My question is why is everyone so sure Stonewall is finished? Yes, in a rational world they’d be totally discredited but, as we all know, we’re not living in a rational world.
Are all the organizations/businesses that are funding them really willing to end their support and risk the charge of discrimination?
I agree J and Brendan, this isn’t the final nail in their coffin. The fact that the Trans 2 spirit thing is exposed as nonsense isn’t a damning indictment of them , its their greatest strength . The more nonsensical the stronger they are, it means the believers need to disavow more of reality to stay in the tribe and the ratchet only goes one way. 2+2 = 36554645726156246256
No I don’t think they are. It’s the same thing that happens to any organisation that achieves the aims it was set up to deliver – it can’t die a decent death, or at least step back and downsize to fit the reduced demands of maintaining the status quo it sought to achieve. It forgets what it was there for in the first place. Perhaps, for example, Larry Page and Sergey Brin really did genuinely set out with the good intention of ‘don’t be evil’ but once they achieved what they set out to do, how could they not be?
Although I agree pretty much entirely with the incisive, precise analysis in this article I don’t blame the good people at Stonewall for this, including Ruth Hunt. Pity the CEO of a FTSE 100 company who says at the AGM – do you know what, our business model is on its last legs. Here’s your money back while there is still some value left in it, we’re winding up the company. It’s just not in our nature to say or think that kind of thing.
I look forward to welcoming the unemployed D&I advisors back to the very real and unequal world of the mid to late 2020s that they unwittingly helped to bring about, and they shall have my fullest sympathies for their arduous travails.
Ludo Roessen
2 years ago
I have listened to the whole podcast and really enjoyed this quality piece of journalism which is very rare these days….
The whole thing is a Ponzi scheme of making money masked by its ideologies.
Like Mr Murray writes….
“But there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades. Many have no other homes to go to. Many find purpose only in the struggle. Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
Peter Francis
2 years ago
Many thanks for this piece. as you say, Stonewall’s founders brought about political change through changing hearts and minds. The current approach is very different.
Social media are used by a small group to villify anyone who dares produce a contrary argument. Consequently, politicians and those in control of the UK’s civic institutions dread being accused of transphobia just as much as they dread being accused of racism.
And then along comes Stonewall. For a simple (though large) cash transaction, Stonewall can get keep the bloggers at bay. It is a protection racket.
Yes, it is really good to have something from Douglas Murray again. The historic development of Stonewall was informative. Whether Stonewall are finished is more difficult to predict.
Despite the incoherence of their doctrine and quasi-protection racket nature of their current funding they may well be too imbedded in political society to disappear, particularly given the numbers who depend on their continued success for their own material and psychological support. Stonewall may be the main supporter of the extreme trans doctrine over here but it is well imbedded in the Democratic Party world view in the US so is unlikely to disappear too rapidly.
hayden eastwood
2 years ago
“Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
In Zimbabwe in 2007 I noticed with interest that, when it looked like Morgan Tsvangirai would beat Robert Mugabe in the presidential election, many of the activists working in the human rights industry appeared positively frightened.
One confessed to me that he had a proposal in the drawer to “find relevance” in the event that Mugabe lost.
It reminded me that the problem with all paid activists is that they must never succeed at their stated goal because their income depends on not succeeding.
I could almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief when Mugabe rigged his way back in through the obvious mechanisms available to him.
Mr Murray’s words on those with “lifestyles to sustain” may be more prescient than he imagines.
I would say that Zanu PF already adopt American racial woke ideology in order to justify their actions.
I know one Zanu fellow, for example, son of a minister, who lives in a 3 story mansion, was educated at the tax payer’s expense in the US and is always going on about “Black Lives Matter” in Zimbabwe, with the full support of his American friends, as though the problem in Zimbabwe is not Zanu PF maiming and killing people with impunity, or their continued theft and vandalisation of the country’s mineral resources, but the 20 000 remaining whites who have not yet emigrated.
Julia H
2 years ago
I would dearly love it to be the end of the faith but I fear it is now too deeply embedded within organisations for that.
I listened to all 10 episodes and it was worth the effort. Great journalism. It’s impressive that BBC employees can ask these questions but sadly the BBC apparently felt no obligation to answer them. Cohen was willing to engage but his obfuscation and incoherence were frankly embarrassing to listen to. I found myself squirming at his constant deflections.
Of course it isn’t just gay people who stand to be erased by Stonewall ideology. Women are fighting a losing battle to protect hard won rights. Currently the Cambridge Students’ Union Women’s Officer is someone called Milo Eyre-Morgan, who goes by the pronouns he/him or they/them and vows to represent “marginalised genders”. Do you see what happened there? Yes, a man has been elected to represent women, in the name of inclusivity. One of his first acts is to promulgate a ‘TERF spotting guide’ which is simply a blatant attack on women who disagree with the gender identity rubbish spouted by Stonewall. What is happening in our universities is quite incredible and very worrying.
Stonewall trans activists are a bit like Militant and Momentum: entryists who are parasitical on a successful host organisation but who erode it from within. Unlike the Labour Party however, which must secure sufficient votes to form a government with a mandate for a manifesto, Stonewall doesn’t have to win a single vote anywhere. It relies instead on its useful idiots in the institutions, who are proving to be very useful indeed. It will take more than a brilliant piece of investigative journalism to excise this widely metastasised cancer.
Thanks for that. It seems that his optimism was misplaced though, as nothing has changed. In fact the Kathleen Stock case suggests it has got much worse.
Quote from the article: “In fact they [these radical activist students] are nothing more than bitter, semi-educated morons who constantly demand emotional safety from the “aggression” of anything they disagree with.”
David Batlle
2 years ago
“ But there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades. Many have no other homes to go to. Many find purpose only in the struggle. Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
Everything you need to know about the Left for the last 20 years. I have never seen it put so succinctly.
Allie McBeth
2 years ago
Thanks for the article Douglas, which points I’ve read also in your excellent book, The Madness of Crowds. I have been wondering what next for Stonewall when the trans battle is won and we are all homogeneously “gendered”. The right to marry domestic animals? A revival for PIE maybe? It’s kind of a natural progression methinks.
Wasn’t it Nietzsche who muttered something about: “If you stare into the abyss long enough…” etc?
The disciples of anti-matter have revealed their brave new world to us.
Time to close the blinds methinks!
Jon Redman
2 years ago
there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades…others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.
There are many reasons we still need a Labour Party, stagnant wages, the fig economy and unaffordable housing to name a few. Unfortunately Labour in its current guise doesn’t attempt to fix these problems
Agreed. The fig economy is on its knees round here, and figpickers are high on the list of the underpaid and overworked. Don’t start me on the quince and medlar sectors….
Agreed. We need a party for labour, by which I mean one which unashamedly champions the living standards of ordinary workers. But can the current Labour party be reformed? It seems to me that they don’t merely need a new leader; they need a whole new membership! I can’t see that happening.
At last, a denunciation of that caste of plague-carriers, Activists.
They are a collection of crooks and cranks, leavened by a few sad people looking for a religion or cause.
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Thomas Sowell once said that life doesn’t ask you what you want, it just gives you options. Everything is a trade-off. Resources are finite, so the more you pour into one area, the less you give to others. I note this under a column about Stonewall published by Unherd the same day as Mary Harrington’s warning about “utilitarian” abortion and euthanasia.
Samir Iker
2 years ago
“When the Coalition passed the gay marriage act, the battle for gay rights was essentially won.”
No, it essentially signalled that it wasn’t any more about gay rights but about destroying society.
Marriage was never a “right” – nor was it a pass to sleep or cohabit with someone else. Humanity managed that quite well for many centuries before marriage was invented.
It was an obligation imposed by society on a couple who decided to bear children (which by definition made it a heterosexual couple for naturally conceived and born children) to stick together and build a home for their children, and bound their assets to those children.
If anything, if a homosexual couple adopt children, then as per those rules they would be OBLIGED to get married first, not have the RIGHT to do so.
Oh you can procreate all that you want to. Having a full set of parents who are committed enough to get married and commit their lives to their offspring is rather helpful to the children concerned, though.
Because the ‘NUTBAGS’ haven’t just infiltrated the BBC and public sector organisations, they now control the HR departments (and therefore employment policies and workplace rules) of most large and medium size private sector employers (especially those private sector firms that rely on Government or public sector contracts). That’s a huge portion of the UK workforce. The effect is chilling. Employees are required to undergo training to indoctrinate them into the required mindset. You will feel during these training sessions that any questioning of the ideology will be stamped upon (and there are questions at the end, upon which you will marked). The images and language that you use in your reports / documents / e-mails and the language / attitude that you use in the workplace must be correct. Get it wrong, and you could be censured. And because the correct language is incredibly complex and continually evolving, you will never be entirely sure whether you are breaking the rules – if you don’t know the rules of the game, then you are sure to lose. So everyone, especially those that do not buy in to the new woke orthodoxy, tries to keep their head down and not offend the new clericy. If you happen to be an obvious white, straight, working class but socially conservative male then you will feel especially vulnerable. It feels like working under a modern-day Stasi. That’s why I take the ‘NUTBAGS’ seriously.
Depends on your definition of harm doesn’t it. To people with low resilience words are violence and not being accepted by everyone, all the time, is like being murdered
Diana Durham
2 years ago
Greatarticle,thankyou.
Alex Tickell
2 years ago
MrMurray’spr
Hugh Marcus
2 years ago
This is a really interesting piece by Douglas. The podcast he’s referring to is classic Nolan. Nolan is like a terrier with a bone, he just won’t let go. What ultimately harms his overall credibility though, is the frequent quotes in the podcast from Jim Wells. Wells is a well known politician in Northern Ireland who, to say the very least, is a skeptic on gay issues (some might say, with justification, he’s homophobic). I suppose the proof of this pudding will be in the eating. Will the media in London, run with this? Or are the BBC & the other media organisations so contaminated by this stuff that they’ll play dumb on it?
Why is scepticism about the gay movement equivalent to a “phobia”
For instance, I currently I have a young daughter in school who is being exposed to random sexual and other content at an inappropriately young age, a large of that driven by the gay movement.
That’s my opinion. I am tolerant towards those who think differently. Gays and their supporters are not tolerant towards my view, however.
mike otter
2 years ago
Sadly Stonewall are doing more harm to lbgt rights than almost anyone except DAESH or the Taliban(the rulers in Afghanistan, not the clergy in general). This leads me to suspect Stonerwall is a safe place for homophobes in the same way BLM is a safe place for people who are prejudiced about skin color. Much like Jimmy Saville hiding in plain sight at the BBC but without his work for charity.To seethe sort of characters Stonewall attracts i can heartily recommned the US website gayhomophobe.com
My question is why is everyone so sure Stonewall is finished? Yes, in a rational world they’d be totally discredited but, as we all know, we’re not living in a rational world.
Are all the organizations/businesses that are funding them really willing to end their support and risk the charge of discrimination?
Good point.
Exposure with facts and logic carries little weight in these days of emotional intimidation.
I agree J and Brendan, this isn’t the final nail in their coffin. The fact that the Trans 2 spirit thing is exposed as nonsense isn’t a damning indictment of them , its their greatest strength . The more nonsensical the stronger they are, it means the believers need to disavow more of reality to stay in the tribe and the ratchet only goes one way. 2+2 = 36554645726156246256
No I don’t think they are. It’s the same thing that happens to any organisation that achieves the aims it was set up to deliver – it can’t die a decent death, or at least step back and downsize to fit the reduced demands of maintaining the status quo it sought to achieve. It forgets what it was there for in the first place. Perhaps, for example, Larry Page and Sergey Brin really did genuinely set out with the good intention of ‘don’t be evil’ but once they achieved what they set out to do, how could they not be?
Although I agree pretty much entirely with the incisive, precise analysis in this article I don’t blame the good people at Stonewall for this, including Ruth Hunt. Pity the CEO of a FTSE 100 company who says at the AGM – do you know what, our business model is on its last legs. Here’s your money back while there is still some value left in it, we’re winding up the company. It’s just not in our nature to say or think that kind of thing.
I look forward to welcoming the unemployed D&I advisors back to the very real and unequal world of the mid to late 2020s that they unwittingly helped to bring about, and they shall have my fullest sympathies for their arduous travails.
I have listened to the whole podcast and really enjoyed this quality piece of journalism which is very rare these days….
The whole thing is a Ponzi scheme of making money masked by its ideologies.
Like Mr Murray writes….
“But there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades. Many have no other homes to go to. Many find purpose only in the struggle. Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
Many thanks for this piece. as you say, Stonewall’s founders brought about political change through changing hearts and minds. The current approach is very different.
Social media are used by a small group to villify anyone who dares produce a contrary argument. Consequently, politicians and those in control of the UK’s civic institutions dread being accused of transphobia just as much as they dread being accused of racism.
And then along comes Stonewall. For a simple (though large) cash transaction, Stonewall can get keep the bloggers at bay. It is a protection racket.
Welcome back!!
Yes, it is really good to have something from Douglas Murray again. The historic development of Stonewall was informative. Whether Stonewall are finished is more difficult to predict.
Despite the incoherence of their doctrine and quasi-protection racket nature of their current funding they may well be too imbedded in political society to disappear, particularly given the numbers who depend on their continued success for their own material and psychological support. Stonewall may be the main supporter of the extreme trans doctrine over here but it is well imbedded in the Democratic Party world view in the US so is unlikely to disappear too rapidly.
“Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
In Zimbabwe in 2007 I noticed with interest that, when it looked like Morgan Tsvangirai would beat Robert Mugabe in the presidential election, many of the activists working in the human rights industry appeared positively frightened.
One confessed to me that he had a proposal in the drawer to “find relevance” in the event that Mugabe lost.
It reminded me that the problem with all paid activists is that they must never succeed at their stated goal because their income depends on not succeeding.
I could almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief when Mugabe rigged his way back in through the obvious mechanisms available to him.
Mr Murray’s words on those with “lifestyles to sustain” may be more prescient than he imagines.
A quick question Hayden: How long do you think the woke madness will take to get this side? We have a lot of problems, yes, but not of that sort.
I would say that Zanu PF already adopt American racial woke ideology in order to justify their actions.
I know one Zanu fellow, for example, son of a minister, who lives in a 3 story mansion, was educated at the tax payer’s expense in the US and is always going on about “Black Lives Matter” in Zimbabwe, with the full support of his American friends, as though the problem in Zimbabwe is not Zanu PF maiming and killing people with impunity, or their continued theft and vandalisation of the country’s mineral resources, but the 20 000 remaining whites who have not yet emigrated.
I would dearly love it to be the end of the faith but I fear it is now too deeply embedded within organisations for that.
I listened to all 10 episodes and it was worth the effort. Great journalism. It’s impressive that BBC employees can ask these questions but sadly the BBC apparently felt no obligation to answer them. Cohen was willing to engage but his obfuscation and incoherence were frankly embarrassing to listen to. I found myself squirming at his constant deflections.
Of course it isn’t just gay people who stand to be erased by Stonewall ideology. Women are fighting a losing battle to protect hard won rights. Currently the Cambridge Students’ Union Women’s Officer is someone called Milo Eyre-Morgan, who goes by the pronouns he/him or they/them and vows to represent “marginalised genders”. Do you see what happened there? Yes, a man has been elected to represent women, in the name of inclusivity. One of his first acts is to promulgate a ‘TERF spotting guide’ which is simply a blatant attack on women who disagree with the gender identity rubbish spouted by Stonewall. What is happening in our universities is quite incredible and very worrying.
Stonewall trans activists are a bit like Militant and Momentum: entryists who are parasitical on a successful host organisation but who erode it from within. Unlike the Labour Party however, which must secure sufficient votes to form a government with a mandate for a manifesto, Stonewall doesn’t have to win a single vote anywhere. It relies instead on its useful idiots in the institutions, who are proving to be very useful indeed. It will take more than a brilliant piece of investigative journalism to excise this widely metastasised cancer.
Thanks for that. It seems that his optimism was misplaced though, as nothing has changed. In fact the Kathleen Stock case suggests it has got much worse.
Quote from the article: “In fact they [these radical activist students] are nothing more than bitter, semi-educated morons who constantly demand emotional safety from the “aggression” of anything they disagree with.”
“ But there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades. Many have no other homes to go to. Many find purpose only in the struggle. Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.”
Everything you need to know about the Left for the last 20 years. I have never seen it put so succinctly.
Thanks for the article Douglas, which points I’ve read also in your excellent book, The Madness of Crowds. I have been wondering what next for Stonewall when the trans battle is won and we are all homogeneously “gendered”. The right to marry domestic animals? A revival for PIE maybe? It’s kind of a natural progression methinks.
Wasn’t it Nietzsche who muttered something about: “If you stare into the abyss long enough…” etc?
The disciples of anti-matter have revealed their brave new world to us.
Time to close the blinds methinks!
Exactly.
And this is much of the existential problem confronting the Labour party.
Both should disband.
There are many reasons we still need a Labour Party, stagnant wages, the fig economy and unaffordable housing to name a few. Unfortunately Labour in its current guise doesn’t attempt to fix these problems
Agreed. The fig economy is on its knees round here, and figpickers are high on the list of the underpaid and overworked. Don’t start me on the quince and medlar sectors….
Shaddocks are having a tough time too.
Agreed. We need a party for labour, by which I mean one which unashamedly champions the living standards of ordinary workers. But can the current Labour party be reformed? It seems to me that they don’t merely need a new leader; they need a whole new membership! I can’t see that happening.
I’ve never been persuaded we “need” a party that always makes everything worse and always leaves chaos behind.
The labour party has gone so far down the ‘woke’ rabbit hole it’s disappeared up it’s own a#se.
Like the legendary Oozlum Bird
At last, a denunciation of that caste of plague-carriers, Activists.
They are a collection of crooks and cranks, leavened by a few sad people looking for a religion or cause.
Thomas Sowell once said that life doesn’t ask you what you want, it just gives you options. Everything is a trade-off. Resources are finite, so the more you pour into one area, the less you give to others. I note this under a column about Stonewall published by Unherd the same day as Mary Harrington’s warning about “utilitarian” abortion and euthanasia.
“When the Coalition passed the gay marriage act, the battle for gay rights was essentially won.”
No, it essentially signalled that it wasn’t any more about gay rights but about destroying society.
Marriage was never a “right” – nor was it a pass to sleep or cohabit with someone else. Humanity managed that quite well for many centuries before marriage was invented.
It was an obligation imposed by society on a couple who decided to bear children (which by definition made it a heterosexual couple for naturally conceived and born children) to stick together and build a home for their children, and bound their assets to those children.
If anything, if a homosexual couple adopt children, then as per those rules they would be OBLIGED to get married first, not have the RIGHT to do so.
I fail to see what point you’re trying to make? Are you for or against marriage, both gay and straight?
For.
But not as a right or an option, but as an obligation towards your children.
So people should only get married to procreate? And should g be allowed to leave a marriage?
Oh you can procreate all that you want to. Having a full set of parents who are committed enough to get married and commit their lives to their offspring is rather helpful to the children concerned, though.
True, but throughout history it’s never been able to be enforced
Douglas Murray is always worth reading
Why does anyone take these attention seeking NUTBAGS seriously?
Because the ‘NUTBAGS’ haven’t just infiltrated the BBC and public sector organisations, they now control the HR departments (and therefore employment policies and workplace rules) of most large and medium size private sector employers (especially those private sector firms that rely on Government or public sector contracts). That’s a huge portion of the UK workforce. The effect is chilling. Employees are required to undergo training to indoctrinate them into the required mindset. You will feel during these training sessions that any questioning of the ideology will be stamped upon (and there are questions at the end, upon which you will marked). The images and language that you use in your reports / documents / e-mails and the language / attitude that you use in the workplace must be correct. Get it wrong, and you could be censured. And because the correct language is incredibly complex and continually evolving, you will never be entirely sure whether you are breaking the rules – if you don’t know the rules of the game, then you are sure to lose. So everyone, especially those that do not buy in to the new woke orthodoxy, tries to keep their head down and not offend the new clericy. If you happen to be an obvious white, straight, working class but socially conservative male then you will feel especially vulnerable. It feels like working under a modern-day Stasi. That’s why I take the ‘NUTBAGS’ seriously.
LOL. I can’t help myself, the capitalisation just feels right.
In a time of entropy hustling is a good way to make a living. This is probably how those grizzly Puritans in the 17th century made such progress.
I had the same problem. You have to create your comment in a separate medium (e.g., Word) and paste it into the comments box.
“Section 28 was still on the statute books, causing harm to gay students and teachers alike.”
How?
Depends on your definition of harm doesn’t it. To people with low resilience words are violence and not being accepted by everyone, all the time, is like being murdered
Greatarticle,thankyou.
MrMurray’spr
This is a really interesting piece by Douglas. The podcast he’s referring to is classic Nolan. Nolan is like a terrier with a bone, he just won’t let go. What ultimately harms his overall credibility though, is the frequent quotes in the podcast from Jim Wells. Wells is a well known politician in Northern Ireland who, to say the very least, is a skeptic on gay issues (some might say, with justification, he’s homophobic). I suppose the proof of this pudding will be in the eating. Will the media in London, run with this? Or are the BBC & the other media organisations so contaminated by this stuff that they’ll play dumb on it?
Why is scepticism about the gay movement equivalent to a “phobia”
For instance, I currently I have a young daughter in school who is being exposed to random sexual and other content at an inappropriately young age, a large of that driven by the gay movement.
That’s my opinion. I am tolerant towards those who think differently. Gays and their supporters are not tolerant towards my view, however.
Sadly Stonewall are doing more harm to lbgt rights than almost anyone except DAESH or the Taliban(the rulers in Afghanistan, not the clergy in general). This leads me to suspect Stonerwall is a safe place for homophobes in the same way BLM is a safe place for people who are prejudiced about skin color. Much like Jimmy Saville hiding in plain sight at the BBC but without his work for charity.To seethe sort of characters Stonewall attracts i can heartily recommned the US website gayhomophobe.com