Earl of Balfour wants daughter to transition in order to take title

[Monstamio]

I'm a long term lurker, occasional poster on mumsnet.

I recently peak-transed thanks in great part to the excellent and very clear posts by people such as Datun and Pisa (thank you).

We've been waiting for an aristocrat to challenge the laws of primogeniture (as exempt from the GRA) and it looks like the Earl of Balfour has stepped into the breech. See link below. This just got a brief mention on the Today prog.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/29/lord-balfour-outdated-succession-law-means-daughter-could-claim/

Does it matter what his overall aims are if the result is it exposes the hypocrisy of the GRA to a more mainstream audience, Edith?
I agree, whatever his personal aims are he’s helping to show up GRA for the farce it is. We’re all going to have to accept the strange bedfellows this legislation will throw together. Just last week I read many posts from usually left leaning mntters praising Rod Liddle and Peter Hitchens for their pieces in the Sunday Times and MOS respectively.

TBF though I don't know if this is a devolved thing and Scotland already got rid of the primogeniture rules or this bit of the GRA

The Scottish Government is consulting with a view to consider how the Act should be amended in relation to the law in Scotland.

Scots law has its own rules on succession and inheritance law. The right to inherit hereditary titles is not a subject I know much about. I deal with clients who have titles but beyond calling them by the correct name I'm not hugely involved in how they got them.

Btw the right to inherit the title does not include the right to inherit the land (or any other assets) which. Land and houses have to be specifically bequeathed, failing which they will be allocated to classes of beneficiary in order. All children are in the first class of descendant, regardless of sex and age.

I have no idea about English law.

I thought many estates were entailed, Lass, so that the estate did follow the title? But my knowledge is mainly gleaned from Golden Age detective fiction so I dare say I'm out of date ...

No , entails were abolished under The Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act 2000 but in any case large estates were and are far more likely to be owned by trusts (in which there may be multiple beneficiaries) or corporate ownership or a mixture of the 2 than individual ownership.

I'm pleased he has brought visibility to this issue.

Interesting follow up in the Times letters today

BREATH OF FRESH HEIR
Sir, The Earl of Balfour (letter, Nov 29) makes the mistake of confusing gender with sex. However much his daughter might elect to be regarded as a boy she would never acquire a Y chromosome and as such would remain forever female. She might display masculine attributes, both mentally and physically, with the help of surgeons and pharmacologists, but until such time as science enables the manipulation of the sex chromosomes any wish to become male would never be fulfilled.

The distinction between gender and sex lies at the heart of the way in which transgender people are perceived by the rest of society. Confusing the two, or trying to assert that they are in some way the same, does nothing to advance the cause of transgender people or to understand the reasons why feminists and many others have concerns about sharing previously segregated spaces.
Clive A Layton, FRCP

Bravo Clive - who is a cardiologist (by the looks of it) and so presumably has some grasp of biology.

Thank you Clive.

I don't think the Earl of Balfour was confused. That letter is unfair.

His primary point is how ridiculous it is that his daughter can't inherit and his secondary point was (ignoring the exemptions for titles) how ridiculous it would be that she could inherit if she claimed she were a trans man.

However, every time someone bursts into print about this the more the issue is highlighted, so, right or wrong, bravo Clive

PS - wait for the TA hate that will now be coming in his direction.....

Hurrah for Clive!

Pre-Norman conquest, the Anglo-Saxons were a bit more pragmatic about who should sit on the throne, choosing the best equipped son to rule, rather than the first born, whilst elsewhere in medieval Europe there was a patchwork of rules about what claims to thrones / titles / land / power women could have.

AFAIK there is no actual law governing the succession to the various peerages, surely the Earl should be petitioning the Queen to amend the terms under which the title was conferred on his family back in the day?

Wow, that is a great letter. YY to ‘feminists and many others’. This disallows the view that eroding same sex segregated space is a niche and bigoted radical feminist concern.

TEMO - trans exclusionary many others doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

I don’t think the Earl of Balfour was confused, so much as making a tongue in cheek comment on the transgender agenda to further his own cause. But well done to Clive Layton for seeing the opportunity to make a clear point. I think we genuinely rely on men to grasp the nettle here, because they can less easily be decried as radical feminists, with all the negative connotations that carries (to the lay person), and the more well-educated the man the better. I wish that were not true, but it is.