Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch, in yesterday's Mail on Sunday, interviews Surrey's new Police and Crime Commissioner:

The elected Police and Crime Commissioner overseeing Surrey police has launched an unprecedented attack on the Stonewall lobby group, accusing it of promoting a dangerous transgender ideology that puts women at risk.

Lisa Townsend, the newly elected Conservative commissioner for Surrey, says she's been inundated with emails and messages from women frightened that female-only spaces, including women's refuges and toilets, are being opened up to people who 'identify' as women even if they have male genitalia.

Stonewall, once best-known for promoting gay rights, is now leading the way in demanding that anyone should be free to determine their own gender – even if that means sending women born as men into female jails.

The group is even paid by official bodies, including police forces, for its advice on transgender issues.

Now Ms Townsend is demanding that Surrey police stop employing Stonewall.

'Everybody has told me not to speak-out about this, that the debate is incendiary, but if women like me can't or don't speak up who will?' Ms Townsend told The Mail on Sunday.

'Stonewall, which has drifted so far from its original mission is now a threat to women and risks putting feminism back 50 years.

'Police forces, in an attempt to correct many of the wrongs committed against minorities in the past, are being naive if they believe that Stonewall are anything but a well-funded lobby group for a dangerous ideology that threatens the safety of our women and girls.

'The single biggest issue that filled-up my inbox when I first announced I was standing as police and crime commissioner were concerns about gender self-identification,' she said.

'They raised concerns about safeguarding, the recording of crime, the placement of trans women in women's prisons and men identifying as women in changing rooms.

'Some were mothers alarmed about the influence of trans lobby groups in schools.

'The women who contacted me were shocked that someone was finally listening to them.'

Well well….the times they are a-changin'.