Mick Hartley

Akua Reindorf, former commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, joins her former colleague Baroness Falkner in criticising the government’s delaying tactics on single-sex spaces:

Ministers are undermining the independence of Britain’s equality watchdog by delaying guidance that would ban transgender women from single-sex female spaces, the lawyer who helped write the guidance has said.

Akua Reindorf, who until last year was a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the government was inventing “procedural hurdles” to avoid a political row over sex and gender.

In her first interview since leaving the regulator, Reindorf said that it was not for the government to decide on guidance.

She claimed her appointment to the commission in 2020 provoked internal opposition from staff at the equalities watchdog almost immediately, and likened the actions of some members of staff, most of whom no longer work for the organisation, to “sabotage”.

The trans allies, no doubt – fired up by their Stonewall training.

Reindorf said it was “immediately clear” that she had been appointed to overhaul the regulator’s approach to sex and gender alongside Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the chairwoman, whose term also concluded in December last year.

“That was a shock,” Reindorf said. “That you turn up at this organisation and not only are you maybe fighting groups from the outside, actually you’re fighting within the organisation.”

She said that there was a feeling some staff “were there to pursue some social justice agenda” rather than apply equality law.

“It was like banging your head against a brick wall,” she said. “There was insubordination, essentially.”

She said that lawyers instructed by the board were ignored, alternative counsel was brought in and agreed changes were not implemented. “You’d just find that things weren’t done,” she said.

Although she feels that while the “war” over biological sex has been won, she said that the “battle” would continue for another decade.

The Labour government aren’t helping, of course – putting up as many hurdles as they can.

Reindorf said the government’s demand for costings was unprecedented.

“When’s that ever been done for a code of practice before?” she said. “None of this drama has occurred in relation to any of them. And what was the cost to business of letting men use women’s facilities ten years ago when people started behaving as if that was an entitlement in law, which it never was?”

She said ministers were effectively asking how much it would cost organisations to comply with the law after years of being misled into breaking it.