Telegraph - Daughters excluded from peerage due to gender outraged by trans woman standing for Lords seat
Daughters excluded from peerage due to gender outraged by trans woman standing for Lords seat
Matilda Simon, Baron of Wythenshawe, allowed to stand in by-election under a legal loophole - because she was born a man
Aristocrat daughters have told a baron hoping to be the first transgender peer that they “can’t have it both ways”.
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, they would become the only woman, self-identified, among the chamber’s 92 hereditary peers, despite holding a title because they were 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”.
The Barony was created in 1947 for Ernest Simon, the industrialist and former Lord Mayor of Manchester, mainly remembered for his slum clearances and housing projects in the city.
His son, Roger, the second Baron Simon, was a Left-wing journalist and one of the founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Matilda Simon, born in 1955, inherited the title because they were born male.
Their elder sister, Margaret, who was born two years earlier, would have inherited the title if Matilda Simon had been born a woman.
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”.
The Lord Chancellor approved Matilda Simon’s claim to the peerage in May last year, but they may have to petition to the King to be referred to formally as “Lady Simon” as opposed to “Lord”.
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 at the “absolute farce” and labelled it an “absurd” situation.
Highlights several issues around gender
Charlotte Carew Pole, from Daughters’ Rights, a group that campaigns against the exclusion of women in primogeniture, told the Telegraph: “Lady Matilda, Baron of Wythenshawe, has helped highlight several issues around inheritance and gender laws, where we now find ourselves in the absurd position of a younger son inheriting a title but identifying as a woman to stand in the hereditary peers by-elections, so keeping her new identity of a woman and the rights of a man to inherit.
“If Matilda is a woman, surely her older sister should have the title? Matilda can’t have it both ways. She’s either a man or a woman and must give something up.”
Ms Carew Pole’s father-in-law, Sir Richard Carew Pole, is a baronet, an aristocratic title bestowed on his family by King Charles I in 1628. Her husband, Tremayne, will one day be the 14th baronet, but her daughter, Jemima, cannot be the 15th because she is female.
'Absolute farce'
A source, who also campaigns for women to inherit the titles, said it “makes a mockery of all sorts of laws” and was an “absolute farce”, while insisting the baron “can’t have their cake and eat it”.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington, co-founder of the Women2Win campaign to boost female representation in Parliament, said: “When you stop to think about the absurdity of this situation, it makes you wonder whether Lady Matilda thinks they can have their cake and eat it.”
Women first entered the House of Lords in 1958, with female hereditary peers able to sit from 1963. The last by-election for the hereditary peers was in 2014, when the great-grandson of HH Asquith won a seat.
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.
In 2018, five daughters of hereditary peers took the Government to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing they were being discriminated against by being blocked from the Lords.
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