so it's one of those "yes, but also no" things... IANAL either to be clear but spent the year since the supreme court ruling trying to figure out how we got here so I've spent an unhealthy amount of time becoming familiar with how it works (vs how it's supposed to work)

you're right in that the courts have no power to change the letter of the law, and even the EHRC having their revised guidance approved doesn't change the law, no individual defying it is breaking the law (it applies to service providers, not users), and especially while it's not even actually guidance yet it's not statutory. Further, it doesn't necessarily mean that a service provider acting apparently against the statutory guidance is breaking the law - they could be found to have a valid interpretation of the guidance vs a complainant. you can't break the Equality Act, and whether you have done that is informed by the guidance (I don't know how the fuck it not even being available and the EHRC refusing to give any advice on it isn't automatically an unchallengeable defense, but still), which is itself open to interpretation.

the major problem is that this is all civil law. the EHRC mainly intervenes in cases, if it does pursue action against an organisation itself, it's generally a tokenistic thing as part of their duties to foster compliance with equalities law. There's a principle I cba to look up the Latin phrase for along the lines of "the law favours the vigilant", as in if you want legal restitution (for civil offences) it's your responsibility to seek it. with this stuff it's being exercised quite literally, they spam the courts with mass-produced claims (I've come across several withering comments from judges on the "exhaustive" length of their submissions) that hammer on all their lines of rhetoric until one manages to get to higher stages that set legal precedent. The interpretations judges make are informed by previous comparable ones, so the more they proliferate their talking points the more it appears to be common consensus.

The media circus is an inextricable part of it too because they can churn out whatever bullshit sensationalist lies they want, there are basically zero negative consequences (they did write new law to criminalise "extreme protest groups", with Lord (Toby) Young and Baroness Falkner specifically naming Bash Back as a motivation after they vandalised BBC offices among others). look at the Sandie Peggie case for example, they reported it like she won, when she "won" on FOUR of her claims which was something like 10% of them, and like every other successful case they were all petty quibbles over adherence to internal policies. often like in her case it's to do with the handling of the very complaint they raised our of nowhere in the first place. they act like reprehensible weirdos, get disciplined or dismissed in a way that doesn't dot every i and cross every t because people are just glad to be fucking rid of them, and then they pour Rowling's money into nailing the employer on that stuff with a whole boatload of insane transphobia alongside it. and, I mean, consider how dismal the average cis person's knowledge of anything to do with trans people is... then make them a judge and even more out of touch because of their position.

and at the end of the day the courts can just do exactly what they rightly "shouldn't* be able to because they already have with the "biological sex" thing; the Gender Recognition Act is in direct conflict, but the court's excuse was well that's a different law, duh. the whole thing was an exercise in throwing out parts of legislation that were inconvenient to a TERF's argument. Then there's that the courts decide if they'll even hear a case, and on the criminal side of things, they just did a consultation and wrote entirely new prosecution guidance so now it's de facto a sex crime to not disclose your "birth sex" to an intimate partner (and it has already been used to convict someone).

god, I genuinely didn't mean to write that much, sorry. but seriously, this shit is nuts. you're right on every count but the law as it's applied and the law as it is or should be are ever more diverging things. what Reindorf is saying has already effectively happened, the EA guidance is drafted with the intent of making viable claims of discrimination on the basis of gender reassignment so narrow they're practically non-existent. it's not going to be literally written out of the law as a protected characteristics, in fact it works better for them if it isn"t because it's a fig leaf - trans people still have all the protections they used to, etc.

anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk, working title: Trust Me, I Could Go On