The Door Marked Exit
The Code’s answer to everyone it excludes is “alternative provision.” Go looking for it, and you find a door painted on a wall. Part three of The Dignity Gap.
By Joanne Lockwood (she/her) FIEDP FRSA FPSA — Written from lived experience, not from the sidelines
So far in this series I’ve looked at the reckoning the EHRC walked into, and the appearance test it invented to operate the law. Both raise the same question: if a single‑sex service is now organised by biological sex, what happens to the people it shuts out?
The Code has an answer, and it sounds reasonable. Alternative provision. Where a trans person can’t use the single‑sex service, the provider should make sure there is another way for them to access what they need. Nobody is left without a service. Everyone is catered for.
It is a good answer. It has one flaw. Again and again on Tuesday, when MPs went looking for the alternative, it wasn’t there.
The number that should stop you
Rachel Taylor put one figure on the record that is hard to read twice.
The charity Galop supports LGBT+ survivors of abuse. This year, Taylor told the Commission, it had made 170 referrals of trans women to secure refuge accommodation — and placed exactly none.
“Out of 170 referrals this year, it has not been able to place a single trans woman into secure accommodation.”
Read that against the Code’s promise. If you cannot use a single‑sex refuge, there will be alternative provision. For 170 women fleeing abuse, the alternative provision was a number: zero. The Code says the door is there. Galop’s casework says it opens onto a wall.
And these are not edge cases dreamt up to make a point. They are women with abusers, being turned back toward them — or toward the street.
The door that isn’t there
Once you start counting, the pattern repeats.
Taylor raised her constituent Emma, the trans HGV driver. The Code would direct Emma to alternative facilities at motorway services. Except, as Taylor pointed out, those facilities largely don’t exist — service stations don’t tend to provide them, beyond the ones built for disabled drivers.
The former nurse Kevin McKenna raised hospital wards. If a trans patient can’t be on the ward of their acquired gender, the answer is a side room — except a side room is decided by clinical need, not gender politics, and on an oncology ward, McKenna noted, you cannot conjure a third clinical team and a third set of beds because the Code would like you to.
Every time, the same shape. The principle is stated. The provision is assumed. The reality is absent.
A right to a service that does not exist is not a right. It is a door painted on a wall.
When the “alternative” is the disabled toilet
There is one place the alternative does tend to exist — and that is where this gets worse, not better.
When organisations look for a ready‑made “anyone” space, they reach for the accessible toilet. Kim Leadbeater named it directly: are we really, she asked, solving this by broadening the use of disabled toilets and baby‑changing rooms to absorb everyone the new rules displace?
Think about what that means. To include one disadvantaged group, you quietly draw down the provision another group depends on — and disabled people, unlike almost everyone else, frequently have no other option. You have not created access. You have moved a shortage from one set of people to another.
You have also built something I warned about when I argued the Code could have chosen dignity: the “trans toilet.” The moment a universal space becomes the space trans people are sent to, every use of it becomes a disclosure. Outing by architecture. And here is the part that should trouble even the Code’s defenders: the Government’s own impact assessment admits this — it acknowledges that turning accessible toilets into gender‑neutral ones reduces provision for disabled people. The harm was foreseen. It was written down.
The quiet economics of exclusion
Why does the alternative so reliably fail to exist? Follow the money, because the money is the whole story.
The Commission’s chief executive, John Kirkpatrick, was admirably candid about cost. The Code’s price tag, he said, runs from a small single‑digit figure up to around £160 million at the extreme upper end. For most providers, he stressed, the cost will be modest — a matter of changing policies, signage, approach. Building works are the rare, expensive exception.
Sit with what that actually tells you. The cheap way to comply is to change the sign on the door — to exclude. The expensive way is to build the alternative — to include. And there is no money attached to the expensive option. The EHRC itself is operating on a 20% real‑terms cut. Refuges, Dr Stephenson conceded, face “a chronic problem of underfunding” and turn people away every day.
So put it together. Cheap to exclude. Dear to include. Nothing funding the difference.
Cheap to exclude. Expensive to include. Guess which one a stretched system will choose.
A Code that points everyone toward an alternative it does not fund is not, in practice, a Code of inclusion with a few gaps. It is a mechanism that produces exclusion — quietly, deniably, one unbuilt door at a time. Exclusion by attrition.
I’ll be fair: the underfunding of refuges is real and predates this Code; the EHRC did not cause it. But the Code lands its “alternative provision” promise on exactly that depleted ground, and then calls the result compliance.
And now what?
If you provide services, this is the honest test to run before the Code is in force: for every person our policy turns away, is there genuinely a door — or only the word “alternative”? If it’s the word, you don’t have a policy. You have a gap with a label on it.
Don’t wait for a Galop‑shaped statistic with your organisation’s name on it. Map the provision. Fund it or don’t claim it. And refuse to let the disabled toilet become the place you send your problem.
Count the doors. Open them. If they don’t open, don’t pretend they do.
Tomorrow — what happens when the people left to make these calls ask the regulator how, and the regulator won’t say.
Hold the rope.
Joanne Lockwood (she/her)
The Inclusive Culture Expert
Website: seechangehappen.co.uk | Podcast: Inclusion Bites
Creator of The Trans Inclusion Toolkit and Diagnostic and Founder of The Inclusion Bites Academy.
#InclusionBites #PositivePeopleExperiences #SmileEngageEducate
Part three of The Dignity Gap. Quotations are from the 9 June Women and Equalities Committee session. Cost figures are from the Commission’s published impact assessment; the disability‑provision point is from the Government’s Equality Impact Assessment for the draft Code. Tomorrow — Part four: “A Regulator That Won’t Regulate.”