A transgender woman has been denied direct contact with her five children on the basis they would be shunned by their ultra-Orthodox Jewish community if she were allowed to meet them.

The woman will be allowed only to send letters to her children, after a judge concluded there was a real chance of “the children and their mother being marginalised or excluded by the ultra-Orthodox community” if face-to-face contact were permitted.

Mr Justice Peter Jackson stated that he had reached the conclusion with “real regret, knowing the pain that it must cause”. The transgender woman – identified only as J – had brought the case seeking to have contact with the children.

As a result of the ruling, her contact with each child will be limited to letters four times a year, with the suggestion that these could be sent to mark three Jewish religious holidays – Pesach, Sukkot and Hanukkah – and the children’s birthdays.



The judge noted his concerns over the clash between the ultra-Orthodox faith and transgender rights, saying: “It is painful to find these vulnerable groups in conflict.”

In his judgment, Jackson wrote: “These children are caught between two apparently incompatible ways of living, led by tiny minorities within society at large. Both minorities enjoy the protection of the law: on the one hand the right of religious freedom, and on the other the right to equal treatment.”



He added: “Despite its antiquity, Jewish law is no more than 3,500 years old, while gender dysphoria will doubtless have existed throughout the 120,000 years that homo sapiens have been on earth. Both sides of the question must therefore receive careful attention.”

According to the court judgment, the woman had fought for contact with her children since leaving the home in 2015, asking that she “should be sensitively reintroduced to the children, who should be helped to understand her new way of life”.

However, the birth mother insisted that allowing her former husband access to the children would lead to them being ostracised by their community, a view that was supported by submissions to the court by the children’s teachers.

Evidence provided by the mother suggested that the children would be barred from attending Orthodox Jewish schools if they had contact with their transgender parent.



The judge said he would send a copy of the judgment to Nick Gibb, the school standards minister. “If change is required, and that is for others to say, responsibility must fall on the shoulders of the schools, the community and the state, and not on the heads of young children,” Jackson wrote.



Before the separation, the family lived in the Charedi Jewish community in Manchester. Both parents come from large Charedi families, and wed in an arranged marriage in 2001. None of the family members can be named for legal reasons.

The claimant stated that she had known “a consistent nagging feeling of incongruity” over her gender identification since she was very young, but family members dismissed it as “a stupid, silly issue”.



She said that after getting married she was warned that a separation would lead to complete exclusion from the community, and she even received death threats.

The judgment noted: “The prospect of having to leave the marriage came up many times, but the mother would make threats that she would never see the children and would be ridiculed and shunned by the community.”

The claimant told the court that after she left, the children were told that she was in a psychiatric hospital or had died.

In her evidence, the birth mother stated that she was profoundly shocked when her husband left her, and was unable to leave her home for three months. She said her former husband has been “severely ostracised” after leaving the family, and as a result she was concerned that her children would suffer.

The judge noted that there appeared to be no malice towards her ex-spouse, saying that the abiding impression from the evidence of both parties “was of mutual incomprehension, of parents who had over the years become emotional strangers”.

The judge also stated that the practices within the community and the schools could amount to “unlawful discrimination against and victimisation” of the claimant and her children. Nevertheless, the practices were relevant to the custody hearing: “The fact that the practices may be unlawful does not mean that they do not exist.”

The judge refused to accept the claim that “transgenderism is a sin”. “Sin is not valid legal currency,” he wrote. “The currency of the law is the recognition, protection and balancing out of legal rights and obligations. In this case, to be recognised and respected as a transgender person is a right, as is the right to follow one’s religion.”

In a lengthy judgment, Jackson emphasised the importance of the parent and child relationship, saying that face-to-face contact could bring “the lifelong benefits of a unique and irreplaceable relationship”.

One rabbi, supporting the claimant’s case, said he was concerned by the concept “of the faith as a club from which people could be ejected, though he observed that this evidently happens”. He said he had known children of divorced parents to be sat separately from other children, which he described as “beggaring belief”.

Another rabbi, speaking for the birth mother, said he “was clear that transgender and procedures to achieve sex change violate a number of basic principles in Torah law”.