Act. We need them to reject laws that enable, support and encourage this culture of discrimination against trans people.
• I do not believe that anyone here today wants to support prejudice and discrimination. There are tens of thousands of transgender people in Edinburgh and the Lothians – thousands turned out to protest this guidance the first time round. 
• Many are like me – people who moved to this city because it represented a sanctuary, a better place to live our lives than where we came from.
• I am currently supporting two nineteen-year-old girls. One is homeless – her family kicked her out for being trans, left her on the streets. The other has been sexually assaulted twice. We are currently attempting to access crisis services, but it has been unnecessarily difficult because of the politicisation of those resources by the same anti-transgender movement that is pushing this guidance. She’s afraid to ask for help, and a lot of the help that does exist already excludes her.
• That’s two examples. There are thousands more, and that is before this guidance even goes into effect. 
• Under this guidance even in its revised form, trans men are just excluded – from both gendered spaces. There is nowhere that they are allowed and disabled toilets are not a solution.
• Our members are experiencing humiliating, frustrating and dangerous difficulties accessing housing, employment, Edinburgh Leisure facilities and more because of who we are. 
• I’ve experienced this personally. I am currently campaigning for gender-neutral toilets at my job, not because I want to, but to avoid exposing myself and my company to legal and personal risk every time I or my trans colleagues use the toilets. 
• We are asking Edinburgh Council to support these proposed actions in rejecting and condemning this guidance. We ask you to remember – appeasement does not work. Complying in advance to hate merely makes it stronger. Unjust laws should not stand. 
• We know what we are asking. This guidance, if implemented, will be a nightmare of frivolous and contradictory lawsuits. 
• You ask yourself what you would have done during Section 28, or the Suffragette movement, or when homosexuality was illegal in this country. This is the fight of this generation. This is your chance to do the right thing. Much like Section 28, this guidance will not stop us existing, nor will it stop us thriving. Join us in fighting it
• Thank you for your time.