Where do trans men go when nowhere quite fits anymore?

Part one

What we're living through

What has changed in law

In April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers that the words sex, man and woman in the Equality Act 2010 mean what the Court calls biological sex.¹ The judgment does not set out a scientific definition of the term. In this context, it uses it to mean sex at birth.

For the relevant sex provisions of the Equality Act, this means that a trans man is treated as female. It does not matter how long he has lived as a man. It does not matter whether he holds a Gender Recognition Certificate.

A Gender Recognition Certificate continues to have legal effects outside those provisions. Trans people who meet the criteria for the protected characteristic of gender reassignment also keep their legal protection from discrimination. That has not been taken away. But the ground has moved under everyone.

In May 2026, the Equality and Human Rights Commission's updated Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations was laid before Parliament.² It sets out how organisations should apply the ruling when providing services, carrying out public functions and running associations, including the community spaces, groups and services trans men move through every day.

Employment is covered by a separate Employment Code, which has not been updated.

The parliamentary stage has now passed without a debate or a vote. The Code is not yet in force, and no commencement date has been set.³ Our Write to Your MP page explains exactly where it stands and what can still be done.

What it means for trans men

It is easy to assume that a trans man who is consistently seen as male has escaped the worst of transphobia. For some men, parts of daily life may become easier. For many, the danger changes shape rather than disappearing.

Being recognised as male does not protect a man when a healthcare record exposes him, when a service questions his body, or when the law refuses to recognise him as his child's father. It does not protect him from racism, poverty, disability discrimination, homophobia or insecure housing.

For Black trans men, being read as male brings the racialised scrutiny Black cis men face. For Black and Brown trans men more widely, racism and transphobia overlap in healthcare, in LGBTQ+ spaces, and in ordinary life. Transition may alter how discrimination reaches a man. It does not lift him out of it.¹²

The framework can shut trans men out of men-only spaces and services, and for gay, bi and other queer trans men that exclusion can cut twice. A man can be pushed out of a male space and, at the same time, lose access to queer men's community, support or specialist sexual-health provision created for men living lives like his.²

A man who isn't always read as male has no settled ground at all. He cannot count on safety or recognition in men's spaces, and being redirected towards women's provision does not give him somewhere he can safely belong. He navigates a healthcare system built on assumptions that do not fit him.

And for every trans man, whatever his life looks like from the outside, this surfaces at the moments he is most exposed. A hospital admission. A screening. A records check he did not choose.

It reaches family life directly.

A trans man who gives birth must be registered as his child's mother. In June 2026, the European Court of Human Rights declared challenges to that requirement inadmissible.

A second case went further. FZ is a trans man with a full Gender Recognition Certificate. He was legally male and married to his wife when their younger child was conceived through donor insemination.

Under section 35 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, a cis husband in FZ's position would have been treated as the child's father. The court found that section 12 of the Gender Recognition Act prevented FZ from relying on his legal recognition as a man in the same way.

His GRC recognises him as male for most legal purposes. Not here.

The court accepted that, in the life this family actually lives, FZ is the child's father. He had acted as his father since before the birth. The birth certificate still could not record that relationship.

The court found that this interfered with both FZ's and the child's private and family life. It still found no breach of their right to private and family life.

Their older child had also been planned and raised by FZ and his wife together. The mother was recognised automatically because she gave birth. To become a legal parent, FZ had to adopt the child he had already been raising as their father from birth.

A cis husband in FZ's position would have been recorded as the younger child's father. FZ was not. He had to ask a court to recognise his place in both children's lives, and he is still not the younger child's legal father.⁴

Uncertainty changes behaviour

Uncertainty alone changes how people live.

Organisations become cautious. Staff worry about complaints. Policies get rewritten before anyone knows exactly what is required. People start looking more closely at one another's appearance. Questions get asked that would previously have been unthinkable. Cis people who do not conform to expectations of gender get drawn into that scrutiny too.

The government's own additional assessment, published alongside the draft Code, identifies these risks directly. It sets out the possibility of trans people being excluded both from the service that matches how they live and from the service associated with their sex at birth, of being left without any appropriate provision where alternatives cannot be funded, of being required to disclose private information, of increased scrutiny and policing of bodies and appearance, of increased harassment of trans people and of cis people who do not conform to gender stereotypes, and of worsening tensions between groups. It concludes that the likely impact on people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is negative across all three limbs of the Public Sector Equality Duty.⁵

Toilets and changing rooms dominate the public debate. The wider uncertainty created by the judgment spills far beyond them.

Healthcare. Workplaces. Community groups. Sport. Friendships. Volunteering. Religious communities. Support services. Everyday decisions about where you will be recognised, where you will have to explain yourself, and where you may quietly decide it is not worth the emotional cost.

That calculation is exhausting.

Many of us have become highly skilled at reading a room before we enter it. Looking for clues about whether we will need to educate someone, defend ourselves, or brace for awkwardness before we can simply take part.

When that becomes ordinary, it quietly reshapes a life.

Whose safety counts?

Arguments about this framework are usually organised around cis people.

Cis women are treated as the people whose safety services are designed to protect. Cis men are treated as the ordinary category of men and the presumed source of danger. Trans people are introduced afterwards, as complications, exceptions or possible loopholes.

Trans women's safety becomes negotiable when they are directed towards men's provision. Trans men's safety and dignity become negotiable when they are excluded from men's provision and pushed towards somewhere they cannot realistically belong. Non-binary people are forced into a framework that does not describe them. Gender-nonconforming cis women may also face suspicion, questioning and abuse because they do not look the way somebody expects a woman to look.⁵

Cis women's safety matters. The problem is not that it is considered. The problem is that it is treated as the organising principle, while everyone else's safety, privacy and dignity are balanced against it.

Even our own rebuttals can become trapped inside that frame.

Brother Nature begins somewhere else.

We begin with the trans man being asked to leave the place where he belongs. The man required to explain his body to receive healthcare. The man who stops attending, stops asking for support or quietly decides that the emotional cost is no longer worth it.

One question is whether this framework protects cis women effectively.

The deeper question is why trans people are expected to absorb its failures.

The wider picture

None of this sits in isolation. In 2015 the United Kingdom ranked first in ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map, which assesses the laws and policies affecting LGBTI people across 49 European countries. In 2026 the UK sits 22nd, with a score of 44 per cent, two points lower than the previous year.⁹

ILGA-Europe's 2026 assessment scores the UK at under seven per cent on legal gender recognition, on the basis that a Gender Recognition Certificate no longer secures recognition in every area of public life.⁹

Trans women, and trans women of colour in particular, face acute and disproportionate hostility, and that must be named clearly. They are placed at the centre of arguments about safety, bodies and access to public life. The government's assessment acknowledges that directing trans women towards men's provision may expose them to a disproportionate risk of violence or sexual assault.⁵

Trans men's situation is different in form. It is rooted in erasure, and in the assumption that being recognised as male means being unaffected by transphobia. Some men are treated as though they transitioned out of the community and out of the struggle altogether. Others are denied recognition as men while receiving little meaningful support as trans people.

These pressures do not land evenly. Racism, disability, poverty, insecure housing, rural isolation, age, and exclusion within cultural or religious communities can shape how much room a man has to avoid a hostile service, travel elsewhere, pay privately or find community.

A policy that tells someone to use another service assumes that another service exists and that he can reach it.

Transmasculine and non-binary people are affected by the same changes and face distinct questions of their own. Brother Nature remains specific about the community we exist to serve while standing alongside them.

Intersex people and people with variations in sex characteristics face distinct harms from binary rules and bodily scrutiny. Policy affecting them should be shaped with intersex-led organisations.

This is about more than politics

It would be easy to read all of this as a political argument. For most of us, it isn't.

It is about whether there are places you can arrive without first working out how much of yourself you will have to explain. It is about whether friendship can happen before disclosure. Whether rest can happen before vigilance. Whether belonging can exist without qualification.

Politics matters because it shapes the conditions communities have to live in. But communities are built by people.

And when people have somewhere they are fully understood, something changes. They stop spending quite so much energy surviving. They begin spending it living.

Part three

Why Brother Nature exists

Why community is the response

The answer to isolation is not to tell people to become more resilient.

Minority stress accumulates through major discrimination and through daily anticipation, concealment, self-monitoring, rejection, and the constant work of assessing whether a situation is safe. A man can look like he is coping while spending an enormous amount of energy staying guarded.¹⁰

A space where that guarding can ease has value in itself. It creates room for friendship before explanation. For laughter that is not interrupted by vigilance. For conversations that begin in the middle rather than at the beginning. For men to learn from one another across generations, bodies, backgrounds and stages of transition.

That is why ordinary friendship matters so much here.

Brother Nature aims to create a meaningful four nights and relationships that continue afterwards. We hope men swap numbers, keep talking, visit each other, plan walks, share what they know, and become part of one another's lives. Community lives in what remains between people afterwards.

Why a men's-only space

Much of what we have described is shared by transmasculine and non-binary people, who face their own serious barriers and deserve spaces built around their own lives. We hold that in mind.

Brother Nature has been created specifically for men because the nature of a room changes when being a man is its shared foundation rather than a question to be settled. It is about the quality of connection that becomes possible when nobody has to establish who he is before he can speak.

That lets conversations about manhood happen without beginning from apology or defence. It lets men explore what they value, what they have inherited, what they want to put down, and what kind of men they want to become.

It also makes room for masculinity to be joyful. Trans men are often invited to discuss manhood only in relation to danger, privilege, harm or social responsibility. Those conversations matter, but they are not the whole of being a man. Masculinity can also mean tenderness, courage, play, reliability, creativity, strength, protectiveness, vulnerability, silliness, discipline, friendship and love.

There is no single correct relationship to it. Brother Nature welcomes men who are conventionally masculine, men who are feminine or gender non-conforming, and men whose expression moves and changes. Nobody has to display visible signs of queerness to prove his politics. Nobody has to suppress femininity to establish that he is a man.

There is no political test hidden inside presentation. There is simply room for men to take up space together, to look at masculinity honestly, and to celebrate being men without treating maleness as something to apologise for.

See who Brother Nature is for

More than a refuge

Brother Nature exists inside a difficult political moment. What defines us is the community we are building.

It is a response to something longer than any one judgment, Code or government: spaces in which trans men can simply be men, together and without performance, remain extraordinarily rare.

Whatever happens next in politics, trans men will still need friendship, rest, joy, role models, shared knowledge, and the chance to grow alongside one another. They are how people survive. They are also how a life becomes more than survival.

Brother Nature is a place to step away from what is difficult, and equally a place to move towards something. A walk through the trees. A conversation that carries on long after the workshop has finished. A man you met two days ago becoming someone you can call months later. The relief of being ordinary in a room where your history does not make you an exception.

There will be serious conversations. There will also be games, music, movement, fires, food, silence, bad dancing, and the sort of laughter that makes it hard to remember what started it.

Joy is not a distraction from everything on this page. It is part of our answer to it.

What we hope men carry home

Four nights cannot resolve the legal, political and social conditions trans men are living through. That is not the promise.

The hope is that each man goes back to his life carrying something real. A friendship. A new way of understanding himself. An older or younger role model. A memory of being completely at ease. The knowledge that there are other men he no longer has to imagine, because he has sat beside them.

A residential cannot build an entire community on its own. It can create the conditions in which community begins. That is what Brother Nature is here to do.

Sources

Sources and how we use them

1. Supreme Court, For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16, judgment and press summary, 16 April 2025.
2. Office for Equality and Opportunity and Equality and Human Rights Commission, Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, 2026, laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026. The publication remains marked as a draft and states that it has not commenced and does not currently have the force of law.
3. Equality Act 2006, sections 14(7) and 14(8). The draft was laid on 21 May 2026. The 40-day parliamentary scrutiny period ended without either House passing a resolution to reject it. Before the new Code can take effect, the existing Code must be revoked and the new Code commenced. No commencement date has been announced.
4. R (McConnell and YY) v Registrar General for England and Wales [2020] EWCA Civ 559; Y v United Kingdom and X v United Kingdom, applications 23202/21 and 23223/21, European Court of Human Rights decision of 2 June 2026, notified on 25 June 2026; and FZ v MZ [2025] EWHC 3338 (Fam), Lieven J. The latter case concerned a trans man raising two donor-conceived children with his wife. He had to adopt their older child to become a legal parent, while the dispute concerning their younger child's birth registration turned on section 12 of the Gender Recognition Act and section 35 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008.
5. Office for Equality and Opportunity and Equality and Human Rights Commission, Equality impact assessment, published 21 May 2026. The findings concerning double exclusion, lack of alternative provision, involuntary disclosure, gender policing, safeguarding risks and worsening relations appear in the OEO additional impact assessment.
6. Government Equalities Office, National LGBT Survey: Summary Report and National LGBT Survey: Research Report, fieldwork 2017, published 2018 and 2019. The survey was self-selected and open to people aged 16 and over. Its findings describe respondents rather than the entire UK LGBT population.
7. Home Office, Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025. Police figures use a combined transgender monitored strand and do not report trans men separately.
8. Office for National Statistics, Suicides of, and crime rates against, transgender people in the UK, 29 May 2025. The ONS states that there is no separate gender-identity question on the death certificate.
9. ILGA-Europe, Rainbow Map 2026. The United Kingdom retained 22nd place with a score of 44%, two points lower than in 2025. ILGA-Europe's analysis scores the UK at under seven per cent on legal gender recognition, on the basis that a Gender Recognition Certificate no longer secures recognition in every area of public life.
10. Meyer, I. H., "Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence", Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674 to 697, 2003; Hendricks, M. L. and Testa, R. J., "A Conceptual Framework for Clinical Work With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients: An Adaptation of the Minority Stress Model", Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 43(5), 460 to 467, 2012.
11. Office for National Statistics, Domestic abuse prevalence and victim characteristics, year ending March 2024, Table 6. Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates for people aged 16 and over. The figures compare respondents whose gender identity differed from their sex registered at birth with those whose gender identity was the same. ONS cannot provide a reliable separate figure for trans men. The sample was divided while new domestic-abuse questions were being tested, so the estimates are based on fewer respondents than a full sample.
12. On the disproportionate policing of Black men: Home Office, Police powers and procedures: Stop and search, arrests and mental health detentions, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2025. On healthcare discrimination reported by trans people of colour: TransActual, Trans Lives 2025: Continuing to endure the UK's hostile environment and Healthcare Professionals Report 2025. On the experience of being read as a Black or Brown man while trans: Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, "Navigating racialised trans masculinity in fascist Britain", BRICKS, 24 June 2026, written from a Black and Brown transmasculine perspective. The connection between these sources is drawn from community testimony rather than from any dataset that reports on Black trans men separately, because no such dataset exists.

Last reviewed: July 2026. We review this page when the EHRC Code is commenced or withdrawn, when a court rules on any challenge to it, when ILGA-Europe publishes a new Rainbow Map, or when new official UK data reports on trans men separately.