Writing to your MP - and what next?

19th June 2026

Until the EHRC guidance is adopted there's one action we can all take that's more important than anything else; writing to your MP to ask them to support Nadia Whittome's motion to disapprove the guidance.

If that's something you've already done, then great! Thank you! You can skip the next Recap section.

A recap

The EHRC's proposed Guidance or Code Of Practice was put before parliament on the 21st May 2026, and will become statutory guidance i.e. the law, after 40 days unless either the House of Parliament or Lords vote against it. A good long read of its problems is here.

The government will not be scheduling that vote, so it's up to MPs to do that by unusual means.

That has prompted a group of MPs, led by Nadia Whittome, to request the government hold a vote in something called an Early Day Motion. At the time of writing this, 146 MPs have added their signature in support of this vote being called.

The more MPs who sign this up for this motion, the more pressure there is for the government to call schedule the vote and there is a chance this segregation guidance will be rejected.

Will it work? To be honest, probably not. The government have a huge majority of MPs, and they've demonstrated they don't really listen to anyone outside their own circle.

But that doesn't matter, because a strong opposition to this guidance now will show there was a democratic deficit in how the new trans segregation rules were implemented; it wasn't on any election manifesto, so if it's delivered without even a vote in Parliament then is stinks of authoritarian overreach. The more letters MPs get now, the more they know this unpopular. Labour's bathroom ban will taint the party until it is overturned, and we will need to use that to full effect.

So, write to your MP, here's an excellent guide. We’d like to add a couple of more points:

Since the Guidance was published there have been meetings of the Women and Equalities Committee where the EHRC were unable to show the Guidance as anything but unworkable. Many MPs left those meetings and immediately signed the EDM. Even former minister for Equalities, Emily Thornberry has signed it. You could add something like:

Secondly, the Makersfield by-election results this morning, where Andy Burnham won the seat with a solid 9000 majority wasn’t a win for the current Labour Party, but an expression of a desire for change of direction. One thing that could signal a change of direction would be for the government to stop pushing this unjust and unworkable code.

Lastly, if you have a LibDem MP then we have one more thing to ask you to include. LibDems are a sizeable opposition party block in parliament so they have opposition days where they choose the schedule. So if your MP is LibDem, specifically ask them to investigate using an opposition day to hold a vote on EDM 240. Perhaps with texty along the lines of:

"With 72 Liberal Democrat MPs, your party holds the vital institutional power to take the next necessary step. I am urging you to explicitly lobby Ed Davey and the Lib Dem whips to use your party's next allotted Opposition Day to table a formal, binding Motion to Disapprove this code in the main chamber."

What you can do next

If you've written to MP then what you might do next depends on your MPs response. Looking through MPs replies they have been posted, there are some patterns:

If they haven't replied : it's time to send another message asking for an update.

If they have signed the motion then please write back and say thank you. This doesn't have to be long, just a short thank you does the job!

If they replied and said no, they agree with the Guidance, then there's probably nothing you can do about that. You might want to reply and say, politely, that you disagree and that this sort of unjust act has lost them your vote. If you post on social media you might want to put up a screenshot and tag us, and groups like TACC.

If they replied and said no because they don’t sign EDMs on principle then this is interesting. Most EDMs are of very little use. Some are resolutions that put a group of MPs position on record but do nothing tangible, a kind of posture politics that does nothing. And if your MP objects to that then that's a principle you might be able to agree with. But that's not the case in this instance. The EDM is the exact action, under parliamentary process, that is needed now. So write back and tell your MP that.

They might reply and say no, they won't sign the EDM, not because they agree with it, but because they want to see the guidance out there representing g the law as it is now understood. They might say they're a trans ally and that they need to work in he background to change the legislation behind the guidance.

In this case, you might want to reply and point out that the pressure to change the legislation is greatest while there isn't valid guidance. The strongest pressure to amend the Equality Act comes from the guidance it produces being so broken that it's unworkable. Signing off on the guidance takes that pressure away. It also gives the ani-trans/Gender Critical movement space to move on to target our rights in other ways: our healthcare, the Equality Act protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment or the Gender Recognition Act itself.

If your MP has replied in another way and you think we should update this page then let us know.