Breaking the Code

To my friend, the editor,

I’d love to write you a detached academic essay, but oh my heart, I am so angry at the minute that I could spontaneously combust. Can you feel it, through the text? Can you feel the pulse of my rage? Anger is an energy. Stay angry, little Meg. Tropes and placebos. This anger is sharp and bitter. It tastes like the deepest childhood memories of exclusion and difference. It tastes of loneliness. It tastes of defeat.

It is an uncomfortable anger. It leaks through at unacceptable moments, manifests in tears when I am meant to be professional. It looks like: ‘please don’t use my they/them pronouns on that form, I don’t know who’ll read it.’ It looks like: ‘she can’t come with us tonight, she doesn’t know if there’ll be a bathroom she can use.’ It looks like: ‘their son just got kicked off his under-12s football team and now he won’t leave his room.’

My anger is personal. It carries with it the weight of being a non-binary person in the UK right now, and one with the kind of voice that gets published in academic forums. It is informed by the knowledge that although I devote my life to the law, I do not exist under the law. The law is a profoundly uncaring system and I am lost within it.

The latest manifestation of the uncaring nature of British law in regard to trans people came last week, with the publication of the EHRC Code of Practice on the Equality Act 2010 (service providers, public functions, and associations edition). The Code of Practice is a set of guidelines aimed at the public and service providers on the interpretation of the EA2010. What they have mainly shown to the trans community is that the would-be arbiters of human rights in the UK do not care about them; in fact, in many cases, trans people are considered a risk, a liability, a source of “discomfort or distress” [13.147] to cis people under this document. The Code advises that trans people should be kept out of the correct bathrooms and services for their lived gender [13.113 etc]; that they cannot play competitive sport with others of their lived gender [13.64 etc]. If the service provider feels that a person might be trans, they are empowered under this guidance to ask and if they do not like the answer, to reject the person from their space – a deeply humiliating experience for many trans people.

And back to the anger. Kathryn Abrams tells us that “the violation of rights and the effort to respond to that violation have potent affective dimensions.” (2011, 570) What is this EHRC guidance if not a codification of the violation of rights? When the European Court of Human Rights wrote in Goodwin v UK (2002) of “the unsatisfactory situation in which post-operative transsexuals live in an intermediate zone as not quite one gender or the other,” (90) it could not have foreseen that almost twenty-five years later, the UK would once again be third-spacing trans people and treating their Article 8 ECHR privacy rights with cavalier disregard [13.161-162 etc].

I am struggling. I want to tell you that it will get better. I want to write, with Lorde, that “anger is loaded with information and energy.” (1984, 127) I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m still stuck in resentment that I have to do this work at all. Raj writes that resentment is “what we feel when we experience hurt and realise we are unable to divest from the individual or relationship or institution that causes it” (2025, 38), following on from Brown’s concept of wounded attachments.

I am here and the law is here and together we are moving inexorably from past to future.

I am here writing, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission is producing documentation, and it is my job to respond to it.

So respond I will:

I do not have the privilege to be silent on this. To treat it like a big game, an Oxbridge debating society or a lawfaring point-scoring exercise. I do not have the distance from it to detach and consider it intellectually, not when my friends are writing and crying and writing some more, Whatsapping at midnight, lobbying politicians, refusing to leave the house out of fear, being spat at in the street, checking in on each other every day out of fear for our safety but refusing to give an honest answer to the question ‘are you okay?’. I do not have an intellectual interest alone in this – I am scared for my community and I am furious that those who are meant to be looking out for our human rights are the ones gleefully kicking for the goal left open by the FWS Supreme Court instead.

The patriarchy doesn’t count on our anger, that’s all I’ve got. The Sensible Men of Law, both the ones who think that we don’t exist and the ones who think that we’re too shrill and loud and messy, don’t understand the force that it can carry. God love a patriarchal standard-bearer: he knows not what kind of tiger he’s poking when he gets us riled up. God love a tone policeman: he thinks he’s got it figured out if he’s just respectable enough. God love all the men and the women for whom ‘the wrong side of history’ isn’t a deep enough darkness to be consigned to for their role in this.

I saw something on American author Steven Thrasher’s instagram recently, a quote from fellow author Molly Crabapple.

“They tried to bury us,” it read. “They didn’t know we were landmines.”

With love and rage,

Sandra

Dr Sandra Duffy is a lecturer in law at Bristol University School of Law