Stonewall’s boss Simon Blake has vowed to fight for a ban on conversion practices that includes ‘every member of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community’. The Stonewall CEO told the Guardian: ‘It’s really important that a conversion practices bill covers all practices designed to try to change or correct somebody’s sexual or gender identity.’ Warm words. But why should gay people trust an organisation that destroyed its reputation in the quest to promote transgender rights?
Bullying and coercing lesbians or gay men to become heterosexual, in the name of therapy, is a human rights violation and is obviously unacceptable. However, including ‘trans’ in this proposed ban, as Stonewall is suggesting, is bonkers. Stonewall appears to be making the same mistake that it has repeated over the last few years: pretending that gay and lesbian people are the same as transgender people, when they are not.
One of Stonewall’s co-founders, Spectator columnist Matthew Parris, accused the charity back in 2021 of being ‘cornered into an extremist stance’. He’s right – and I’m sceptical that Stonewall has learned its lesson. If Blake’s words about the gender debate are anything to go on, it seems unlikely:
‘It’s absolutely right that Stonewall became trans inclusive in 2015,’ he insisted. The Stonewall boss, who took up the job last year, admitted there has been ‘huge division’ on the issue of gender, but insisted that Stonewall had always navigated ‘incredibly well’ through contentious topics. Really?
The truth is that Stonewall’s game is up; it’s time for the charity to fold. More than a decade ago, in 2013, I described Stonewall’s version of the gay rights movement as ‘operating like an elderly claret-soaked Tory making his way to the bedpan in the corner of the room: bloated, smug and plodding’.
Little did I realise how much worse things could get. In 2014, one of the first things then-CEO Ruth Hunt changed was the charity’s focus on same-sex attraction in favour of gender identity. Under her watch. In response to a 2018 petition asking Stonewall to acknowledge there was a conflict around transgender rights and sex-based women’s rights, she wrote: ‘We do not and will not acknowledge this. Doing so would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others. We will always debate issues that enable us to further equality but what we will not do is debate trans people’s right to exist.’
In 2020, Nancy Kelley replaced Hunt as Stonewall CEO. Under her watch, Stonewall continued to turn a blind eye to lesbians in favour of those with penises. Stonewall even brought out an entire report on asexuality in the UK, spending time, money and energy that would have been better invested elsewhere looking at the oppression of people who would prefer a cup of tea to a roll in the hay.
Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights
Stonewall’s shifting mission might lead you to think that lesbians and gay men in Britain are fine because we can legally marry and raise children in same-sex relationships. But nothing could be further from the truth. Legislation and societal attitudes have never been so far apart, and lesbians – arguably thanks to Stonewall – are being hounded out of our own dating networks, social events and even jobs.
Stonewall was never much help in guiding employers and institutions on how to support lesbian or gay employees. The charity’s Diversity Champion Scheme seemed more focused at times on upholding gender ideology than properly helping gay and lesbians in the workplace.
I talk to young lesbians on a regular basis, having interviewed dozens of them for my forthcoming book. Even those sympathetic to gender ideology tell me the same story: they are branded as transphobic if they refer to themselves as lesbians. Instead, they are told to say ‘queer’ or ‘non-binary’. This erase of the word ‘lesbian’ is not in spite of Stonewall’s existence, it is because of Stonewall.
Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights. The LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 to fill the gap left by Stonewall after it drank the gender kool aid. It’s time to let a new organisation take over. Stonewall must be consigned to history.
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