The Supreme Court ruled. The mayor told staff not to enforce it.

The story

The Mayor of Hackney, Zoe Garbett of the Green Party, has told council staff not to "police access" to women's facilities in the borough. This is in apparent defiance of guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), issued after a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that the terms "woman," "man" and "sex" in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. The ruling followed a campaign by groups concerned about male-bodied people accessing female-only spaces. The EHRC's code of practice states that single-sex spaces should be organised based on biological sex, and that "those with duties under the Equality Act should be following the law." Garbett said she has had trans residents and organisations ask if her borough's toilets remain a safe space to use, and told Metro: "I'd say absolutely yes it is."

The reframe

A Supreme Court ruling is about as unambiguous as a rule gets. It is not guidance, not a recommendation, not one interpretation among several. It settles what a word means in law. The EHRC's code of practice then translated that settled meaning into an operational instruction: single-sex spaces should be organised on the basis it defined, and duty-holders should be following it.

None of that machinery required a directly elected mayor's endorsement to take effect. It required only her compliance, or her staff's. What Hackney's mayor has done instead is tell council employees not to enforce it in her borough's facilities, which is not disagreement conducted through the proper channels, appeal, legal challenge, or public campaign, but a decision that the ruling simply will not apply here, made by someone with the local authority to make that decision stick regardless of what the country's highest court said.

The manuscript's account of how rules actually function once they leave the page is built for exactly this kind of gap. A written standard being technically capable of consistent, automatic application does not mean it will be applied that way. The ruling exists. The guidance translating it into practice exists. What does not exist, in Hackney, is the enforcement, because enforcement was never automatic to begin with. It was always going to depend on whoever held local discretion choosing to exercise it, and here that person has chosen not to.

This is not really a story about toilets. It is a story about what "the law" turns out to mean in practice once it reaches the level of an individual council leader with the standing to simply decline. The Supreme Court can settle a definition. The EHRC can issue a code of practice built on that definition. Neither can compel a mayor's staff to check anything at a door if the mayor has told them not to. The rule remains fully intact on paper. Whether it operates at all now depends on postcode.