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 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.

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 at the “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.