Baron Matilda
Daughters excluded from peerage due to gender outraged by trans Tory standing for Lords seat
Matilda Simon, the 3rd Baron of Wythenshawe, is tipped to stand in a by-election to replace the Liberal Democrat Viscount Falkland, voted on by all sitting peers, with entries closing on May 15.
If successful, [he] would become the only woman, self-identified, among the chamber’s 92 hereditary peers, despite holding a title because [he was] born a man.
Daughters who have been shunned from their families’ hereditary lines because they are not men have called on Matilda Simon to “stop having her cake and eating it”.
His. His cake. That’s the whole point, isn’t it. He gets to be a Baron because he is a man.
Matilda Simon, born in 1955, inherited the title because
they wereborn male.
Theirelder sister, Margaret, who was born two years earlier, would have inherited the title if Matilda Simon had been born a woman.
Women aren’t good enough to inherit titles, you see. Only men can do the title-inheriting. Those cudgels are heavy.
Under a legal loophole in the Gender Recognition Act 2014, a person changing gender “does not affect the descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour”.
Calling it a “legal loophole” is very polite. It’s a gaping cavern of unfair rules-engineering. Heads he wins, tails she loses.
With more by-elections looming, even if Matilda Simon does not stand this time to replace Viscount Falkland, who was elected in 1999, women have
hit out atthe “absolute farce” and labelled it an “absurd” situation.
Sigh. There it is again. Objected to; criticized; fumed at; denounced. Talk like a grownup.
Lady Simon graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, before becoming a lecturer at Manchester University. Now a furniture maker, she describes herself online as a feminist, socialist and LGBT+ advocate.
He is emphatically not a feminist.
I wonder if they’ll build him a special ladies’ room, or if he’ll pee in the gents’ like the rest of the peers?
So trans women are women, except when they’re not?
You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
It seems that all that self-ID TWAW stuff is for the little people.
When it comes to real power, the people with real power aren’t having it.
“Calling it a “legal loophole” is very polite” – are you suggesting this law might benefit one segment of the population disproportionately??
And I have read that it DOES NOT work the other way round. An older sister who transitions won’t get the title.
In “A Civil Campaign” by Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the sub-plots is about a woman changing sex to become eligible to inherit an aristocratic title. In this case, set many centuries in the future, “sex change” is a much more accurate designation than for anything that is possible today.