.jpg)
“I am exhausted at having to come out every day and do mini education sessions for people I encounter,” Sam says.
Sam, whose name has been changed for the purposes of anonymity, is a trans, non-binary person working at a small independent agency.
Lacking a gender transitioning policy, or any kind of policy about transgender and gender-diverse people, the workplace culture at Sam’s agency has been entrusted to the idea that “We’re all good people here”.
The results of that have been mixed, with a culture that Sam describes as “warm tolerance”.
When Sam arrived, they were the person who asked for pronouns in signatures, who took the “Male” and “Female” signs off toilet doors to create gender-neutral spaces.
“What I crave is people doing those things ahead of me, pointing them out, taking care of me before I have to ask for it,” they say.
Gender transitioning support: the lowdown
Sam’s employer is not alone, falling into a sizeable group of agencies that do not have gender transitioning policies.
From Campaign’s School Reports data, covering 92 shops, 54% had a gender transitioning policy at the end of 2024, while 46% did not have one. Meanwhile, out of the 91 shops providing data, 31% had gender transitioning included in their health insurance, although it is not known how many shops offer health insurance in the first place.
Marty Davies, founder of Smarty Pants Consultancy and a Campaign columnist, helped devise the questions on transitioning policies for the latest set of School Reports and is a well-known advocate for trans and gender-diverse people in the ad industry.
Referring to Campaign’s findings, she says: “I thought it would be a bit higher to be honest, so I’m disappointed, but it’s not surprising.”
By comparison, Cassius Naylor, consultant and co-director of advocacy at Outvertising, says he is “thrilled” to see that more than half of shops have a policy in place. Having implemented a transitioning policy at one of his previous employers, Naylor adds that healthcare provision was a “very difficult thing to try and get changed in a corporate setting”, with contracts expiring every three years or so and adding cost to the company’s deal with their provider.
Perceived complexity
For Naylor, if companies don’t yet have a policy in place, they are behind the curve and should move quickly to change that. However, he adds, it is important to get the policy right. “You might only get one shot at getting a policy like this passed," he says.
He adds that there has been a “substantial lack of clarity” about how people can move around in the workplace, including the use of toilets and other facilities, since the UK Supreme Court ruling in April this year, which stated that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex and “binary”.
This ruling means that a person who is not born biologically female cannot access the legal protections the Equality Act 2010 affords to women by changing their name with a Gender Recognition Certificate. However transgender people do still have protections against discrimination and harassment under the Act.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission later sent out an interim update on workplaces, public places, sporting bodies, schools and associations.
On single-sex facilities, the EHRC says that trans women should not be allowed to use the women’s facilities and trans men should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, but acknowledged that in some places trans women would not be able to use the male facilities and vice versa.
Davies says that, in the wake of the ruling, having a workplace policy and being vocal about it is a crucial way to show trans employees that they are working in a supportive environment. “If you’re not outwardly showing that you support all of the people that work for your business, then it leaves space for people to think that maybe you don’t support them.”
From agencies’ School Reports submissions, policies on being trans-inclusive take in guidance on areas such as dress code, with the prompt to dress in line with the person’s identity; advice on using facilities that suit the person; changes to personal details on HR systems and on email; and time off for medical and surgical procedures. Notably, many of the policies focus on a bespoke communication plan, allowing the individual to decide how they want to inform colleagues, clients and other parties.
When it comes to private medical cover offered by the company, services include counselling for mental health conditions related to gender identity, assessment with a gender identity specialist and initial hormone treatment.
Independent media agency the7stars has had a policy since September 2018, and subsequently changed its language around gender for other policies, to be more inclusive for all LGBTQ+ staff. For instance, maternity and paternity leave have been changed to primary and secondary caregiver leave, acknowledging that it may not just be mothers who are the primary caregivers and that the parents may not be a mother-father pairing.
Rhiannon Murphy, managing partner at the7stars, which had 312 staff as of the end of 2024, explains that the agency established the policy as a tool for “signposting support and affirming our commitment", in addition to the policy’s actual purpose. She adds that she is “surprised” that more agencies don’t have a transitioning at work policy in place and believes it comes from a “real lack of understanding”.
“There’s obviously a real, perceived kind of complexity around the issue, and there’s a real fear of getting it wrong,” she says.
Following the Supreme Court ruling, Murphy and the senior leadership team at the7stars sent out internal communications to “reaffirm our commitment as an agency and as a business to dignity, inclusion and equality for all, regardless of gender identity”.
Currently, the7stars doesn’t cover gender transitioning under its healthcare insurance policy – which it offers to all staff – but it is something the business is looking into. “There’s going to be quite big cost implications, so we’re trying to negotiate with our broker at the moment,” Murphy says.
‘It made me feel I was making people go out of their way’
Davies hypothesises that it’s more difficult for smaller agencies to enact gender transitioning healthcare insurance. “The number of workers that you have opens up different packages for healthcare policies. If you’re independent and smaller, there are less options available to you," she says. “When you are a bigger organisation, you have more resources to dedicate to being fuller in your provision.”
Kate Williams is director of diversity and inclusion at Publicis Groupe UK, which employs more than 6000 people including at media agencies Starcom, Zenith and Spark Foundry, and creative shops BBH, Leo and Saatchi & Saatchi. It has had a gender transitioning policy in place since 2022 and private medical insurance covering transitioning was added in 2023.
Like the7stars, after the Supreme Court ruling, Williams and her team put out a message saying that nothing had changed as far as Publicis Groupe UK was concerned and with regard to areas such as facilities, people should use those that felt comfortable with.
Williams says there are benefits to being a larger network when developing these kinds of policies. However, with more people comes more messaging, and she admits that “sometimes it's difficult to cut through all of that noise and traffic for your emails to land”.
She says: “[At a network] you’re more likely to see increased numbers of people, so you can actually bring a number of people together who have a shared affinity, which may not be possible in smaller agencies.” She adds, though, that with small teams, it can be easier to develop close working relationships, which can “nurture somebody through transition really effectively”.
Even if a network does have a broad policy, Williams says that the most important thing is to “offer personalised support”.
“Like a lot of our policies, our disability policy, inclusion policy, these things manifest very differently for different people. No person’s transition journey will be the same as anybody else’s,” she adds.
She goes on to say that it needs to be informed by the person who is transitioning and that people at Publicis have appreciated a policy which isn’t “too prescriptive” and gives them the licence to navigate the journey themselves, alongside their team.
It means that the person involved does not have to bear the full burden of informing everyone, having potentially difficult conversations with third parties and the administrative role of changing their details across all work platforms.
This was not the case for Jay, another creative at a large network, whose name has been changed for the purposes of anonymity. As non-binary and gender fluid, Jay says that their transitioning process at work was very “ad hoc”.
“HR wasn’t prepared with a process to walk me through it. If there had been more of a structure in place, it would have made things so much easier. By doing it ad hoc, it just made me feel like I was making people go out of their way,” they say.
Davies adds that, without a policy, it feeds into the idea that “just by advocating for themselves, [trans people] are being difficult”.
After their social transition, though, Jay says that they felt a shift in their confidence at work: “[I was] a little bit more confident to take up space and bring my ideas to the table.”
Findings from the latest All In Census, a 2025 survey of the UK’s advertising workforce, about the industry’s trans and gender-diverse population, are stark.
On average, 9% of the industry said they were likely to leave the sector because of lack of inclusion and discrimination, for LGBQ+ respondents it was 14% and for the trans community that figure rose to 23%.
Meanwhile those people in the trans community were four times more likely to feel uncomfortable in the workplace; 60% of them were likely to feel this way compared with the 15% average, according to All In.
Davies says people are willing to switch to other parts of the sector – such as working in-house for brands – if they are offered better support. “People move around to go to places that have better transitioning healthcare, so we might be seeing a talent drain through lack of provision,” she says.
Are there alternative approaches?
Next 15-owned creative agency Elvis, with 52 staff members last year, is among the 46% of agencies that don’t have a policy.
Managing director and sustainability lead, Caroline Davison, says the agency has “chosen not to implement specific policies for every possible circumstance, as having a large number of policies could become overwhelming”.
She adds: “Instead, we've developed broad, encompassing policies – like our Equal Opportunities, DEI, and Health & Wellbeing policies – that are designed to cover a wide range of personal and professional situations.”
Davison also adds that the agency’s approach is to ensure that “everyone feels valued, respected and supported, while maintaining the flexibility to address individual needs”.
Policies are not the only way to provide support, according to Abbie, a trans woman at a large network, whose name has been changed for the purposes of this article to maintain her anonymity.
She says her team has offered her a great deal of help, particularly when the wider discourse about transgender rights in society has been challenging. “There has been support shown at hard times politically without asking,” Abbie adds.
For example, one colleague ran a charity fundraiser after the interim ruling from the EHRC came through, and Abbie has been provided with mental health days after the Supreme Court ruling.
She says: “That's huge to know they are tapped into the conversation, to know that they are listening, to know that they care. Like, what more can I ask for?”
Political storm
The wider network, Abbie points out, can no longer be vocal about DEI work because of its presence in the US market and the “American political state”.
Following his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States in early 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order that terminated all federal government programmes related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility – and which ordered the Attorney General to draw up plans “to encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI".
In May, the US Supreme Court temporarily allowed Trump to enforce a ban on transgender people serving in the military, while legal challenges to the policy took place.
The effects of the anti-DEI sentiment predate Trump’s re-election, with publication Gay Times saying it has lost eight in 10 advertisers since last year.
Davies notes there is also “less work” for her consultancy role supporting the representation and portrayals of trans people. In a sign of the times, she has now developed a queer resilience training workshop.
Abbie says: “It has been the year of the quiet rainbow. We can’t be vocal about it. That doesn’t mean progress isn’t happening. It just means we’re having to be smarter about it because of the political state,” adding that both politics and culture wars are playing a part.
“One of the great campaigns in the last 10 years has been the campaign against trans people,” she says.
With support, she believes the trans community can come through it: “This is the time to look after each other on a solo level, make sure you’re in an environment where you are valued and cared for. Once this ridiculous storm has blown over, you will be given the opportunities you deserve.”