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Your SU's Response to the EHRC

Wednesday 27-08-2025 - 13:30

Your SU's Respone to the EHRC

By Your SU

Your SU has submitted its response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s consultation on its Equality Act guidance, following the Supreme Court’s ruling that for the purpose of the Equality Act, sex refers to ‘biological sex’.

NUS EHRC Campaign

What Does This Mean?

As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the EHRC released a Code of Practice to help organisations understand the implications of the ruling. This included, amongst other guidance:

  • “Trans women … should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men … should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, as this will mean that they are no longer single-sex facilities.”
  • “The Equality Act allows trans people to be excluded from an event or treated differently ... when necessary for reasons of safety or fair competition.”
  • “Membership of an association of 25 or more people can be limited to men only or women only and … a women-only or lesbian-only association should not admit trans women (biological men), and a men-only or gay men-only association should not admit trans men (biological women)"".

This led to a consultation period where organisations could submit responses. As Your SU, we wanted our membership to shape our response, so we used the consultation window to listen to our students through a House Meeting and other listening activities.

Following the online House Meeting attended by both Sunderland City Campus and London Campus student representatives, as well as listening activities on both Sunderland City Campus and St Peter’s Campus, we have included the voices and perspectives of students from a multitude of identities, backgrounds, and experiences to ensure that our submission was co-created by our student membership.

Your SU has highlighted to the EHRC that:

  • The Code of Practice is vague and lacks clarity throughout – it carries the risk of Your SU having to make changes that conflict with our charitable values and potentially misinterpret our legal obligations to laws other than the Equality Act (2010).
  • It should clarify that organisations are not mandated to exclude transgender students from single-sex spaces, but rather that they are permitted to restrict membership to those who share a protected characteristic.
  • The Code of Practice as it stands does not meaningfully include the experiences of the diversity of LGBTQ+ identities, especially the experiences of transgender men, within its examples.
  • The language used throughout the Code of Practice is legally ambiguous and risks echoing harmful rhetoric used against transgender people.

Why Did You Submit a Response?

Your SU aims to be inclusive in all that we do – it’s one of our five key principles. The Code of Practice would not only be logistically difficult for us to implement; it also negatively impacts the experience of our transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming students on campus. We want our opportunities to be open and welcoming to all, and by submitting a response we have joined the NUS in a national effort to respond to this Code of Practice so that we can ensure that all students feel respected and safe in anything they do with Your SU.

What's Next?

Over 50 Students’ Unions across the country submitted to the consultation for the EHRC to consider. Your SU will be following closely, and if you would like your voice to be platformed in any further consultation, have any questions regarding our submission, or would just like some more information, please email yourcommunities@sunderland.ac.uk.

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