The Supreme Court is comprised of very able and mature minds, aware of the law and of their duties. The case brought by For Women Scotland concerns a pure and straightforward matter of statutory reading and I have no doubt that the voices of the various campaign groups permitted to intervene – all but one of which are supportive of [For Women Scotland’s] desire to create a new court-based definition of sex away from the statutes – will be accorded the weight and respect which they are due. I have every confidence the law plainly stated will prevail. All else is politics.

Dr Victoria McCloud, quoted in The Herald, 8 October 2024

It is extraordinary – and alarming – that the Government should question the authority of a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. This is a direct challenge to the rule of law. It should bear in mind what Margaret Thatcher said: “In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the law”.

And, as a legal matter, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law. Saying “this is the law” is what it is the Supreme Court’s job to do. Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and the other moral detritus they drag in with them have no mandate to question the Supreme Court’s decision.

Jolyon Maugham KC, on X/Twitter, 24 September 2019

Yep, everyone – even moral detritus like former tax (avoidance) lawyer Jolyon ‘Angry Dad’ Maugham KC and former judge Dr Victoria McCloud – loves the Supreme Court when it’s making rulings they like. But when it’s making rulings they don’t like, not so much.

Some might say it is extraordinary – and alarming – that a former tax (avoidance) lawyer and and a retired judge should question the authority of a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. After all, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law. And some might wonder what mandate a former tax (avoidance) lawyer and a retired judge (who now lives in Ireland) have to question the 16 April Supreme Court ruling that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 means ‘biological sex’.

But that is what Angry Dad and Dr McCloud are now busy doing. Since 16 April, Angry Dad has called the Supreme Court ruling “profoundly unfair” and “a real low in British legal history”. Looking somewhat tired and emotional in a video shared by trans activists on X/Twitter, he’s asserted that “something very strange and very wrong has happened in the Supreme Court … this is a really, really bad moment for British justice”. And on Bluesky he’s said “I believe the Supreme Court was hubristic, reckless or bigoted – I’m not that interested in the precise moral quality of their turpitude – in the way they approached the For Women Scotland case”.

‘Turpitude’ means ‘depraved or wicked behaviour’. Angry Dad is 53 years old. But he and his wife have transed two of their three daughters.

In a crowdfunder launched the day after the ruling, in support of a Fighting Fund for Trans Rights, Angry Dad’s Good Law Project wails that the ruling “isn’t just wrong, it’s extremely harmful”. And in a second crowdfunder, launched just days later in support of a vaguely specified legal challenge to the ruling, the GLP (wrongly) claims that the Supreme Court “disgracefully refused to hear from trans people before handing down a decision with the profoundest possible consequences for trans lives”.

As I write, those two GLP crowdfunders have raised a total of £383,570 – more than five times the combined total sum raised to date by the GLP’s previous five crowdfunders. Both crowdfunders now feature – at #12 and #4 respectively – in the GLP’s Top 15 most remunerative crowdfunders (out of 83 launched since 2017). Yet, far from appearing grateful for this largesse, Angry Dad has responded by yelling:

Screw the so-called Labour Party, screw the so-called Equality & Human Rights Commission, and screw the so-called Supreme Court. The Supreme Court judges have abandoned their judicial oath in service of pleasing their wealthy friends.

It’s not exactly clear from the two GLP crowdfunders, or Angry Dad’s rants on social media, exactly what form the legal challenge to the Supreme Court ruling will take, but we have to assume that they plan to ask the High Court to make a declaration, under section 4 of the Human Rights Act 1998, that the Equality Act 2010 is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

And today we learned that this somewhat ambitious – if not utterly fanciful – legal challenge will feature that other fan of the Supreme Court’s “very able and mature minds”, former judge Victoria McCloud. He told the BBC:

Trans people were wholly excluded from this court case. I applied to be heard. Two of us did. We were refused. The [Supreme Court] heard no material going to the question of the proportionality and the impact on trans people. It didn’t hear evidence from us. The Supreme Court failed in my view, adequately, to think about human rights points.

In October last year, the Supreme Court did indeed reject the application to intervene – orchestrated and funded by Angry Dad and the GLP – made by Dr McCloud and fellow trans person Professor Stephen Whittle OBE, PhD, DLaws, FAcSS, Cycling Proficiency Grade 2. But the Court did accept interventions by both the global human rights organisation Amnesty International, and the Equality & Human Rights Commission. And, well, both organisations made quite a few human rights-y points and arguments.

Dr McCloud has yet to tell us which human rights points or arguments he thinks the trans-friendly Amnesty International (or the EHRC) somehow failed to make in their written and oral interventions, but today he told the US-based Cable News Network (CNN):

The UK is now in absolutely plain breach of a case called Goodwin, which is what led to the legislation permitting people to change their legal sex. So the UK is going to have to address that, and I believe that the Strasbourg Court – the European Court of Human Rights – is going to tell it that it must.

This is really a case and guidance that’s been promoted by a very tiny minority of British people. It’s not reflective of the basic decency of British people. It’s simply that there’s been a disproportionate voice from a very well-funded lobby. And it has the ear of government, it has the ear of the press – a lot of it.

But it isn’t in accordance with basic British values.

Leaving aside the non-legalistic and somewhat conservative references to ‘British values’, and the fact that Dr McCloud is not affected by the Supreme Court ruling as he lives in Ireland, this all sounds remarkably like the, er, human rights argument made by the global human rights organisation Amnesty International in the intervention that, back in October last year, Dr McCloud was confident the Supreme Court would, er, accord the weight and respect it was due:

In 2002 a judgement of the European Court of Human Rights [i.e. Goodwin] found that the lack of legal recognition of a trans person’s ‘acquired gender’ in the UK was a violation of the rights to privacy and family life. In response, in 2004 the UK Parliament passed the Gender Recognition Act setting out a process for legal gender recognition.

A trans person issued with a Gender Recognition Certificate becomes for all legal purposes the ‘acquired gender’, so that if the ‘acquired gender’ is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman.  Subsequent case law has clarified that the scope of the Gender Recognition Act is across all purposes of life, and this has been the commonly understood legal position for many years.  

Call me sceptical, but I suspect Angry Dad and Dr McCloud might do better just applying for one of those ‘bad court’ thingies.

Whatever, I have made complaints to (a) the Bar Standards Board, about the actions and public statements of Jolyon Maugham KC in relation to the Supreme Court ruling (BSB ref: B7B3914E); (b) the Advertising Standards Authority, about the misleading nature of the crowdfunder launched by the Good Law Project on 25 April (ASA ref: A25-1920281); and (c) Trading Standards, also about the misleading nature of the crowdfunder (Citizens Advice consumer service ref: CCA-955600).