English lawyer and activist Victoria McCloud was BOTD in 1969. Born in Surrey to a middle-class family, she was assigned male at birth. She studied at Oxford University before training as a barrister, moving to London in 1995 to practice commercial litigation. She completed her gender transition in the late 1990s, and was legally recognised as female in 2004 following the passage of the Gender Recognition Act. In 2010, aged 40, she became the first transgender person to be appointed as a judge of the High Court of Justice, perversely holding the title of “Queen’s Bench Master”. She presided over several high-profile cases, including a 2016 application to ban US President Donald Trump from visiting England, and an application to remove politician Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. She has been heavily involved in advocacy for trans people and reviewing standards of medical care for trans patients. She resigned as a judge in 2024, following the UK Supreme Court’s decision in the For Women Scotland case, restricting the Human Rights Act definitions of “woman” and “sex” to refer only to biological gender. She subsequently moved to the Republic of Ireland, announcing her intention to join efforts to appeal the For Women Scotland decision to the European Court of Human Rights. McCloud is in a relationship with psychiatrist Annie McCloud, with whom she entered into a civil partnership in 2006.