Mick Hartley

Lucy Bannerman with a long essay in the Times – How activists used a veil of secrecy to rewrite biology:

Take Stonewall. It is no exaggeration to say that while no one was looking, a small group of activists were quietly rewriting the rules to recalibrate the human race. It’s probably fair to say that most ordinary folk, with lives to lead and jobs to do, might not have had the time or inclination to spend hours online, arguing over queer theory and heteronormative hegemony with strangers calling themselves @FunkyBoudicca and @sparklehorse41.

What we do know, however, is that while the rest of the world was getting on with real life, local police forces and NHS hospitals, universities and ambulance services, and countless other private companies and public services were happily handing over the way they ran their services to be evaluated and rewritten by Stonewall, not according to the law as it is, but according to the law as the lobby group would like it to be. There was zero consultation with “mothers” being renamed “birthing parents” or employees being urged to add their preferred pronouns to email signatures.

Behind the scenes, the language of biological sex was rinsed from strata of society at a stroke and replaced with the nebulous euphemisms of gender identity. The astonishing thing is not that a lobby group lobbied, but how readily public services rolled over, and even paid Stonewall for the privilege. The public bodies won Stonewall’s rainbow stamp of approval and, if they were lucky, got bumped up a few places on its employers’ index. In return, the public got NHS smear test campaigns targeting “anyone with a cervix”, and a healthcare culture in which men are asked if they are pregnant before having scans.

Start joining the dots and the question of how we got here begins to make sense. When the first same-sex marriages took place in March 2014, Stonewall’s biggest battle had been won. Ruth Hunt became its new chief executive a few months later, boss of an empty nest. One of her first moves to fill the void left by advances in gay equality was to expand Stonewall’s formal remit to include transgender people, adding the T to the LGB. “It’s disgusting we hadn’t done this work sooner,” she would claim as she stepped down 5 years later, having alienated many gay supporters who felt the trans wars were not their battle to fight, and who worried that Stonewall’s new, po-faced quest for corporate rainbow-ification might even undo their hard-gotten gains. As one former supporter sighed, “being a tranny used to be fun”.

Those gay supporters of Stonewall were quite right: the T has no place next to the LGB.

The whole takeover by trans activists of our language about sex and gender is surely one of the most extraordinary and damaging episodes in recent social history. There are at least signs that more and more people are becoming aware of this. But yes, that question remains: why did so many organisations just roll over, join the cult, and pay Stonewall to set their agenda?