Liora Wren | Transiness Research Project
Yesterday, three UN Special Procedures mandate holders — the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, and the Working Group on business and human rights — published a joint statement on the United Kingdom’s review of Equality Act guidance (OHCHR, 2026). The statement is measured in tone and careful in scope. It recalls the UK’s binding commitments under the ICCPR, the ECHR, and CEDAW, and identifies the structural risks that arise when legal frameworks are implemented in ways that decouple recognition from lived access.
One sentence carries most of the diagnostic weight:
Legal recognition that is not accompanied by functional access to rights in everyday life risks becoming hollow.
This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is an institutional warning with specific content. The statement identifies the conditions under which that hollowing occurs: when frameworks permit routine exclusion from ordinary public services; when they introduce discretionary natal sex verification by service providers; or when they otherwise sever the connection between legal status and practical participation in everyday life. Any of these, the mandate holders conclude, would raise serious concerns under international human rights law.
The concern about discretionary natal sex verification has been developed carefully. Allowing providers to rely on subjective judgment in assessing natal sex would, the statement argues, undermine legal certainty, invite gender stereotyping and arbitrary exclusion, and erode dignity — and not only for transgender people, but for anyone perceived not to conform to gender stereotypes. The harm is identified as structural rather than incidental: discretion creates asymmetry; asymmetry produces inconsistency; inconsistency erodes any reliable relationship between legal status and access.
The proportionality dimension is equally significant. The European Court of Human Rights holds that gender identity falls within the core of private life, and that distinctions based on sex or gender identity require particularly weighty justification. UK courts are required to apply that jurisprudence. Widespread exclusion from essential spaces — healthcare, sanitation, education, shelters — would not meet that standard: it would be, in the statement’s precise language, arbitrary and disproportionate. CEDAW reinforces this; the Committee has consistently affirmed that its obligations extend to transgender women as part of the framework for combating gender-based violence against women and girls.
The statement also addresses the High Court judgment of 13 February 2026. The Court held that service providers may, depending on circumstances, lawfully offer trans-inclusive services without being obliged to admit cisgender men to women’s services. But the Court also upheld the requirement that workplaces provide separate gender-neutral facilities for trans employees — and the statement identifies directly what this will produce in practice: inadvertent disclosure of trans status for employees who have consistently used facilities aligned with their gender identity. The Government is asked to ensure workplace policies are fully consistent with equality and human rights obligations.
What the statement does not do — because it is not designed to — is examine specific guidance documents, trace the mechanisms through which these failures occur, or quantify what they produce in institutional practice. It operates at the level of treaty obligation and legal principle. It names the risk. It does not map the architecture through which that risk becomes harm.
That is, in part, what we do.
What We Do, and Where Our Work Converges
Transiness began as a community and support space for transitioned women — those who have completed a medical transition. In the context of the post-2025 policy environment, it has developed into a research-led and engagement-focused project. We moved away from social-media-based support deliberately, recognising that emotional support alone cannot address the structural conditions affecting transitioned women today. What those conditions require is evidence, analysis, and direct engagement with the institutions that produce them.
Our work focuses on the ways institutional policies, safeguarding models, and service-design frameworks render harm administratively invisible while displacing it onto transitioned women. We write about safety, healthcare, and embodied realities because these needs are routinely overlooked — transitioned women are rarely conceptualised, in policy or clinical practice, as people who require care, protection, or specialist understanding. We also publish reflective writing alongside formal analysis, as part of a deliberate effort to reclaim epistemic authority: the capacity to define and interpret our own experiences rather than having them defined for us by frameworks not designed with us in mind. Transiness is run entirely by and for transitioned women, with no external funding. Our independence means our analysis is accountable to the communities it serves.
So far this year, we have published three formal reports: on safeguarding failures in sexual and domestic violence services (Wren, 2026b), on the psychosocial consequences of segregation and enforced disclosure (Wren, 2026a), and on the NPCC Interim Transgender Search Guidance (Wren, 2026c). Reading the UN statement alongside those reports, the convergences are substantial — and the fact that they emerge without shared framing, without our specific terminology, makes them more telling rather than less.
The hollowness the UN statement identifies is quantifiable in our safeguarding analysis. We estimate that between 5,400 and 12,000 transitioned women experience intimate partner violence in the UK each year, with approximately 5,700 experiencing sexual IPV specifically (based on a 10.8% past-year prevalence rate applied to a UK population of approximately 52,600). In a functioning, non-exclusionary safeguarding system, we would expect transitioned women to appear in recorded service uptake at roughly 0.8–0.9% — a figure derived from population proportion adjusted for elevated victimisation rates. The actual figure is near-zero in some areas. Legal protection exists on paper. The practical pathway to accessing it has been designed in a way that makes it structurally unavailable.
In the NPCC analysis, the same structure appears in policing. The Equality Act recognises gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. PACE creates same-sex searching requirements grounded in dignity principles. Yet the Interim Transgender Search Guidance produces a classification architecture in which a transitioned woman may be searched by an officer whose assignment is determined by birth record rather than present anatomy — and in which the mechanism nominally available to correct this, the consent pathway, requires disclosure of protected history as its operational precondition. The right to dignified treatment is in the statute book. The mechanism through which it is meant to be delivered is built in a way that structurally prevents it.
The statement’s concern about natal sex verification maps onto this precisely. The NPCC guidance requires operational establishment of natal sex at the point of encounter: through Police National Computer records that may reflect a classification made before transition, that the individual has no right to inspect in advance; or, where records are unavailable, through visual assessment at the roadside. When natal sex cannot be established — the guidance’s sex-undetermined provision — the fallback is observable current state, which is the very thing the natal sex framework was designed to override. The result is the legal uncertainty, gender stereotyping, and arbitrary outcomes that the UN statement identifies as the foreseeable consequences of discretionary natal sex verification. The statement also notes that such judgment creates risks for non-transgender people perceived not to conform to gender stereotypes; the NPCC analysis reaches the same conclusion, documenting how the sex-undetermined provision can misfire against non-transitioned women whose presentation is read as insufficiently gender-legible.
The segregation analysis (Wren, 2026a) traces how this hollowness scales across domains. Following the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling and EHRC interim guidance, natal sex classification has been implemented or attempted across workplaces, healthcare, social organisations, sports, retail, and the criminal justice system. The proportionality analysis in that report provides what the UN statement affirms but does not itself quantify. PTSD prevalence among transgender adults who have experienced discrimination sits at 44.4% — approximately 6.5 times the general population rate (Reisner et al., 2016). Discrimination predicts PTSD at a magnitude comparable to childhood abuse and greater than intimate partner violence as a predictor. Chronic discrimination activates the HPA axis and produces measurable, lasting alterations in serotonin and dopamine systems — these are not attitudinal responses, they are physiological ones. Against that evidence of harm, the claimed benefit of natal sex classification — the safety case — lacks a commensurate evidential base: Freedom of Information requests across 382 public bodies found four complaints about trans women using single-sex facilities in England over three years; research across 17 US states operating trans-inclusive bathroom policies found no documented cases of predatory misuse (Williams Institute, 2018).
The UN statement’s specific concern about the workplace gender-neutral facility requirement maps onto what we call the Third Space Problem (Wren, 2026a). A designated separate facility does not provide neutral accommodation. It achieves classification: a three-tier taxonomy in which the third space marks its users as categorically other. Every employee who navigates toward it is, through that act of navigation, publicly categorised — not once, not occasionally, but every working day, in the same building, in front of the same colleagues. The harm is structural and chronic, produced by the design of the space rather than the intent of any individual. The statement calls on the Government to ensure workplace policies meet equality obligations; our analysis specifies why the facility requirement, as upheld, does not.
The final convergence is perhaps the most significant and the least discussed. The UN statement expresses concern about increasing reporting gaps where communities fear humiliation and degradation. Across all three of our reports, this is documented as monitoring blindness: not a side effect of classification systems but a structural property of their design. When harm is produced through disengagement rather than complaint — when a survivor leaves a SARC after initial assessment and that attendance is recorded as a completed intervention; when a transitioned officer resigns and that departure is recorded as a statistic; when a patient stops attending a GP surgery, and that absence generates no signal — the system cannot detect its own failures. The failures register as absence. Absence is read as evidence that the system is working. The NPCC analysis names this an observability failure. The safeguarding report frames it through the lens of institutional betrayal (Smith and Freyd, 2014): where institutional responses mirror the dynamics of the harm a person is seeking to escape, withdrawal is a rational protective response, not evidence of low need.
What We Haven’t Done Yet, and What That Means
Identifying convergence between our work and an international human rights statement is a useful context. But it is less useful than identifying what the statement reveals we have not yet addressed.
The most significant gap is proportionality’s other side. We have documented harm carefully. What we have not produced is a systematic analysis of the claimed benefit side of the proportionality equation — not merely noting that the evidence base for natal sex classification’s safety benefits is thin, but conducting the structured review that would allow a court, regulator, or policy body to interrogate that claim rigorously. That means examining the mechanisms through which classification is said to produce safety benefits, reviewing the evidence for each, and establishing whether alternative approaches — universal design, risk-based assessment, harm-reduction frameworks — would achieve the same objectives with less harm. A proportionality case that models harm comprehensively but treats the benefit as self-evidently absent is analytically incomplete, even if the eventual conclusion is the same. We need to do that work.
Within our own scope, we have also largely modelled harm as operating through a single axis. The NPCC analysis flags this in its critique of the guidance’s Equality Impact Assessment, which marks Disability as having no potential impact while simultaneously acknowledging anticipated work-related stress and decreased wellbeing for trans officers — outcomes that constitute disability when they cross a clinical threshold. We name that as a structural failure of single-axis modelling in the EIA. But our own analysis has not yet developed what the classification burden looks like when it compounds with disability, racialisation or insecure immigration status. The safeguarding report touches this — noting that documentation mismatches create particular vulnerability for transitioned women whose papers do not match their presentation, and that this intersects acutely with immigration status — but does not develop it systematically. However, we have limitations.
Psychosocial systems analysis takes time and precision. Within the context of the international human rights concerns articulated, there is a burden to act with immediacy and to minimise foreseeable harm before it is embedded culturally. This does not mean that intersectionality is not important; rather, this reflection embeds a commitment to touch more specifically in this area. We are aware that the work that we do here is not only for the benefit of transitioned women, but also for all people who face the daily navigational pressures that minority status brings.
There is also a comparative gap. The UN statement makes substantive use of international experience to establish that inclusive frameworks are workable and sustainable. We reference comparative evidence in our analyses — the Williams Institute bathroom policy research, international medical consensus on transition — but we have not produced a systematic comparative analysis of how other jurisdictions have operationalised gender recognition in specific institutional contexts: policing, violence services, healthcare, and employment. That kind of analysis would both strengthen the proportionality case and provide domestic policy discussions with something concrete to work from.
These gaps point toward the development of our work. They are also worth naming in relation to what the UN statement is and what we are, because the distinction matters.
The statement speaks to the government through treaty obligation. It establishes what international law requires, names the failure modes that would constitute violations, and calls for a careful, rights-respecting process. That is a particular kind of institutional authority — formal, mandate-based, addressed to states. It cannot do what we do: trace nine design failures in a specific policing guidance document, quantify a service uptake gap in violence services, or model the daily disclosure dynamics of a facility requirement. That granularity is simply not what a UN joint statement is for.
Our authority is of a different kind. We have no mandate, no institutional standing, no enforcement mechanism. We are a small, unfunded project run voluntarily by transitioned women. What we have is methodological rigour, accountability to the communities our work affects, and the particular kind of knowledge that comes from working within the systems we analyse rather than addressing them from outside. We document what these systems produce in practice — in specific guidance documents, referral pathways, custody procedures, and facility designs — and we make that documentation available to professionals, commissioners, and policymakers who need it.
When independent analyses — one from international human rights monitors, one from community-based systems researchers — identify the same structural failure modes, the appropriate response is not satisfaction but clarity about what follows.
What follows, for us, is continuing to document the distance between the principles the UN has articulated and what UK institutional settings are currently producing. That is the work. It does not require epideictic framing. It requires rigour, specificity, and the willingness to keep asking: what does this mean in practice, who bears the adaptive burden, and what becomes visible versus what remains administratively unseen.
References
Brandt, L., Liu, S., Heim, C. and Heinz, A. (2022) ‘The effects of social isolation stress and discrimination on mental health,’ Translational Psychiatry, 12, p. 398. doi: 10.1038/s41398-022-02178-4.
Good Law Project Ltd and Others v Equality and Human Rights Commission [2026] EWHC 279 (Admin).
For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2025] 2 WLR 879 (UKSC).
National Police Chiefs’ Council (2025) Equality Impact Assessment: Searching by Transgender Employees of the Police Service, Version 3. London: NPCC.
OHCHR (2026) Joint statement on the review of the UK Equality Act guidance and international human rights compatibility. Geneva: UN Special Procedures, 27 February 2026.
Reisner, S.L., White Hughto, J.M., Gamarel, K.E., Keuroghlian, A.S., Mizock, L. and Pachankis, J.E. (2016) ‘Discriminatory experiences associated with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms among transgender adults,’ Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(5), pp. 509–519. doi: 10.1037/cou0000143.
Smith, C.P. and Freyd, J.J. (2014) ‘Institutional betrayal,’ American Psychologist, 69(6), pp. 575–587. doi: 10.1037/a0037564.
Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (2018) Are transgender people at greater risk of victimization when using public restrooms? Los Angeles: Williams Institute.
Wren, L. (2026a) Segregation and Enforced Disclosure: Projected Psychosocial Outcomes for Transitioned Women Under Natal Sex and ‘Third Sex’ Classification Systems. Transiness Research Project, February 2026. www.transiness.com
Wren, L. (2026b) Safeguarding Failures Affecting Transitioned Women: A Systems Analysis of Sexual and Domestic Violence Service Design. Transiness Research Project, February 2026. www.transiness.com
Wren, L. (2026c) Institutional Classification in Police Searching: A Systems Analysis of the NPCC Interim Transgender Search Guidance. Transiness Research Project, February 2026. www.transiness.com
Liora Wren is the author of the Transiness Research Project. All companion analyses referenced here are available at www.transiness.com.
