Mick Hartley

A fine Times editorial today. In full:

For a moment in March last year, it appeared that sanity had broken out in the health service. Steve Barclay, then relatively new to the job of health secretary, ordered NHS England and related health bodies to review their involvement with Stonewall. The charity, originally created with the laudable aim of fighting discrimination against the gay community, had been captured by the ­extreme trans lobby and was disseminating its ­unhinged ideology throughout government by means of a racket called Diversity Champions.

This involved private and public bodies, ­including Whitehall departments, universities and the BBC, paying thousands of pounds for Stonewall’s seal of approval as models of “diversity and inclusivity”. Rightly, Mr Barclay considered that the money flowing into Stonewall’s coffers might be better used treating patients. He therefore advised the health bodies not renew their memberships of the scheme. Scroll forward to now and NHS England is still in the grip of Stonewall’s deranged “gender neutral” language. It continues to exclude the word “woman” from its staff ­domestic abuse policy, as if it were a dirty word.

It is of course correct that domestic abuse can affect anyone. But women are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer violence in the home. No ­responsible literature dealing with the subject should impinge on this grim reality. But in its drive to be a “Top 100” Stonewall employer, NHS ­England insists on using language peddled around the public sector by the charity.

In the minds of the NHS chiefs buying into the pressure group’s distorted world view, domestic ­violence apparently happens “regardless of ­gender”. This dangerous nonsense has rightly been called out by Nia, a domestic and sexual ­violence charity.

This attack on common language usage can be seen ­elsewhere in NHS England guidance. The term “pregnant woman” is, it appears, no longer acceptable and has been replaced by “pregnant employee”. The NHS is chock full of people with a detailed knowledge of human anatomy and the one thing they are likely to agree on is that when a person is pregnant that person will be — beyond a shadow of a doubt — a woman.

That this kind of offensive wokery is allowed to exist in taxpayer-funded literature is a standing rebuke to the government. When will ministers grasp this nettle once and for all, and banish all trace of Stonewall and its lunacies from the public sphere? Victoria Atkins, Mr Barclay’s successor at the health department, should lay down the law to all health bodies, insisting that the traditional ­language of male and female be reinstated ­immediately into all official publications.

Thankfully, Stonewall’s extremism is resulting in it being spurned by many of the 320-plus public bodies that between 2018 and 2021 pumped more than £3 million into the charity. Not before time. It is a lobbying entity, not a dispassionate provider of expert advice. But in an effort to maintain its relevance — and income — after the general ­acceptance of gay rights, it succeeded in ­reinventing itself as an arbiter of the trans debate. That there is a need to defend the word “woman” shows how successful it has been in banishing common sense from bodies fearful of trans McCarthyism.

Ms Atkins must turn the tide on this insanity once and for all. Her fellow women expect no less.