This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
If Akua Reindorf KC is a dangerous extremist, as some of her more excitable detractors insist, she is a curiously unconvincing one. In person she is measured, warm and distinctly left-leaning, cheerfully conceding: “I can say now, I’m not a Tory.” Released from her stint as a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), she is candid about her views and the organisation she was relieved to leave.
A decade ago, a role at the equalities watchdog would be unlikely to generate headlines or garner threats. By 2021, however, when Reindorf was encouraged to apply, the EHRC was already in the eye of the ideological storm sweeping British institutions. From the moment she arrived, Reindorf says, a faction of staff had already decided what she was: “the devil incarnate”, even “the world’s most evil TERF”.
“Women’s rights begin with recognising women as a coherent group with a definition that doesn’t include men,” she says. “If you have a binary category, it can’t be porous. The reason women have sex-based rights, including the right to separate spaces, is because men as a class can pose a threat to women. You can’t include men in the category and still preserve those protections.”
The hostility to this analysis was not universal, but it was organised. “Certainly not all of them, but there was a hard core of activists.” EHRC staff are not civil servants, yet the job calls for a civil service impartiality. In practice, Reindorf felt not everyone shared that commitment, though she was undeterred.
“There would have been no point in me being at the EHRC if I didn’t have opinions. My purpose was to have informed, evidence-based views I was prepared to discuss and be flexible about. I was brought in because I had expertise — I wasn’t going to put that aside because people got upset.” Meanwhile the board, she says, worked well despite wide political differences and was largely aligned in its legal approach. That alignment, however, drew criticism from some staff, who were quick to brand commissioners “gender-critical”.
In 2023, EHRC chair, Baroness Falkner, faced an investigation after staff complaints about the commission’s independence and its direction on sex and gender policy. No wrongdoing was found. The inquiry stalled after leaks and was later dropped following a ministerial review. “It was testing,” Reindorf admits drily.
For her, the key issue is not office politics or personalities, but the law — and what happens when it collides with ideology. “If you’re a regulator for equalities and human rights, you will inevitably attract people who are politically committed to those causes. It’s not like working for the water board. Over time a culture developed where the organisation saw itself less as a regulator and more as part of civil society. That creates friction when your role is to apply the law rather than advance a cause.”
Reindorf’s appointment by the then equalities minister, Liz Truss, followed the publication of a report she authored for the University of Essex. The Reindorf Review examined the no-platforming of two visiting feminist academics, Professors Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix, whose talks were cancelled after student complaints.
The inquiry concluded that the university had failed in its duties to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom, and recommended that policies be anchored more firmly in law rather than external guidance from partisan groups.
Most notably, the review found that the LGBT giant, Stonewall, to which the university paid a fee to vet its policies, had misrepresented equality legislation, presenting “the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”. The report was one of the first serious challenges to the charity’s influence and preceded wider scrutiny of its access to government and its role in shaping trans inclusion policies at 850 organisations. Notably, at the time of Reindorf’s inquiry, even the EHRC was a paid-up member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme.
The Reindorf Review did more than resolve a campus dispute. It landed at a moment of growing anxiety about academic freedom, campus culture and democratic values. Looking back, she sees it as an early warning about where “Stonewall law” was heading: “Many organisations came to believe the Equality Act mandates self-ID, which is just plain wrong. But it slipped through in a fog of muddled law that few people properly picked apart, with little case law and even less scrutiny.”
Four years later, her analysis was vindicated. On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. “I wasn’t surprised by the judgment,” Reindorf says. “It was simply a matter of the court spelling out what the law already meant.”
Providing the guidance for the ruling fell squarely within her remit. Yet to this day, the revised pages remain lodged in the bowels of Whitehall, whilst the responsible minister, Bridget Phillipson, offered shifting reasons for not laying it before Parliament. At different points the equalities minister has suggested the EHRC failed to supply enough information, that other jurisdictions required consultation, and that the ruling itself was too complex; even though it boiled down to the clarification that a gender recognition certificate is not a passport to opposite sex spaces. Reindorf says she was staggered to hear briefings from Phillipson’s department implying the EHRC had acted in “bad faith”. “My God, it was astonishing,” she says. “We broke our backs to get that right. All hands were on deck. People had leave cancelled. It was intense.”
The disputed section, she notes, runs to just 11 pages and has been with ministers since September 2025. The commission’s job, she argues, is to ensure the guidance reflects the law; the minister’s role is simply to accept the draft or return it.
“It’s not [Phillipson’s] job to interpret the guidance,” Reindorf says. “It’s her job to decide whether she accepts it. If she doesn’t, she sends it back. If she does, she lays it before Parliament. That’s it.” Government criticism of the EHRC, she adds, is particularly galling given the scale of the work. The summer of 2025 saw a consultation that drew around 50,000 responses, roughly 50 times more than previous exercises.
“I feel bad for the staff,” she says. “They worked incredibly hard on this.” Yet she is unsparing about the enterprise itself. The guidance, in her view, is “a complete and utter waste of time … It will be out of date by the time it’s published”.
In more than two decades as a discrimination lawyer, she says she has reached for a code of practice only a handful of times. And yet, politically and culturally, the guidance has become a “proxy war” in which “whatever changes people succeed in getting into it will make absolutely no difference to what the law is. All it will do is confuse people”. If campaigners or politicians want a different outcome, she argues, there is a straightforward route: change the statute.
Much of the reaction, she suggests, rested on a misunderstanding of what the Supreme Court had actually decided. “People engaged with it as though it was the case that finally told us self-ID was not the law,” she says. “But no serious lawyer ever thought self-ID was the law. That had been clear for years. The judgment was really the final piece of the jigsaw.”
Lawyers with an agenda have undoubtedly contributed to this misunderstanding. The Good Law Project, which is seeking to challenge the Supreme Court in Europe, has referred to the ruling as an “attack on trans people” claiming it has “ripped up the Equality Act”.
Reindorf is not convinced that such activist groups fully understand the law. “I’m not trying to downplay the judgment,” she says. “It’s an absolute turning point. But strictly speaking, its application is quite narrow.” The For Women Scotland case, she notes, centred on how the Equality Act treats people with gender recognition certificates (there are roughly 9,000 in the UK) rather than establishing any new principle about self-identification.
She is equally scathing about the idea that Europe will overturn British law. “Some think Strasbourg will ride in as a white knight. But the European court has never ruled directly on a clash between trans and women’s rights at this level, and there’s no reason to assume it would disregard women’s rights or deny the UK a margin of appreciation in how it balances them.”
Ironically, it was the EHRC itself which created part of the problem that the courts are now struggling to unravel. Its 2011 guidance told service providers with separate or single sex services that they should treat people who identify as trans according to the gender in which they present, regardless of whether they had a Gender Recognition Certificate. Reindorf says this was “legally, completely and utterly wrong on sex and on gender reassignment”. Throughout the following decade, a system of de facto gender self-identification became embedded across public bodies.
“Nobody understood that bit of law at the time, and it wasn’t particularly controversial, and it was just a couple of throwaway paragraphs in the 2011 code.” Now she feels it must be repealed.
The government, she maintains, refuses to withdraw it even though it dates back to 2011 and is legally wrong: “Stonewall still relies on it and says it will keep doing so until it’s removed. Frankly, I’d scrap it and rethink the whole approach.” This is in part because the burden of gender self-identification — financial, social and emotional — has been largely carried by women.
“I’m really disappointed that women have had to operate at a grassroots level, crowdfunding cases for years just to have the law and their rights re-established, without any institutional support. That’s something the EHRC should be doing more of, but it simply doesn’t have the resources.”
What’s shocking, she says, is that despite the legal clarification women are now having to do it all over again. “You’d think the Supreme Court judgment hadn’t even happened, given the volume of litigation coming in and the refusal by some to comply with the law. It feels like a breakdown in the rule of law, and women are left to mop it up. The government is just standing by and watching the rule of law being threatened in this way.”
Reindorf is clearly tired of the human rights of half the population being airily dismissed as a “culture war”. “That phrase is often used to trivialise the issue and make it sound silly, as if it’s not serious or not about women. I find that insulting. This is about women’s fundamental rights and the rule of law.”
Reindorf is no crusader. She is a lawyer exasperated by the gap between what the law plainly says and what institutions prefer to hear. For years she has argued from the inside for what many outside the legal system regard as straightforward. The fight that has made her a heroine to some and a heretic to others runs along the fault line between law and politics. It shows no sign of ending.
