The diversity trap
by Helen Joyce, the Critic:
Stonewall’s diktats create a workplace culture that scares and silences sensible people.
You’d have to be living under a rock not to have noticed that many of the charities that used to fight real and urgent injustices now spend their time on counterproductive hectoring instead.
Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and our very own Stonewall have abandoned practical policies to help the downtrodden in favour of totalising theories of free-floating oppression and claims of harm, hate and genocide.
So extreme has this reinvention been that they now resemble the priestly caste of a joyless, godless neo-religion that preaches against whiteness, cisness and heteronormativity — original sins for which there is no absolution, only eternal self-flagellation. In the title of a recent book by the comedian and author Andrew Doyle, these people are “The New Puritans”.
The default mode of these once-great charities is finger-wagging. They specialise in caps-lock, hand-clap, repeat-after-me, “be kind, do better” tweets about micro-aggressions, systemic racism and the sacred nature of transness.
The latest offering from Stonewall is a series of mugs emblazoned with “some people are [insert identity]. get over it”. Used in the office, they guarantee that your colleagues will loathe you, but won’t dare say so for fear of being reported to hr.
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