The UK’s only out trans judge has vowed to challenge the UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definitions of “women” and “sex”.
Former judge Dr Victoria McCloud said the ruling, which deemed that the words as used in the 2010 Equality Act related to “biological women” and “biological sex,” was being used to make her and the trans community feel “contained and segregated”.
The ruling failed to consider vital human-rights arguments, McCloud claimed, and she criticised the country’s top judges for failing to speak to a single transgender person before arriving at their decision.
Now, she plans to challenge the ruling in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), claiming that the Supreme Court had “failed” to consider how it would affect trans people.
“Trans people were wholly excluded from this court case,” Dr McCloud told the BBC on Monday (28 April). “I applied to be heard, two of us did. We were refused.
“[The court] heard no material going to the question of the proportionality and the impact on trans people. It didn’t hear evidence from us.”
Announcing the court’s unanimous verdict earlier this month, Lord Patrick Hodge said the Equality Act referred to “biological sex” when mentioning “sex.” However, the ruling should not be read “as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not”, he added.
The decision prompted a backlash from trans people and their allies, who took to the streets the following weekend in protest.
McCloud and other campaigners are challenging the judgement to prove that it violated her “fundamental human rights”, she said.
“Just as the prime minister didn’t know what a woman was, the Supreme Court don’t know because they haven’t defined biological sex. The answer is that a woman in law is something with the letter F on her birth certificate.
“I am a woman for all purposes in law but now I’m a man for the Equality Act. So, I probably have to guess on any given occasion which sex I am.”