The language of correction is never neutral. It is the language of the prison, the boot camp, the conversion therapy clinic. When Akua Reindorf indicates that trans people must accept the rollback of rights because they have been “lied to” for years, she is not offering legal clarity. She is delivering a punishment dressed up as jurisprudence.
This is not a good-faith legal reckoning. It is a moral crusade waged by institutional actors who have made peace with cruelty. The EHRC, once charged with defending the most marginalised, now openly entertains the idea that trans people were “misled” into believing they had dignity, autonomy, and access to public life. The law never promised self-ID, Reindorf tells us—so it must follow that those who lived by that principle deserve a reckoning. Not just a correction, but a rebuke.
Let’s be clear: the Supreme Court ruling did not simply “clarify” the law. It has provided a legal pretext for the institutional rollback of trans rights, a fact Reindorf and her colleagues appear not just resigned to, but delighted by. When she calls workplace inclusion policies a “farce” and ridicules public concern over toilet access, she is laughing at people’s attempts to live safely in public. What kind of commissioner sneers at the very people they are meant to protect?
Trans people are not confused. They are not misled. They have not been lied to. They are responding, with dignity and resistance, to a sustained campaign of dehumanisation, spearheaded by a cross-section of legal hardliners, culture warriors, so called feminists, and opportunists. The EHRC’s function in this moment is not legal stewardship. It seems to be ideological enforcement. When Naomi Cunningham says trans people “will have to give way” and “it can’t be helped,” we are hearing the cold voice of carceral liberalism: the logic that some must suffer for the order to remain intact.
This is not a question of legal ambiguity. It is a matter of which lives are treated as disposable. Reindorf’s appeal to “other people’s rights” only makes sense if you believe that trans people’s very presence in toilets, sports clubs, or rape crisis centres is itself a violation. That is the twisted arithmetic behind the current political settlement: to preserve the feelings of some, others must be expelled. That is not balance. It is scapegoating.
And what of the supposed “misinformation”? Until very recently, self-ID was not some fringe fantasy. It was EHRC policy. It was the government’s own direction of travel. Trans people built lives within that framework because the state told them it was possible. Now, that same state—via Reindorf and others—wants to disavow its past and rewrite history. It was never real, they say. You were deluded. Be grateful you got anything at all.
But rights are not a zero-sum game. The idea that trans equality comes at the expense of women’s safety is a fantasy fuelled by media panic and political cowardice. Women’s services are crumbling because of austerity, privatisation and underfunding, not because a trans woman needed to use the loo. The real threat to women’s safety doesn’t come from a trans support group at the YMCA. It comes from the same institutions now pitting us against one another.
Reindorf and Cunningham might imagine themselves as realists, offering legal truth stripped of sentiment. But what they are engaged in is the erasure of lives, and worse, the suggestion that this erasure is necessary, even virtuous. It is the old colonial logic: correction, containment, control.
This is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of a darker one. And we will not be corrected into silence.
Main image by Steve Eason.
Artificial Intelligence (9) Book Review (71) Books (75) Britain (31) Capitalism (9) Class (8) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (39) Elon Musk (9) Europe (10) Film (11) France (14) History (9) Imperialism (14) Israel (9) Keir Starmer (10) Labour Government (24) Labour Party (9) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (13) Nigel Farage (13) Palestine (9) Protest (13) Reform UK (20) Russia (10) Television (8) Trade Unionism (8) Ukraine (8) United States of America (74) Verso Books (8) War (15) Work (9) Working Class (9)
Leave a Reply