Britain’s “first transgender judge” is attempting to go over the head of the UK Supreme Court, appealing to European judges in Strasbourg in a bid to overturn a ruling earlier this year affirming biological sex.
Victoria McCloud, who identifies as a woman and who was described as the UK’s “first transgender judge” upon appointment in 2010, has launched an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against the ruling at the UK Supreme Court in April which found that “the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.”
The ruling meant that even transgender people who have received what is called a gender recognition certificate from the British state are not allowed to enter female single-sex spaces such as bathrooms.
Retired judge McCloud’s legal team has argued that because some trans groups and McCloud were not permitted to join the suit brought forward by For Women Scotland against the Scottish government, the case had breached the right to a fair trial guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights and its associated court in Strasbourg.
The UK remains bound by the ECHR despite Brexit, as it is technically a separate institution from the European Union and therefore Britain’s membership was unaffected by the withdrawal from the bloc.
In a statement to The Telegraph, McCloud said: “There is no space for decision-making about us, without us. I intend to ensure that there will be no peace for the gender-critical ideological movement, the Labour Government appeasing it, or space in our schools, homes and workplaces for an ideology which causes harm, misery and oppression of a small and law-abiding minority in our formerly tolerant country.”
The challenge will be supported by the Trans Legal Clinic, which has raised some £150,000 for the case. McCloud will also be represented by Oscar Davies, who self-describes as “non-binary”, supposedly the first barrister to do so in British legal history.
Responding to the appeal, the chief executive of the women’s rights group Sex Matters, Maya Forstater, said that McCloud’s case is “incomprehensible”.
“The European Court of Human Rights only hears cases that have exhausted all domestic legal remedies, and since McCloud wasn’t a party to For Women Scotland in the Supreme Court, that’s not the case here,” she said.
“It’s a fantasy that someone can go straight to Strasbourg to complain that the Supreme Court in their own country didn’t listen to them.”
Should the ECHR attempt to overrule the British court’s ruling on gender, it would perhaps be the most significant intervention from Strasbourg into domestic UK affairs since Brexit, with the possible exception of the 2022 injunction used to stymie the then-Conservative government’s scheme to send illegal boat migrants to asylum processing centres in Rwanda.
However, in this case, an intervention from the European court may be welcome to the governing left-wing Labour Party, which was forced to support the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year reluctantly despite its base becoming increasingly dogmatic on progressive gender ideology.
The ECHR bid is not the retired judge’s first foray into transgender legal issues. The Daily Telegraph noted in a 2020 report before they quit the bench in 2024, which stated that McCloud was previously known as Dr Jason Williams, that the judge had spoken out against the way the UK manages legal name changes through deed poll because it creates a permanent, public, legal record of the fact transgender people had other names in the past.
Because when people change their name by deed poll and register this with the government — allowing them to get a passport or driving licence in their new name, for instance — it is published by the state, Judge McCloud said in a ruling that: “The internet enables easy search for people… Enrolling a name change Deed to all intents and purposes makes permanently public the name change and will in many instances therefore amount to what will later be taken as disclosure of a change of social or legal gender, whether by child or adult.
“In other words, it ‘outs’ them.”
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