A transgender judge has resigned, apparently because of the risk of politicising the judiciary. But this was no ordinary judge. Victoria McCloud is a King’s Bench Master of the High Court, a senior job. In 2010, McCloud – then aged 40 – was the youngest person to have been appointed to the role. The news was not trumpeted at the time as a ‘first’ for transgender people. Few people knew about McCloud’s unusual history and, it seemed, fewer cared.
McCloud transitioned in the 1990s. It was a very different world for transsexuals, back then. The goal was to reassimilate unnoticed in the workplace, and society at large – hiding in plain sight as it were. It made sense. If nobody realised that you were trans, then they could hardly discriminate against you on the grounds of gender reassignment. Before the 2010 Equality Act, that was crucial. McCloud was not unusual in keeping a trans identity out of the public eye.
So, what happened? Why did trans identities become so political, and why is McCloud now complaining that ‘I am now political every time I choose where to pee’? In another extract of a letter – parts of which it has been claimed were leaked to the Times – McCloud added:
I have reached the conclusion that in 2024 the national situation and present judicial framework is no longer such that it is possible in a dignified way to be both ‘trans’ and a salaried, fairly prominent judge in the UK.
Victoria McCloud
That’s a big statement for a senior judge to make, and a sad indictment of modern Britain. Is this country really no longer a place where trans people can contribute their skills, knowledge and expertise? It’s certainly very different to 2012, when I transitioned. That was almost two decades after McCloud but even then, my aims were to go through gender reassignment, keep my job and stay out of the press. Two out of three ain’t bad, I guess.
I only began to speak out when I saw the politicisation of trans rights – my rights, indeed – by an out-of-control activist lobby who were demanded that anyone should be able to self-identify their gender, and hence their legal sex. The likely impact on the rights of women and the development of children seemed to be beyond the wit of naïve politicians – on both sides of the House of Commons – simply acquiesced.
Maria Miller – as chair of the Women and Equalities Committee – called on the government to update the law ‘in line with the principles of gender self-declaration’. That was 2016. The next year, prime minister Theresa May told a Pink News awards dinner that her government would do just that. In 2018, it was Jeremy Corbyn’s turn to pay homage to the same gathering with the same message. Finally, in 2022, Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill hit the buffers when a male rapist was remanded to Corton Cale women’s prison in Stirling.
But the damage had been done. The acceptance of transsexuals depends far less on pieces of government paperwork and far more on trust and confidence. After rather too many spectacles of men abusing the system, more and more women have decided that they have had enough, and I can’t say I blame them. The previous welcome that was – certainly in my experience – almost always extended to male transsexuals is now more guarded. In social media environments, it has sometimes been withdrawn and replaced by hostility.
Is that what McCloud was getting at when pointing out that the judiciary ‘has used me in social media’, which ‘has been rewarding and I will cherish the memories’, but ‘came at a cost because I became a public figure and a target’? The result – according to McCloud – is that, ‘it has been open season on me and others’.
Or is this resignation more personal, and a consequence of McCloud’s own social media output? One barrister has suggested that McCloud may have engaged in posting content that ‘breaches two parts of the [social media guidance issued to judges] (1) not to identify your judicial post on any social media account to which the general public has access, and (2) not to use such an account to engage in debate on matters of political controversy’. In this case, it wasn’t any old controversy but the transgender debate itself.
Whatever the reason for McCloud’s departure, it still feels like open season for transsexuals on social media. The online antipathy can be brutal and personal. The old unconditional welcome has maybe gone for good. Perhaps that was inevitable, but there is work to be done to build something better, where transsexuals can live our best lives without impinging on the rights of other people.
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.
Her book, Transsexual Apostate – My Journey Back to Reality is published by Forum
* This article was first published by The Spectator on 23 February 2024: The sad truth behind why the UK’s first trans judge resigned.
Debbie Hayton 
8 replies on “The sad truth behind why the UK’s first trans judge resigned”
Debbie, when you say “male transsexual”, do you mean a transsexual who is biologically male, or a transsexual who looks like a male?
I like to express my opinion on just about everything, but I’m not sure that I have a right to comment here. Was the problem that she let her transsexual nature become known, or were there ways for people to dredge up that information without her consent? Or was the problem that she said something controversial, or was it that she revealed things on social media she shouldn’t have (because of her status as a judge)?
I agree that the overall controversy about trans people is probably what made her an issue.
In a perfect world, there would be no prejudice. Trans people, to the extent that they don’t “pass” well, might engender some curiosity, but that is all. My belief is that the insistence of trans activists that trans women are real women, and that trans men are real men, is the biggest part of the issue. I recall that even as late as 2010, not many activists were making such claims, but that all changed by 2020. If your gender dysphoria makes you a REAL woman, then that gives you the right to push into any and all women’s spaces — and that’s the second-biggest controversy, in my view.
I believe the concept of gender identity was conjured up to make trans people feel normal. But it isn’t honest. If honesty looked like this — “I feel like a woman, so I live as a woman; please leave me alone so I can live my life the way I want to” — then I think society would be much more accepting of the phenomenon.
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I agree Caleb. I think the key word here is dignity. There seems to be very little dignity in the way the trans lobby is debating and behaving online. Half the time it seems to be an excuse to display individual fetish and draw attention to sexual practices that most of us would rather not know about and spend a lot of our time trying to protect our children from worrying about.
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Well, I’m a gay man who hasn’t had a sex life in twenty years; and since men don’t have menopause, I still have a sex drive, so I look at pornography. I prefer the mild stuff, the loving stuff. (If menopause doesn’t remove a woman’s sex drive, I apologize for the error.)
Gay porn has gotten nastier in the last thirty years, with more swearing, slapping and now spitting (not to mention S&M). Ugh. I don’t remember who told me this, but I understand that adolescent girls who want to be boys sometimes look at gay porn, something I never would have expected. I supposed they figure that, if they become a boy and they are attracted to boys, they should see how gay sex is done, because they’ll end up being gay!!! But it can’t have any meaning for a trans man because trans men don’t have real penises, and they certainly don’t have prostates (stimulation of the prostate is part of the pleasure). The whole situation just seems bizarre.
It’s true that a lot of trans people go into porn, presumably because they can’t get other jobs. On some porn sites, the big thing is trans women displaying both their big male genitals AND their big artificial breasts. Another theme, though less common, is trans men who haven’t had bottom surgery having intercourse in all of their orifices at once.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for straight people who think that gay men have elevated sex to something that is gross, but gay sex is downright normal compared to the sex some trans people are having.
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This is what I mean. Obviously these activities have always existed but now it seems we are obliged to “celebrate’ this way of life. I really don’t see why. I am in the fast diminishing group of people who think that sex is a private activity involving a maximum of two people. How dull is that?
Oh and by the way the menopause for most women is just not that big a deal in fact they welcome the freedom.
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The whole question of “dignity” for human beings is an interesting one. I like the idea of dignity — at least until we come face to face with our animal nature, and that happens when we become desperate for one reason or another. Your last remarks spurred me to confess some personal things, and I suppose I did that because I have mixed feelings about sex in general. I was never much into anal sex, and I know plenty of gay men who never did it because it was unsanitary — but then I have also known straight couples who did it as a way to avoid pregnancy. There was a 19th century poet — I can’t remember his name — who bemoaned in one of his poems that God chose to put reproduction and excretion in the same place in the human body. We have no control over that, so we have to deal with it.
I agree about celebrating. I never celebrated being gay, and now I eschew the whole concept of “pride”, and I will never hold a pride flag. Here’s a poem I wrote about being gay. I have replaced the italics with all caps because I don’t know how to do italics here.
GAY PRIDE
The concept never made much sense to me.
I can hear my mother asking, “Proud to be sterile?”
Or the boss wondering what his clients will think
when they find out what I am. (Does it matter?)
Sex is such a personal thing! If I claim
to be proud, should I then tell everyone
my best technique, my preferred position?
Is what I am some kind of performance art?
But all that changed one day when a red-faced brute
suspected what I was and tried to shame me,
barked epithets at me, called me a pederast,
a thief of youth (though I know no children at all).
That was the day I became proud—not of THAT
per se, but of whatever makes me me;
of my individuality, of what
makes me unique in a congested world.
THAT’s a button I know how to polish.
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I am a male transsexual – I’m biologically male but I have undergone a meaningful transition. In other contexts I might have used the term male-to-female transsexual, but that has become controversial.
In real life I perceive next to no prejudice. I just get on with my life. People I work with are far more bothered that I am trustworthy and reliable, and I can do my job well. Suspect that was the case for McCloud as well.
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Yes, for what it’s worth, I much prefer this terminology. I find the terms “transman” and “transwoman” (with or without a space) take a suprising degree of mental work to decipher, and they also admit that central tenet of trans identity ideology, that a “trans”-whatever is some subset of the whatever class: “trans women are real women”. I tend to say, “trans-identified male/female” or “…man/woman”.
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Very heartfelt C. It would seem that some men really struggle with the idea of any variation of the “norm’ which shows itself in aggression despite the fact that they are not personally being attacked in any way. We need a lot more dignity and empathy in this world.
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