‘UK felt safer in the ’90s’ says country’s first out transgender judge

The UK’s first out trans judge has said she feels the UK has become far more dangerous for transgender people since the 1990s.

Retired High Court judge, Victoria McCloud, said a rising “climate of fear” has made things worse for trans people compared to when she came out in the 1990s.

“[In the past few months] we’ve seen a declaration of genocidal intent made by the Lemkin Institute in relation to the United Kingdom to warn people about what’s going on. We’ve seen concerns from the United Nations and from the Council of Europe,” she told The Independent.

“When I came out, things were bizarrely rather better. That was the nineties – we didn’t really have any rights, but there was less of a climate of fear.”

The legal expert, who retired in 2024 due to the increasingly hostile climate for trans people, argued the FWS v Scottish Ministers Supreme Court ruling had made things worse for the community.

Published in April, the ruling concluded a years-long battle between the gender-critical group For Women Scotland and the Scottish government, arguing that the 2010 Equality Act’s definition of sex referred to “biological sex” and women referred to “biological women.”

“I’m particularly at risk of becoming a target”

McCloud, who moved to Ireland in 2024, said she is “very cautious” when returning to the UK following the judgement, saying she no longer sees London as a “safe space.”

“When I come over, I don’t see it as a safe place to go,” she said. “Lovely cis friends are great at helping me to stay out of risky situations where I might be confronted or even potentially assaulted, because, of course, my face is quite well known.

“I’m particularly at risk of becoming a target by some of the more extreme people from the gender critical ideology movement. And that’s a worry. But I think it’s important that I do carry on, and I do have to come back for things like media interviews and so on occasionally.”

The ruling has since been used by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to justify updates to its single-sex service provision guidance, which, if approved, would exclude trans people from gendered facilities and services exclusive to their identity.

McCloud argued that the provisions, which the EHRC haven’t finalised, are already affecting trans and cis people alike, saying that she has already heard of people “who are not trans” being abused in gendered spaces.

“It’s really common, and indeed, not just lesbian women, just anyone who’s maybe a tall woman or whatever,” she said.

“It’s leading, I think, to more abuse of non trans people than it is to trans people, because most trans people actually are quite invisible – we go to quite a great length to be invisible, whereas people who are non-trans don’t see the need to do that.”

Alongside the Trans Legal Clinic and W-Legal, McCloud recently filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), petitioning a rehearing of the Supreme Court case involving trans people.

Brought under Article 8, 14, and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, McCloud said the court “reversed my and 8,500 other people’s sex for the whole of equality law,” without listening to them.

“We are now two sexes at once,” she said, as reported by The Guardian, “We are told we must use dangerous spaces such as male changing rooms and loos when we have female anatomy. If we are raped we must go to male rape crisis. We are searched by male police, to ‘protect’ female police from, I assume, our female anatomy.”

The judge says the Supreme Court refused permission for her to be heard as a witness in the FWS v Scottish Ministers case. She blasted the decision, saying: “Decisions about us, that fundamentally change our rights, shouldn’t be made without us.”

Her petition to the ECHR, she says, “relates fundamentally to fairness,” adding: “It was a situation where nowhere throughout the whole of the case, trans people were heard or represented at all.”