The equality watchdog has been making repeated moves to support transphobic campaigners and narratives at the expense of transgender people. Leading an activist group to protest against EHRC with several jugs of piss.

An activist group calling themselves “Pissed off Trannies” or POT for short have showed up outside the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s offices with dozens of bottles of piss. The group wore masks and spoke with Vice under condition of anonymity.

The Vice piece says that one member pissed herself in her bejewelled gown, before pouring bottles of urine on herself and the pavement outside the building. This while shouting “The EHRC has blood on its hands and piss on its streets”.

To Vice the activists said their protest against EHRC was “an extreme version of the public embarrassment that trans people experience on a daily basis, using the toilet that either doesn’t fit with their gender or using the one that does, and then facing the backlash of people’s judgement”.

She added: “The Equality and Human Rights Commission… is more concerned with pushing its transphobic agenda than it is in protecting the civil rights of the people it’s meant to serve, which is UK citizens.”

The EHRC infamously stepped in to support Maya Forstater’s legal case against her employer. Initially a judge ruled that her transphobic beliefs were incompatible with human dignity due to the absolutism with which she expresses them. However this was overruled when the EHRC joined in to argue that holding beliefs isn’t the same as expressing them – and subsequently Forstater won her case.

Leaked documents allegedly from the EHRC also point towards them targeting bathroom and disallowing access to trans people without a gender recognition certificate. This has prompted major LGBT+ organisations to also protest against EHRC, however they did it by urging an international review of them rather than pissing on their doorstep.

Elsewhere online there’s been mixed responses. Many in the trans community are praising the protest against EHRC and naturally many in the transphobia community are holding it up as proof positive that all trans women must be excluded from women’s spaces. The same people are accusing the masked trans woman from the photos of being perverted while zooming in on her crotch to get an eye full of her genitals through her transparent dress.

Personally? It’s not what I would’ve done but I’m not about to sit here and say it hasn’t been an effective protest against EHRC. It certainly got people talking and paying attention. For me though, piss grosses me out which is unsurprisingly why its the subject of a lot of my gross-out humour on social media. You certainly won’t catch me drenching myself in piss any time soon.

Whether or not the pissing on oneself was a key part of the protest against EHRC and couldn’t have been done without it; the issues raised are important. Pushing trans people out of spaces the way that anti-trans activists who have the EHRC’s ear are campaigning to do puts us on a urinary leash. We can only travel as far as our nearest safe toilet because as they say; when you gotta go, you gotta go.

I can only hope that trans people don’t have to be covered in piss in order to be left alone in future, though with Truss as our new PM I don’t see protest against the EHRC slowing down any time soon.