Mick Hartley

Janice Turner counts the cost of all the public money being spent on court cases and payments to those hounded by Stonewall-addled bureaucrats for their sex-realist views.

The waste runs to millions, and the bitter irony is we paid twice over. Because the reason policies were adopted that encouraged the victimisation of staff for beliefs shared by 99.999 per cent of humanity is that government departments, NHS trusts and police forces each paid £3,000 a year to join Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme. In 2022-23, 165 public bodies were members, a total cost of £530,482. But the bill doesn’t end there: the scheme required each body to write a lengthy submission, answer questionnaires and open its practices up to Stonewall scrutiny. Thousands more salaried hours.

Then, to improve their ranking, bodies were told to eliminate “mother” from maternity policies and create an LGBT staff group whose views on gender matters — and punishment of heretics who disagreed with them — should be treated as holy writ. Stonewall instructed employers they must allow workers to shower and undress in facilities that aligned with their gender identity, not their sex. This falsehood, which breaches Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, is the wellspring of two ongoing cases where female nurses, five in Darlington and Sandie Peggie in Scotland, are fighting for their right to single-sex privacy. If both win, as is expected, that’s another £1 million in settlements and costs.

Civil servants whose primary duty is to uphold the rule of law were guided by activist groups whose “trainings” and “best practice” encourage them to “get ahead of the law”, ie to believe that the 2010 Equality Act, in which sex is a protected characteristic, is a dreary anachronism all righteous progressives ignore.

Yet these employment tribunals are small beer compared with the most egregious waste: the corruption of the Office for National Statistics. A loyal Stonewall diversity champions member until recently, the ONS ignored warnings that its 2021 census question that allowed people to self-identify their sex was confusing and unworkable. But the government’s chief statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, appeared to care less about data than that the question had an “overwhelmingly positive response from LGBTQ+ charities”. Now the ONS has been forced to admit that its sex and gender data is worthless.

What’s the bill here? The government paid the costs of Fair Play For Women who crowdfunded £110,000 for a judicial review; it used its top barrister Sir James Eadie and untold hours of ONS staff time; it commissioned a 200-page report by Professor Alice Sullivan (£200,000) to analyse the mess. But how do you put a price on ruining the integrity of a £900 million national census that feeds into every strand of policy?

Will these cases ever end? Even now, NHS trusts pay outside trainers £900 a session for staff “pronoun training”. The consequences of such brainwashing are evident in the case of Jennifer Melle, a Ugandan-born NHS nurse. Asked to deal with a catheter in the penis of a trans-identifying male paedophile under police guard, she referred to him as “mister” and he responded with vile racist abuse. Even so Melle was hauled in for the far worse crime of misgendering and is taking her case to an employment tribunal.

Yet a lawyer tells me that while previously senior managers preferred to lose a tribunal case than have a showdown with their vengeful LGBT staff network, times and the economy have changed. Gender ideology is creating big red numbers that show up on the bottom line.

It's surely the biggest con in modern history: mistaking a fetish for a civil rights movement. It's perverted not only institutions, but corrupted science itself. It's the new Lysenkoism.