by Freddie Attenborough, The Critic
The group has long been an unreliable guide to the law
In some ways you’ve got to hand it to Stonewall. A Supreme Court ruling that it has been misinterpreting the law for years might have given a lesser organisation reason to pause. But not this one.
Since its whole-hearted embrace of trans ideology in 2015 (which added a sudden T to its previous LGB), Stonewall has told the many institutions it’s worked with — among them the BBC, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice, any number of British universities and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — that anybody who identifies as a woman should be regarded as one when it comes to such things as single-sex spaces. It continued to do so even when a lot of them (including all those above) left its Diversity Champions programme, citing anxieties about the overly hardline approach.
But after the Supreme Court ruled that under existing law, “woman” means a biological woman, rather than accepting it was wrong all along, Stonewall has adopted a firm policy of prevarication, advising its remaining supporters that it’s still too soon to figure out what the judgement’s implications might be. Now, responding to a letter from Maya Forstater of Sex Matters saying that this advice is “wrong and dangerous”, a spokesman not only indicated that the charity would be sticking to its prevaricating guns (“This is widely acknowledged to be an incredibly complicated ruling and its wide-ranging impact is still being worked through”); he also added a remark that’s either completely delusional or a shameless fib. “Stonewall’s guidance,” the spokesman said, “has always reflected the law.”