In a sign that Stonewall’s influence is waning, NHS England has distanced itself from the organisation, cancelling conference tickets and a planned membership of the group’s Diversity Champions Scheme.
As reported by the Times, many other public bodies – including Historic England, Arts Council England and Sport England – are now reviewing their membership of Stonewall’s various benchmarking schemes, as the fallout from a landmark report on gender confusion in children and young adults shines a spotlight on the controversial organisation.
Last year, the Information Commissioner found that Stonewall’s Equality Index – which measures employers on diversity and inclusion – along with its Diversity Champions Scheme – which includes guidance to employers on gender-neutral spaces and the use of pronouns – allowed the charity to exercise “a significant degree of influence over the policies that participating members operate”, and that “by associating themselves with Stonewall’s brand, employers are bound to chase its approval”.
Stonewall, Britain’s most well-known LGBT campaign group, has come under intense scrutiny for its stance on trans rights since the publication of the report by Dr Hilary Cass.
Originally set up to advocate on behalf of lesbians, gays and bisexuals (the “LGB”), in 2015 Stonewall effectively decided to change direction and prioritise campaigning on behalf of those who identify as transgender (the “T” of the “LGBT”), including backing the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and young adults who say they are transgender.
However, concerns that the organisation is unwilling to engage with evidence-based research that challenges its thinking on this issue have been growing for many years.
In 2018, when campaign group Transgender Trend sent out resource packs to schools warning teachers that there was very little medical evidence to support an ‘affirmative’ approach to gender confusion in young people, and there were high rates of autism and mental health issues among young people being referred to NHS gender clinics. Stonewall’s response was to advise teachers to “do the right thing” and “shred” this “dangerous” and “deeply damaging publication”.
Following publication of the landmark Cass Review earlier this month, Stonewall also released a statement on X claiming that puberty blockers are reversible, and should still be prescribed to children and young people in a “timely manner”.
Yet as the Cass Review makes clear, the evidence base for this claim is “remarkably weak” and it is currently not possible to rule out fears that these drugs cause irreversible damage to cognitive and physiological development and fertility. On that basis, the Review concludes that “much longer-term follow-up is needed to determine whether there is full bone health recovery in adulthood [for children prescribed puberty blockers], both in those who go on to masculinising/feminising hormones and those who do not.”
Elsewhere, the Cass Review notes that studies had been “exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint”, and there was a “toxicity” in discussions, with young people being caught in “stormy social discourse”.
Critics have put some of the blame for that at Stonewall’s door.
In a recent interview with the Times following publication of the Cass Review’s Final Report, Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, who ran Stonewall between 2014 and 2019, claimed she had never attempted to shut down debate, that her only regret was trusting the “experts”, and that she did not recognise the characterisation of Stonewall as being a bullying campaign group.
That last claim in particular was met with incredulity by many public commentators not currently suffering from memory loss.
In 2019, one of Stonewall’s co-founders, Simon Fanshawe, was excommunicated by the charity after signing an open letter criticising its campaign for changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 that would allow people to “self-identity” as whatever sex they chose. This would, he said, undermine “women’s sex-based rights and protections”. He also rebuked the charity over its growing tendency to denounce as “transphobic” anyone who refused to fall in with the view that a person’s gender identity takes precedence over biological sex in policy and in law.
As if to prove his point, the organisation then sent Fanshawe a terse, vaguely millenarian sounding email that read: “By expressing your views, you have put yourself outside Stonewall.”
“How bitterly ironic,” he responded in the Mail, “that the only freedom Stonewall won’t embrace is the freedom to disagree.”
The following year, the soon-to-be-head of Stonewall, Nancy Kelly, was the deputy chief executive of NatCen, a research body that agreed to have Prof Alice Sullivan, a leading quantitative sociologist, barred from a seminar discussion of how Britain conducts its census. Prof Sullivan had initially been invited to talk at the event by NatCen, which works closely with the ONS. However, the event was cancelled after some NatCen members alleged that Sullivan held “anti-trans views”.
Ms Kelley has also previously compared lesbians who don’t want to include men in their dating pool to ‘sexual racists’ and those with gender-critical views to anti-Semites.
In 2021, Allison Bailey, a lesbian barrister sued both Stonewall and her chambers – a member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme – over allegations they tried to silence her after she co-founded a group called the LGB Alliance, which opposes Stonewall’s view that trans-women should legally be viewed as women. Bailey claimed that “in retribution” for launching a group with a rival view to that of Stonewall, the charity “co- ordinated with the barristers’ chambers . . . to put me under investigation”.
That same year, an independent report into the No Platforming of feminist professors Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman at the University of Essex was damning about the influence of Stonewall on university policies. Akua Reindorf, the author of the report, described a “culture of fear” at the university, with academics concerned about voicing opinions that countered the Stonewall-approved line.
Last year, it emerged that Britain could be blacklisted at the UN’s Human Rights Council following repeated complaints from Stonewall and other trans rights lobby groups that the UK’s equalities watchdog has dared proposed greater protections for women’s sex-based rights that.
Specifically, the EHRC Board had provided legal advice to Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch on the complex and divisive issue of the meaning of the word “sex” in the Equality Act, and made clear that the Government should lean towards a biological definition of sex as the fairest way of protecting everyone’s rights, but that it should carefully identify and consider the potential implications of any such change for the rights of trans people.
That, however, wasn’t enough for Stonewall. Rather than engaging in meaningful debate over the issue, they fired off a series of complaints to the body that provides UN accreditation, claiming that the EHRC’s suggested protections for biological sex were “actively harming trans people”.
One source close to the charity said it was Stonewall’s increasing stance of “demanding” change rather than campaigning and enabling progress to be made that had caused issues.
They said: “What Stonewall does now is ‘we demand you agree with this, we demand you agree with that, we demand the next thing’, and it just doesn’t enable that bigger principle which is ‘what support should we be giving to some young people and vulnerable young adults so that they can make the best decisions for their life?’”
They added: “Some people think it shouldn’t be campaigning on trans rights at all, I think that’s up to it and that’s not my point. My point is that actually it just didn’t build broad alliances and it absolutely did no debate.”
