Maya Forstater, who leads the women's rights organisation Sex Matters, has strongly criticised an attempt by Victoria McCloud to challenge the Supreme Court's gender ruling at the European Court of Human Rights, calling the effort "nonsense" and suggesting it resembles a publicity stunt more than a genuine legal challenge.
The executive director argued during an appearance on GB News that McCloud cannot simply approach the Strasbourg court without first pursuing all available legal options within Britain's judicial system, a process the former judge has not completed.
Ms Forstater said: “This looks more like a PR campaign than a legal case. You can't just rock up in Strasbourg and say you want to bring a case to the European Court of Human Rights, you have to exhaust all the legal remedies within the UK, which means starting at the very bottom and going up to Supreme Court and Victoria McCloud didn't do that.
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Maya Forstater blasted the decision as "nonsense"
|GB NEWS
“What Victoria McCloud did was apply to intervene in the For Women Scotland case and was turned down.
“Victoria McCloud hasn't published the application to intervene, so we don't know what Victoria McLoud thought they were bringing to that case. But in any case, the judges didn't think there was legal merit in it and turned that application down.
“Victoria McCloud could have appealed at that point. He could have appealed later on, when the judgment was passed, and he didn't.
"So now just saying, I'd like to raise 150k from people who want to give me money to try and bring a claim to European Court of Human Rights is just nonsense.
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“I think what he wants is to create confusion and make it look like this judgment is uncertain.
"But judgments from the Supreme Court are the highest court in the land, and you can't just overturn them in the European Court of Human Rights unless you were in the case in the first place, which Victoria MacLeod was not.
“I think this is just trying to put up smoke to make people think that the law is not clear.
"The law is clear, it is certain and public bodies, private bodies, gyms - everyone who's covered by the Equality Act needs to get on with applying it and not thinking that there's going to be something coming down from the European Court of Human Rights.
“We need to use clear language to understand what we're talking about. Victoria McCloud is a man. He's a man who identifies as a woman. He's free to call himself what he likes. His friends may want to call him ‘she’; I don't."
“I want to be very clear that Victoria McCloud should not be in women's change rooms, in women's toilets and women's showers. We're about to bring a case against the Corporation of London about the Hampstead ponds, which is really about, can men be in women's showers and places where women are naked?
“At that point, you've really got to say ‘he’ because if you start calling them women, the next thing you know, you're letting them into women's showers.
“I don't know how long we're going to be having this same discussion over and over again. The Supreme Court looked at this and they said people who identify as transgender are protected against discrimination, and that includes people who've had surgery and people who haven't. And you can't ask if someone's had surgery. You can't give them more or less rights if they've had surgery.
There has been outrage to the ruling from the trans community after the Supreme Court ruling
| GETTY“That's a personal choice that somebody makes, so when you think about, is there a place to swim on Hampstead Heath if you're transgender? There is. It's the mixed pond. And you can't ask, have you had surgery or not?
“The same with any place where there are men's, women's and unisex. That means everyone's catered for and you're not asking people what surgery they've had, because that's a hugely personal question to ask.
“Of course you should police changing rooms in shops. It’s a porn category, peeking into women's changing rooms.
"There are hidden cameras, telephones, it does need to be policed. And somebody who is a man who looks like a man who sounds like a man, should not be trying to go into a women's changing room everybody knows what sex they are."
McCloud, who became Britain's first transgender barrister and judge, is pursuing the European challenge on grounds that the Supreme Court violated her right to fair proceedings under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The former High Court judge maintains that the court's refusal to accept submissions from her or hear testimony from other transgender people or organisations constituted a fundamental breach of justice.
"There is no space for decision-making about us, without us," McCloud declared in a statement released on Monday morning.
She pledged to oppose what she termed "the gender-critical ideological movement" and accused the Labour Government of appeasement, vowing there would be "no peace" for those supporting what she described as harmful ideology against transgender people.
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