Victoria McCloud

Dr Victoria Cloud (Master McCloud) is a Former Master of the Senior Courts, Queen’s Bench Division and later King’s Bench Division.

In 2024 she stepped back due to Gender Critical Ideological campaigns against her after a High Court judicial career just short of two decades, having presided over cases including defamation claims against Donald Trump or Nadim Zahawi MP’s suit against an Iranian publication, and was the first instance judge in the leading case on open justice, Cape Intermediate Holdings Ltd v Dring. Since moving on from her salaried judicial role she has recently been appointed as a Legal Chair of the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal to hear trials of serious misconduct in the medical and associate medical professions, with effect from summer 2025.

She has maintained her international activity writing and speaking in fields as diverse AI and legal tech, electronic discovery, legal costs, diversity inclusion and equality, and historic abuse litigation reform. She is a consultant for W-Legal Solicitors and Associate member of Gatehouse Chambers. She has been recognised regularly in the media for her contributions to diversity and equality especially in the LGBTQ+ and women’s rights fields, including The UK Independent’s Pride Lists in 2024 (3rd) and 2025 (1 st ), Attitude Magazine’s 101
LGBTQ+ trailblazers 2025, Dow Jones News ‘Pride of Finance’ 2024, Women of the Year Awards 2021, Sunday Times, ‘women of the year’; 2020, and is one of the 100 women in the First 100 Years archive.

She was the UK’s first and so far only openly ‘trans’ barrister and then judge, having come out in the 1990s in her late twenties. As a result of her treatment in an increasingly hostile UK she and her partner emigrated to Ireland and now live near Wexford. Much of her time is now taken with campaigning and legal action against the notorious ‘For Women Scotland” Court decision which stripped trans people of their equality rights and reversed the legal sex of those who had (as in her case) changed legal sex decades ago. She recently created and runs the Trans Exile Network which is there for mutual support of trans, non-binary and intersex people who are fleeing the UK given the situation. She is a practising Roman Catholic having found her faith several years ago.