I'm not sure how legal it is to set up a service in the UK that only serves trans people - the legal exemption in question is at least partly one-way. It's defi

I'm not sure how legal it is to set up a service in the UK that only serves trans people - the legal exemption in question is at least partly one-way. It's definitely not legal to prefer to hire trans women on the basis that other trans women are more likely to be comfortable speaking to them, because the exemption allowing rape counseling services to only hire cis women for the same reason very definitely and specifically does not apply in the other direction. (Requiring that they at least think of trans women as women is probably legal and hopefully wouldn't fall foul of the indirect discrimination provision, maybe.) Also, that Code of Practice is the result of a change of government and a fairly intensive lobbying campaign by trans activists to reduce the damage done by the exemption. It was originally intended to be much broader in application. From the original explanatory notes: "A group counselling session is provided for female victims of sexual assault. The organisers do not allow transsexual people to attend as they judge that the clients who attend the group session are unlikely to do so if a male-to-female transsexual person was also there. This would be lawful." That is, originally it was intended to allow rape and domestic violence services to exclude all trans women as a class because they believe that some cis women wouldn't want to attend if they were there. This is a common belief amongst a certain group of vocal feminist activists who think trans women are men and run government-funded services. Note that there's no requirement that clients are actually unwilling to attend, just that the organizers think they would be. I think they also intended this to apply this to one-on-one counseling on the basis that women would have to share a waiting room. This was also a rollback in protection for some trans women, because the law on Gender Recognition Certificates didn't permit this. Any future Governemnt can trivially change the Code of Practice back too; don't think it'd even require a vote in Parliament. (The reason trans people got added to anti-discrimination law at all is because the European Court of Human Rights ruled they had to be. There was some pretty impressive foot-dragging on implementing that too.)