Stonewall’s Ratner moment
by Maya Forstater, The Critic:
Stonewall, the venerable gay-rights organisation founded in the wake of Section 28, has had a rebrand. Out goes the proud revolutionary red, white and black; in comes an uneasy combination of candyfloss pink, toothpaste green and petrol blue.
Stonewall’s new identity comes in the middle of a crisis. It is having a “Ratner moment” after CEO Nancy Kelley said out loud that Stonewall does not represent lesbians who think that sexual orientation relates to people’s sex.
The charity set up to protect people in same-sex relationships from discrimination has become committed to ideas borrowed from “queer theory”: that straight males can be lesbians, that girls can grow up to be men and that doctors should facilitate this by stopping the course of puberty. Kelley said that disagreement with these positions is akin to anti-Semitism and should not be tolerated in the workplace.
Stonewall, which expanded its remit in 2015 to include transgender people, has moved so far from its original values and aims that two of its founders, Matthew Parris and Simon Fanshawe, have said that it no longer stands for gay rights.
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Stonewall. HR managers, Whitehall officials and politicians are finally starting to balk at its upside-down transformation. First the national equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, revealed that it had withdrawn from the charity’s Diversity Champions scheme. The EHRC had recently told the High Court that institutional policies saying that people must be allowed to choose which single-sex facilities to use on the basis of gender identity are not in compliance with the Equality Act.
Read also: Is your school a Stonewall School Champion? from Transgender Trend
SUBMISSION AND COMPLIANCE: risks for Stonewall Champions by Naomi Cunningham, Legal Feminist
Stonewall take another hostage by Rob Jessel and Helen White, Artillery Row
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