Media Diversity Institute

By Dr Victoria McCloud, British lawyer and former High Court judge    

This piece is about one specific legal dramatic development for trans and LGBTQ people in the UK and the mass media context which led directly to it, and the civic fallout afterwards. I refer to the decision in April of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, by judges who naturally cannot be immune from awareness of all the press coverage that had gone before. Transsexual people who have followed the UK court and medical process are, since For Women Scotland, in a ‘twilight zone’ of being two sexes at once, without rights to Equal Pay with men, for example. 

The Court decided not to hear argument from any party authorised to represent trans people (the author herself was declined permission) and departed from two decades of law arising from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). They redefined ‘lesbian’ as being solely ‘biologically’ determined and decided that the law allowing diagnosed transsexual people to change sex after a strict court and medical process does not apply to sex discrimination law. 

UK coverage overwhelmingly makes use of the term ‘trans’ as ‘one size fits all’ and accepts that anyone who asserts that they are trans or is asserted to be trans must be such. Paradoxically, a press unfavourable to ‘trans’ people has adopted the controve...Read more