Imagine it's Friday evening.

So, the EHRC has published its new 340-page "Code of Practice". Yes... Three hundred and forty pages. You have to admire the commitment to thoroughness when the core message could have been scrawled on a Post-it note and slid under a toilet door.

Which is, of course, where we're going.

Let's imagine a Friday evening. Nothing exotic, just a trans woman, let's call her Sarah, who wants to do what everyone else is doing on a Friday evening: go out, have a drink, perhaps eat something that wasn't microwaved, and be briefly among other humans. The radical agenda. The controversial lifestyle choice of existing in public after dark.

She arrives at the pub. The landlord, having presumably spent his week reading the 340 pages of EHRC guidance and consulting a solicitor who charged him four hundred quid to say "we're not entirely sure", has made a decision. There is now a third gender-neutral toilet, a converted broom cupboard with a sign on it that someone has laminated. The lamination is crooked. The sign says "All Gender." There's still a mop in there. This is what "dignity and alternatives where possible" looks like in practice.

Now, the guidance is careful to note that trans people retain protections against discrimination under the characteristic of gender reassignment. So Sarah can't be refused a drink, can't be thrown out, and can't be treated, in the formal legal sense, badly. She can simply be redirected to the cupboard that announces her presence to the entire pub more effectively than a foghorn. Nothing says "blending in" like being the only person in the building using the "special door".

And this is where the government's elegant solution runs into a small practical difficulty: the entire architecture of this policy requires trans people to be visibly, identifiably trans in order to be redirected anywhere.

You cannot operationalise a rule that says "biological sex determines which toilet you use" without someone making a determination about which category a given person falls into. Who will the landlord assign to do that job? What training will they have? Will there be a separate 'genital examination room' next to the cupboard with the wonky laminated sign for those edge cases where the bouncer isn’t quite sure?

The moment you require that determination, you have created a system in which every trans person, including trans people who pass entirely, who have been living unremarkably in the world for years, must either self-declare or be assessed by whoever happens to be on the door of the women's loo with a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of human phenotypic variation.

This is being framed as a safeguarding measure. The safeguarding is not, apparently, for Sarah.

And take Claire, biologically female in every sense the EHRC would recognise, who is six foot one, has a jawline you could use to open letters, keeps her hair short because she finds it practical, and has never once in her life been interested in what shoes go with what. She will also now need to be... assessed.

The policy also does something ingenious, which is to launder moral responsibility downward. The EHRC doesn't exclude anyone; it merely provides guidance. The government doesn't exclude anyone; it merely approved the guidance. The pub doesn't exclude anyone; it's merely complying. The bouncer who says "the other one, love" ... well, she's just following the laminated sign. Everyone's hands are spotless. The architecture discriminates so the individuals don't have to.

Every time, every pub, every restaurant, every venue that's conscientiously followed the guidance, a continuous, laminated reminder that you are being accommodated rather than included. There's a difference, and the difference is exhausting.

Meanwhile, in the pub, some bloke is already looking at Sarah and Claire funny. He didn't read the 340 pages. He's working from a rather shorter document, something he absorbed from five years of newspaper front pages, and his understanding of the current legal situation is that his suspicions have been officially validated. He doesn't know about proportionality assessments or legitimate aims or the specific carve-outs that technically still protect trans people under gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. He knows that the government said trans women aren't women. That's what got through. (That's what always gets through.)

The lawyers will argue the details for years. They'll be comfortable arguments, conducted in warm rooms, about the precise boundaries of the law.

Sarah and Claire just wanted to go out for a drink.