The EHRC boss sticking to her guns in the face of trans lobby outrage
Those entering top positions at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) have been warned that they are beginning “the worst job in the Civil Service”.
That advice was given back in 2012, when the transgender debate had barely begun but the equalities regulator was still fraught with division and barely trusted by ministers.
A decade later, Baroness Falkner of Margravine, though not a civil servant herself, has surely realised that she has taken on quite the poisoned chalice.
The 68-year-old, born in Pakistan, took over the reins from David Isaac as EHRC chair in December 2020, and was hailed at the time by the women and equalities minister Liz Truss for her “commitment to equality”.
She became a life peer in 2004 and before that, worked for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons and party headquarters, including as director of international affairs and policy.
She also worked at the Commonwealth Secretariat, was a member of Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights and also chaired the EU financial affairs sub-committee in the Lords from 2015 to 2019.
Having beaten other candidates to the EHRC top job, she soon made it her mission to tackle the trans debate.
‘The law is clear that organisations can sometimes limit access to their services to one sex’
That debate, she has said, is one of “competing” rights. Under the 2010 Equality Act, both sex and gender reassignment are protected characteristics, meaning they get legal protection from discrimination.
But with rising numbers of trans people self-identifying as men, women or others, a grey area has emerged in the law where those who do not formally transition to a different gender are not accounted for.
Lady Falkner has attempted to clarify this conflict by weighing womens’ right to single-sex spaces and sport against the wishes of trans people to live as they identify without always fitting in binary boxes.
Her two main interventions were firstly to produce official advice last April that said trans women can be lawfully excluded from female-only spaces including lavatories, changing rooms, fitness classes and hospital wards.
A year later, this April, she recommended that sex-based protections for men and women in equality law be reserved for those born biologically male or female, not those who identify as such.
Both moves have infuriated trans activist organisations and put her at odds with some of her own officials.
Lady Falkner has remained defiant. “The law is clear that organisations can sometimes limit access to their services to one sex,” she wrote in The
Telegraph earlier this year.