Mick Hartley

It's not all bad news:

The House of Lords has abandoned a workplace inclusivity programme run by Stonewall following a row about the use of gender-neutral language in legislation.

It has become the latest organisation to pull out of the charity’s Diversity Champions programme under which participants pay for advice on creating a supportive working environment.

A spokesman for the Lords said the decision followed an assessment of the “costs and benefits of the programme”.

However, it is understood that peers lobbied Lord McFall, the Speaker of the House of Lords, and Simon Burton, the chief clerk, to leave the programme.

Concerns have been raised about the LGBTQ+ charity’s position on language. It has previously told organisations to replace the word “mother” with “parent who has given birth”.

Stonewall, an LGBTQ+ charity? Not any more. Like a baby cuckoo, the T has long since kicked all the other letters out of the nest. It's a trans charity.

The government had wanted to refer to “pregnant people” rather than mothers in its new maternity legislation, which was fast-tracked through parliament to enable Suella Braverman, the attorney-general who was expecting her second child, to take time off after the birth without having to step down as a minister.

The wording was changed after it was rejected by the Lords, with the government conceding that “mother” was acceptable, but some peers raised concerns that it had been there at all.

During the bill’s second reading in February last year, the Conservative peer Baroness Noakes said the phrasing contributed to “the erasure of women in society”.

TransActual UK, a transgender group, wrote on Twitter: “Despite the claims of women being ‘erased’ when talking about pregnancy, it is once again trans men and non-binary people that are erased. And when not erased, misgendered by people that cannot bear to acknowledge that we know our own sex/gender better than they do.”

Of course they do. They make much better women than actual women. They've studied all the little moves: the coy pout, the head tilt, all the pink frilly frothy stuff that goes to make the performance of a (stereotypical) woman. Sadly, contra Judith Butler, being a woman is a matter of biology, not "performativity".