He draws on extensive interviews with current and former staff — including journalists at the very top. Speaking out for the first time since leaving the Corporation, Fran Unsworth, the former director of BBC News, reveals in an explosive interview: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult.”

But has the BBC learned from its mistakes? Only last November, Tim Davie, the former director-general, had to resign in disgrace over the issue of impartiality. And as his successor Matt Brittin prepares for his first day next week, Burley asks whether the BBC can still deliver on its founding promise to report without fear or favor.

Burley’s investigation covers the BBC’s capture from 2010 until today:

1. “No Debate”: The Newsnight row that exposed a new activism
2. Stonewall, the Style Guide and the drift towards advocacy
3. How DEI changed the culture
4. A disastrous reorganization
5. The Nolan podcast and the BBC’s Stonewall reckoning
6. The battle for BBC Online
7. The Tavistock Files
8. Exclusive: Fran Unsworth on “progressive madness”
9. Matt Brittin’s challenge: can the BBC recover trust?

***

We don’t know much about Matt Brittin, the former Google executive who will become director-general of the BBC on Monday, but we must assume that he likes a challenge. When he walks through the doors of Broadcasting House, he will be greeted by a restive staff, demands for further swingeing cuts and doubts about the journalism that, above all else, must be the BBC’s purpose.

He has to succeed where his predecessor, Tim Davie, failed, and push savings through without further compromising the BBC’s ability to deliver impartiality. That was what the row that engulfed Davie and the Corporation’s CEO, Deborah Turness, last November was about, and Brittin must fix it. Although the focus of the leaked Michael Prescott memo that triggered the crisis which saw both quit their jobs was misleading editing of a speech by Donald Trump, the kicker was an allegation that producers blocked stories unfavorable to the perspective of transgender rights activists.

Davie had never properly addressed the underlying institutional dysfunction that wrought such damage: the decade-long capture of the BBC by a world view that regards any attempt to discuss the issues around transgender rights to be hurtful and transphobic. Davie’s failure to grasp the journalistic implications of this is best exemplified by his use, as late as 2024, of the lazy mantra: “We have to be kind and caring in this and listen to people, and be nice!”

But is Brittin, another 50-something non-journalist who is happy to display his woke credentials on the trans issue, too similar to his predecessor? The similarities between the two men don’t inspire confidence and the BBC’s record isn’t good. It took a side in the culture war. It allowed its pursuit of younger audiences and an obsession with Diversity & Inclusion to skew its editorial judgment and marginalize women. This investigation exposes the extent of that capture. Based on my own experiences at the BBC, and numerous conversations over many months with members of staff, past and present, it reveals the scale of the problem and the difficult task ahead.

Assessing the damage, one former senior BBC executive who worked closely with Davie is particularly damning. ​“I’ve never been an enemy of Tim’s,” he tells me, “but I think that shows, again, his inability to understand what journalism does. He’s not a journalist. And that’s the problem.” One senior presenter despairs for an organization out of touch with its license-fee payers: “We seem obsessed with drag queens. We are in a terrible mess at the BBC.” Another wants drastic action: “There’s no sign of anyone getting a grip on anything,” he tells me. “The only solution is getting rid of them all. It’s like cutting out cancer. You have to just do it.”

“No Debate”: The Newsnight row that exposed a new activism

For me, it all started on a Newsnight shift in 2014 when Frank Maloney, the boxing promoter, announced he was now a woman and his name was Kellie. 

Born Frank in Peckham in 1953, Maloney enjoyed a stellar career as a boxing manager and promoter who helped guide Lennox Lewis to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Frank, a chirpy Cockney, and a tiny bit menacing, retired in 2013 and began living quietly as a transgender woman. Only when the papers came sniffing in the summer of 2014 did Kellie Maloney come out on the front page of the Sunday Mirror.

It was hardly a new idea, but it was still a shock to see Kellie, transformed by a neat little bob. British culture had tended to play trans for laughs, most memorably in the guise of the unseen, deep-voiced transgender woman taxi-driver Babs in the BBC comedy The League of Gentlemen, and the bearded man in a dress insisting he was, despite the evidence, “a lady” on the less brilliant Little Britain, but the respectful reception in the boxing community, of all places, suggested attitudes were changing.

Approval was not unanimous, however. Feminist commentators noted that Maloney, then 61, had enjoyed decades as a man in a macho sport. Was it really fair that he was able to benefit from all those years as a man and then just turn around and expect to be treated as a woman? It was an interesting question, so I commissioned a discussion for Newsnight that was designed to be broad and discursive.

​I approached the issue with sympathy, no agenda and little deep understanding. I assumed everyone knew the difference between a man identifying as a woman and the full Aretha Franklin: a natural born woman. I was unaware of how uncompromising many activists were on the subject. Arguments about issues such as self-ID had yet to hit the mainstream and my basic knowledge had been shaped by Channel 4’s My Transsexual Summer, which had aired in 2011. It was a sympathetic portrayal of transgender young people and what seemed to me to be their deep and sincere desire to live as the opposite sex. When it came to Kellie Maloney, ​I didn’t think Maloney’s years as macho Frank meant he should continue to suppress what he regarded as his true self.

I was keen to explore the issue and give a new generation of transactivists the chance to make their case in an impartial setting. What I was about to learn the hard way was that this new generation rejected debate.

​It fell to the producer — we’ll call him Mark — to assemble a panel. We weren’t looking for conflict but wanted to begin a conversation that hadn’t been had yet about Maloney, women’s spaces and the aspirations of the new transactivism. Mark booked Paris Lees, a high-profile transgender woman who celebrated Maloney’s choice. To understand the nuance, we also wanted to hear from a transgender man, so we booked Freddy McConnell, best known as “the man who had given birth”, also known as a biological woman.

But we needed some grit in the oyster: a guest who could help us explore the implications of biological sex giving way to gender identity. The two women Mark sounded out had received death threats after speaking out on the subject and being labeled as TERFS: “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.” It simply wasn’t worth the grief, they said wearily. When Mark posted on Twitter to ask the formidable radical feminist Julie Bindel to take part, the online activists lost it. Bindel, knowing the risks better than we did, declined the invitation.

​Mark pressed on and eventually struck gold with Miranda Yardley. Yardley — a transgender woman who sympathized with the concerns of gender-critical feminists like Bindel — was already asking questions about the difficult issues surrounding biological men demanding access to spaces reserved for women. “The demand for unrestricted access to female spaces,” Yardley had written, “that exist for the dignity, comfort and protection of women, concerns me greatly.”

​I was pleased. A discussion between three transgender people was unusual and interesting, even if it was slightly weighted in favor of Lees’s and McConnell’s approach. But the reaction on Twitter when we announced the line-up was less enthusiastic. The online activists thought including an actual transgender woman with a different set of opinions was transphobic.

Mark was clearly shaken by all the abuse filling his Twitter feed. A section of the transgender community were piling in, calling Yardley a TERF — though I don’t know how you can be both trans and “trans exclusionary” — and there was abuse directed at Mark too, sharing his account name, calling him “scum”.

​We carried on, regardless. But then, at 8:48pm, less than two hours before the start of Newsnight, Lees took to Twitter:

​I’ve turned @BBCNewsnight down as I’m not prepared to enter into a fabricated debate about trans people’s right to exist/express themselves.

McConnell, already in a cab to the studio, wasn’t far behind:

​Was going to go on @BBCNewsnight but thanks to this awesome trans community, found out it’s basically a TERF-filled trap.

Lees’s reasoning was disingenuous. We weren’t debating transgender people’s right to exist: the entire panel was made up of transgender people existing and expressing themselves. And the transgender woman McConnell labeled a TERF was outnumbered two to one. Where was the trap? Instead, it looked like the pair decided to pull out as soon as they learned Yardley was booked. An alternative trans viewpoint was a threat. A discussion was unthinkable. And so, the mighty Newsnight was forced to drop a sane and serious discussion on what it means to be transgender because two intolerant transgender people misrepresented our agenda and closed down the debate.

The transactivist tactics — Twitter storms, name-calling, disingenuous accusations and the insistence on “no debate” — have become all too familiar in the years since. And the feeling that the BBC was being policed and manipulated by activists only grew stronger as their hold on the corporation grew more pernicious. But as we were to discover, this had been going on under the surface for some time.

Stonewall, the Style Guide and the drift towards advocacy

A year or so later — after I’d left the program — the entire Newsnight team was summoned for a special event: Newsnight meets the transactivists, hosted by transgender media pressure group All About Trans. “We kind of all had to go,” one staffer remembers. “It was almost a three-line whip thing. And we were all paired with a trans person when we got there.”

I know of no other campaign group able to secure the attendance of an entire program team, including the then-lead Newsnight presenter Evan Davis. Davis, according to one attendee, “was much more critical [of transactivists] in those days than he is now”, and he pushed back strongly when they tried to tell him the sorts of guests they didn’t want to see on Newsnight. “You can’t dictate who we have on,” he told them, “that’s not what we do.” Unlike the encounters between transactivists and concerned feminists, or those that took place online, the event was cordial.

The connections between trans campaigners and the media ran deep. In 2011, before most of us were paying attention, the lobby group Trans Media Action persuaded the BBC and Channel 4 to stump up £20,000 to get them up and running. Following the investment, which went unnoticed at the time, Trans Media Action, which later became All About Trans, held dozens of workshops for senior BBC staff providing guidance on how to handle transgender people and their pronouns. These workshops included activists from the now-discredited charity Mermaids and various pressure groups.

In 2013, representatives met various BBC executives — sometimes at the swanky Langham Hotel next to BBC HQ — including Steve Herrmann, the boss of BBC News Online at the time, and Colin Tregear, an advisor to the BBC Complaints Unit, as well as other gatekeepers of the broadcaster’s impartiality. Their message was that the BBC should refer to transgender people by the gender they identify with rather than their biological sex as well as using preferred terminology such as “assigned male/female at birth” as opposed to “born a man/woman”.

Such was their sway that when a new BBC Style Guide — the internal rule book that applied to BBC journalists — arrived in November 2013, it had adopted the transactivist position. If you said you were a woman, then that’s what you were. It also asserted that “Homosexual means people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender”, a contentious statement since it suggests sexual attraction is driven by gender rather than sex. 

It was the BBC’s job to resist being carried along on a wave of activism and concentrate on impartiality but too many of its staff, including its executives, were predisposed to view the transactivist position as inherently progressive and therefore good. By absorbing the transactivist world view, the new Style Guide seriously compromised the BBC’s ability to be impartial when the controversy around the issue exploded a few years later. But that wasn’t the only problem.

In 2015, having delivered marriage equality for gays and lesbians, the hugely successful lobby group Stonewall decided to focus its energies on transgender rights. This was a perfectly legitimate move — although an ultimately disastrous one — which became a big problem for the BBC. At the time that Stonewall made this fateful decision, the Corporation was already a paying member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions program which offered advice, “inclusion strategies” and a nice logo to advertise your commitment to diversity. It was also registered with Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index. The more the BBC reflected Stonewall’s approach in its internal policies, the higher it scored on the Index, and it was keen to do well as the nascent diversity and equality movement took hold within the management. So, when Stonewall added the letter “T” to the “LGB”, giving fresh impetus and credibility to the transgender rights agenda, the BBC found itself aligned with one side of the argument.

This seamlessly embedded the politics of transgender self-ID into the BBC’s HR and corporate policy, just as the Style Guide had embedded it into its journalism. The BBC, we should note, wasn’t an outlier. This was happening everywhere. And there was no resistance. As Gavin Allen, a senior manager and member of the BBC News Board from 2014 to 2021, remembers it, people were blinded by the power of the Stonewall brand. “Stonewall was a credible organisation,” he tells me. “If they said ‘X, Y, Z,’ we thought, ‘Oh, Stonewall, oh God, maybe they’re right, and we’re on the wrong side of history.’ Then you realize, ‘Wait a minute. This is horseshit.’ But unfortunately, that was way too late.”

“I heard that phrase, the ‘wrong side of history’, in so many bloody meetings,” remembers one very senior executive I spoke to. Meanwhile, women were speaking up but being ignored. The BBC seemed to work on the basis that if it was OK with Stonewall, then there was no need to check.

As a result, many at the BBC unthinkingly placed Stonewall and all its ideas firmly in the basket marked “good”, with no discussion. Critical thinking — asking whether you could genuinely draw an analogy between gay rights and transgender rights — risked putting you on the “wrong side of history”, and so it was best avoided. As one senior presenter tells me, this led to a disastrous category error: “Many people just believed the lie that this was gay rights 2.0. This was the same struggle, unfinished business from the gay rights movement, when it was nothing of the sort. It’s completely contradictory to the gay rights movement.”

The two campaigns are fundamentally different. The fight for equal marriage asked nothing of others except the setting aside of discriminatory attitudes — whether rooted in homophobia or religious conviction — about gay relationships. It demanded no one alter their understanding of reality. Transgender rights, as advanced by Stonewall, asked something categorically greater: that people accept transgender women as biological women in law, in language, and in practice — including in single-sex spaces. That is not a prejudice to be overcome. It is a question on which reasonable people, including many gay men and lesbians, profoundly disagree.

There are, of course, people who are simply transphobic — who hate transgender people for being trans. But those who oppose self-ID, the use of puberty blockers, or the opening of women’s spaces to biological males should not be branded as bigots. They are raising legitimate questions about the consequences of a specific set of policies.

And yet those who were there at the time struggle to explain how the BBC got itself into this position. “I don’t think I was ever at a meeting where a policy was agreed saying ‘trans women are women’,” Gavin Allen recalled, “it just sort of seeped in.”

And yet, it was there in black and white in the BBC’s Style Guide.

“I mean, that’s fucking awful,” Allen says when I remind him. “… I just don’t remember any debate about it.” It clearly troubles Allen that, to some extent, when inside the BBC bubble, this huge story passed him by. “I genuinely can’t remember how strongly I felt about this issue,” he says. “I certainly felt miles more strongly once I left, weirdly.”

In the years that followed, as the debate became more intense and public opinion hardened against the demands of transactivism, the BBC had to live with its decision. Impartiality is difficult at the best of times; it is almost impossible when you appear to have publicly taken a side.

***

In January 2017, the BBC led the news with the commutation by President Barack Obama of the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning. Cath Leng was a chief writer for the channel, and she was struggling with Manning’s pronouns; Manning now identified as a woman called Chelsea and the BBC scripts, as per the Style Guide, referred to Manning as she/her throughout. Leng’s position required a commitment to accuracy and impartiality and as she remembers: “It was my job to make sure everything was true. I said, ‘You have to give me reasons why I should lie about this person’s sex. Really good reasons.’”

So Leng set to work on the pronouns, changing them from “she” to “he” to the outrage of some of her colleagues. Reaching an impasse, the subject was taken to the “huddle” of news editors in charge that day. Leng was overruled; from then on, for her, everything changed. “I was ostracized,” she remembers. There were some staffers who were sympathetic but they weren’t willing to back her up publicly. She was up against a generation of younger staff who were suspicious of anyone who questioned the right to self-identify, and who were backed up by the Style Guide. “It was a war of attrition.” she says. “They wear you down.”

Leng argues forcefully that she is neither a bigot nor a transphobe; her objection is based on what she considered to be the principal duty of a journalist: to tell the truth. Her refusal to back down was rewarded with disciplinary action. Ultimately, she won, but left the BBC in 2023, effectively forced out after 25 years, she believes, because of her views.

Leng’s objection — the sacrifice of truth — is a powerful one. As one long-serving presenter put it to me: “It’s the only area of our professional life where we’re told you have to say things that aren’t true.”

How DEI changed the culture

In October 2017, the then-prime minister, Theresa May, put transgender issues on the political agenda by announcing at a PinkNews Awards that she wanted to “demedicalize” the process of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate: by scrapping the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This was “Self-ID”.

On the night May announced her plans, a self-identified transgender woman using the name Karen White — real name Stephen Wood — was spending another night in New Hall women’s prison in Yorkshire, where he’d been sent because he identified as a woman. He had already carried out a series of sexual assaults against female prisoners, but remained there while the offenses were investigated. The following year, Wood was sentenced to life in prison for a catalog of violent sexual offenses.

This was exactly the danger women concerned about allowing biological men into women’s spaces had highlighted. They weren’t suggesting that transgender women were more likely to offend, but opposed making it easier for men to declare themselves women because it risked making access to victims — whether in prisons, women’s refuges or changing-rooms — easier for offenders like Wood. Biological men in women’s spaces was not a popular idea; it just took time to register with the public.

Meanwhile, trans-rights activism continued to gain ground. The politics of intimidation and the fear of cancellation were winning, supported by Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives — an alphabet soup in which the BBC would slowly drown.

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue with the goals of Diversity and Inclusion: a more diverse workforce working in an environment where everyone is heard. The initiative had gripped the corporate world, and it was spreading rapidly into the public sector. But there was a problem: it was so enthusiastically embraced at the BBC that it became part of its brand and shaped its character.

The conversation quickly shifted from how to increase representation behind the scenes to the content itself: were the guest choices diverse enough? Did the content reflect the barriers and prejudices faced by a given community? How did the content sit with the BBC’s statements on diversity and inclusivity?

Across the organization, and way beyond news, content became noticeably more diverse. This was not a bad thing. But problems arose when the content began to lean towards propagandizing. Coverage of the emerging movement opposing May’s Self-ID plan, for example, was essentially nonexistent, and the films I commissioned for Politics Live represented the sum total of BBC TV coverage over the consultation period. As one BBC staffer recalled: “You’d switch on your computer in the morning, and there would be a message from Stonewall, effectively, saying, ‘We’ve cracked it. We’ve become diversity champions!’”

Meanwhile, though BBC drama, entertainment and kids’ programming worked to highlight the transgender experience, a feminist concerned about single-sex spaces was unlikely to be heard — or even allowed to articulate a view. “There’s no two ways about it,” Allen says. “It was definitely a kind of capture.”

There is an obscure but extraordinary document on the BBC website, which tells you a lot about the character of that capture and how antithetical it is to BBC values. “LGBT Culture and Progression: A report on Career Progression and Culture at the BBC” summarizes a 2018 study into the culture and work environment for LGBT staff at the BBC. It assessed their career progression, and whether the working culture discriminated against them. Designed by Stonewall, the project was overseen by the former cabinet minister James Purnell, then the BBC’s director for radio and education, and whose foreword points out that almost half of 18-24-year-olds identify as something other than heterosexual. The foreword adds that “an organization that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee”.

The BBC’s pride co-chairs at that time — Karen Millington and Matt Weaver — also wrote a foreword. In it, they announced a decision to drop the use of “LGBT” and move to “LGBTQ+”, to ensure that everyone identifying as “genderqueer, bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, pansexual, intersex, asexual, queer and questioning” feels included. In addition, the pair make several recommendations to improve the lot of LGBT people working for the BBC. All were granted and signed off at the very top of the organization.

The report is really interesting because it openly states a position that is rarely committed to paper:

“There was a general feeling that News & Current Affairs output often presents balanced debates on LGBT issues, which were at odds with the BBC’s corporate stance on LGBT inclusion, which seemed to be invisible.”

This line has been described to me by a senior presenter at the BBC as a “smoking gun”. It reveals that these BBC employees were hostile to the journalistic principles of impartiality and balance when it came to debates about LGBT issues. Instead, they believed that the BBC’s corporate position on LGBT inclusion should be promoted and valued over and above “balanced debates”.

This statement, which contravenes the BBC’s core value of impartiality, is presented without comment as a “finding” in a document signed off by the Executive Board. In case there is any doubt about what was being said, Andrew Young, the BBC’s head of workplace diversity, inclusion and belonging, said the quiet part out loud during a Zoom meeting with LGBT allies in 2019: “I’m not going to get into impartiality. It’s not my view, it’s the BBC’s view that we need to present a balanced view and debate. Hopefully, that kind of thing might change over time.”

According to Allen, there was something else impeding impartial coverage — what he describes as the “constant thumping drum in the background saying we must reach out to younger people”. The result, he says, was a news operation “pandering” to younger journalists whose opinions on trans and identity began to dominate. Decades of experience, particularly if gathered by “cis” straight white men over 40, were dismissed. “No one could say what they honestly thought,” Allen tells me, “you’d be a kind of pariah and reactionary if you did.”

Leng had discovered this to her cost two years before. And things were about to get worse.

A disastrous reorganization

Tim Davie arrived as Director General in September 2020, and quickly decided to push through a disastrous reorganization of BBC News — drawn up by the Director of News Fran Unsworth — before the Covid pandemic delayed its implementation. The cuts centralized editorial decision-making while also hollowing out the ranks of experienced editorial staff. The editorial risks involved were significant, but Davie pressed on regardless.

Those who remained tell me that the effect was felt swiftly, as the mass cull of journalists led to the rapid promotion of junior staff — or “Muppets” as one veteran unfairly put it — and an over-reliance on freelancers. One senior producer recalls returning to BBC News after the reorganization to find the BBC “had changed beyond all recognition. The foot soldiers were very, very young and very different.”

Another staffer on Newsnight recalls open hostility from younger colleagues towards the BBC board member and former adviser to Theresa May, Sir Robbie Gibb, when he went to visit the team at the invitation of the show’s editor. “I just remember really vividly coming out of that meeting, and these two young producers were saying, ‘Oh, who the fuck does he think he is? He hates the BBC. He’s a ‘fucking Tory’.” This was, the staffer remembers, a completely new breed of journalist: “They were complete activists. They had no concept of impartiality or what the purpose of the BBC was.”

Amid the cull, the BBC lost a large cohort of journalists who were genuinely interested in impartiality — a more suburban, less transgressive group. With them, a whole set of attitudes disappeared.

And while many senior positions were axed, some new ones were created. The BBC’s first LGBT correspondent started work in 2018. Ben Hunte would report on “stories, issues and debates surrounding sexuality and gender”, and provide “insight and analysis on matters affecting the LGBT community in the UK”.

The BBC has always denied that it created the post at Stonewall’s behest, but Hunte was openly sympathetic to one side of the argument — their side. The effect was to magnify the sense that the BBC was a participant in Stonewall’s campaign. It wasn’t really Hunte’s fault; it was an impossible job that shouldn’t have been created. Another journalist sums it up: “It was a complete disaster, and actually senior management would accept that. They wouldn’t go on the record and say it, but they’ve said it to me.”

As a result, Stonewall, channeled through the BBC’s diversity team, was able to pursue its agenda across the organization unchallenged. “We were like kids who had got off tricycles and were trying to ride motorbikes,” one senior manager tells me. “People just didn’t know enough about how to deal with this new world of equality. I don’t think anyone took time to try and understand it.”

As D&I thrived, impartiality was an after-thought. Davie always sounded like he was reading someone else’s script when he talked about impartiality and journalism, but was more authentic when it came to D&I. He constantly reaffirmed the importance of diversity and told managers (including me) that they “will not get promoted without us assessing how happy your staff are and how you’ve delivered against diversity targets”. Hardly a manifesto to deal with the problem of groupthink.

One veteran journalist at the BBC who knows Davie well thinks he understood the problem. “Tim is a classic,” he tells me. “He’s a normal guy, normal instincts, and a perfectly nice fellow. He understands intellectually what’s going on, but can’t do anything about it because he feels himself cornered in a way that I don’t think realistically he was.”

The Nolan podcast and the BBC’s Stonewall reckoning

Luckily the BBC is not its Director General. It is its journalists, its mission of delivering impartial coverage, its commitment to the truth. Those, like me, who are critical of the way that the BBC has handled the transgender issue aren’t primarily concerned with the substance of the debate so much as the principle that a service paid for by everyone should not favor one side of the argument and marginalize the other. Nor can that be excused because the favored side is more progressive or fairer or more forward-thinking. Those are opinions not facts.

While the BBC’s management lost sight of all of that, it fell to what Cath Leng calls the “rogue” elements in the BBC — from the English regions, Northern Ireland and Newsnight — to save the BBC from itself. “None of it came from the center,” Leng tells me, “and everything that came from the center was very affirmative.”

No wonder David Thompson, producer of a 2021 BBC Radio Ulster podcast series Stonewall, Nolan Investigates, thought his podcast might never air. For one thing, his series was a masterclass in impartiality — risking ferocious accusations of transphobia. For another, it was utterly damning for the BBC. The podcast, presented by Stephen Nolan, focused on the worryingly close relationship between Stonewall and all the public institutions that had signed up to its Diversity Champions Scheme — awkwardly including the BBC. Across the 10-part series, it laid bare the intimate relationship between the Corporation and the charity, and how that might affect editorial content.

Before the project got its official go-ahead, Thompson and Nolan submitted to an unprecedented pitching session to the BBC’s great and good on Zoom — unprecedented because London rarely paid much attention to something that was being made in Northern Ireland. The virtual room, Thompson remembers, was not enthusiastic.

One senior manager was furious, asking Thompson who he thought he was to question people’s gender identity — despite the fact that this wasn’t a part of the pitch. Crucially, however, the most senior person in the room took a different view. Fran Unsworth, whose reputation for cautiousness had worried Thompson, spoke up and settled the matter: “This is a really important piece of journalism, and we will back it.”

Unsworth’s intervention meant that the series ran, but many employees weren’t happy about it. “Overwhelmingly, people in the BBC didn’t like the fact that it happened,” remembers Thompson, “they felt it was some sort of Right-wing plot against trans people or something.” At every stage, he says, there was push-back and even sabotage with promises of accompanying online pieces being made and then broken.

“In London,” he continues, “BBC online stripped back the online version of the story so far that the article became neutered. But by that stage, I couldn’t be bothered with the fight. At every stage there was resistance.”

But the resistance receded when the listening numbers came through. Despite minimal promotion, and all that difficulty with BBC Online, Nolan and Thompson had a hit on their hands. “And then,” Thompson told me, “everyone wanted a piece. And some people who had not wanted anything to do with it were attaching themselves to it and congratulating themselves on their bravery”

The podcast made such a convincing case of a conflict of interest that the relationship between the BBC and Stonewall became untenable. By November, the BBC, very reluctantly, left the Diversity Champion’s Scheme, not because there was undue influence coming from Stonewall, you understand, but because it might look that way. Nolan Investigates: Stonewall should have marked a turning point, but insider attitudes didn’t shift.

The battle for BBC Online

The real problem, as David Thompson found, was online. “It’s been known about for years” one senior BBC journalist told me “nobody did anything, and they were warned.”

In 2021, one senior manager wrote a confidential memo expressing concern about the volume of trans-related content appearing on the BBC News website’s homepage. It was, he wrote, disproportionate, always affirmative and dangerous: “in doing so we perhaps fail to explore more fully the wider debate over the important societal issues involved.”

Numerous members of staff I have spoken to have echoed those concerns. Online is the part of BBC News where the sense of capture is most acute. Staff would describe it as a place where metropolitan identity politics is the norm, and where women worried about single-sex spaces and the risk of violence were disdained and regarded as extremists. “The level of hatred for women who raise these issues is quite shocking,” one tells me. “It’s actually quite upsetting. I find it very, very hard on a personal level, both professionally and actually personally, to be perceived in this way.”

Caroline Lowbridge, a BBC journalist based in Nottingham, found this out the hard way. She came to the website in 2021 with a feature about lesbians who were facing pressure to have sex with transgender women, and who were being called transphobic if they didn’t.

Her story represented one of the most troubling and bizarre aspects of the transgender argument: Stonewall, of all organizations, was castigating lesbians for not being sexually attracted to penises. The chief executive of Stonewall at the time, Nancy Kelley, even suggested that same-sex attraction was akin to sexual racism, when people exclude potential romantic partners on the grounds of their ethnicity.

Kelley was alerted to the article when Lowbridge contacted Stonewall for comment. Kelley swiftly followed up with Kamal Ahmed, the editorial director of BBC News, expressing concern that the allegations in the piece “neatly intersected with the component of transphobia that is representing trans women as sexual predators”

Ahmed passed the concern onto Lowbridge’s line manager, commenting that the territory was a “bit niche”, but he didn’t try to stop the story. The same can’t be said for numerous others within the BBC who accused Lowbridge of transphobia and her piece of misgendering and mis-use of language. One senior staffer told Lowbridge in an email that the trans community “is already massively under attack, both physically and culturally”.

Lowbridge’s response was weary but determined: “I’ve been attacked on social media, and the chief executive of Stonewall has contacted the BBC News Editorial Director to complain about me. The story has now been through 18 different people within the BBC (at the last count) and has still not been published.”

Once again, Fran Unsworth had to intervene to get the story out. And when it finally appeared, there was a sting in the tail: the article carried Lowbridge’s name in the byline. Given the nature of the story and the strong opposition to it, it would be reasonable to be given the opportunity to remain anonymous. But I have heard reports that Lowbridge’s bosses were insistent that she put her name to it. Perhaps they thought she might finally back down and decide against publishing the story.

When the article was finally published, there were anti-BBC protests on the streets of Lowbridge’s hometown, Nottingham, and a demo outside New Broadcasting House. But the fact that it made it at all was a minor miracle. One BBC online staff member couldn’t believe their eyes: “I thought, Wow! Finally, we’re actually covering it.”

We will never know how many stories were quietly abandoned or actively suppressed.

The Tavistock Files

Perhaps one of the most consequential stories that actually made it through to broadcast examined one of the most worrying aspects of the whole transgender debate: children.

Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes — both Newsnight journalists — had spent two years doing what the rest of the BBC’s news operation conspicuously wasn’t: investigating concerns, first raised in 2019, regarding the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock Clinic in London — Britain’s only specialist service for children seeking to transition. Backed by an independent editor, Esme Wren, their forensic reporting revealed that puberty blockers were being prescribed without sufficient evidence of benefit; that there was an overly affirmative culture that reinforced patients’ desire to transition; and there was a climate in which staff were discouraged from raising doubts. Delivered amid the usual accusations of transphobic bigotry, their work triggered an official investigation into the service and significantly contributed to its closure.

In April 2024, the Cass Report — four years in the making — delivered its damning verdict. It was the lead story on Newsnight. Cohen and Barnes had both left the programme by then, but Barnes returned as a guest to discuss it with Victoria Derbyshire.

The first person asked to comment was Hannah Philips, a transgender woman who’d had a positive experience at the GIDS clinic. This was nothing new. Whenever Cohen and Barnes had reported on the service, there was pressure to include “positive” transgender voices to offset the negative nature of the story. Even when the evidence was in and the verdict delivered, the instinct was still to soften it.

Barnes was genuinely angry as she talked about how long it had taken for anything to be done. Where were the politicians? “Where have large swathes of the media been? And sadly, I include the BBC in that, outside of this programme.”

It was clear that an NHS scandal of the first order had been ignored entirely by the BBC’s health team. One senior staff member at the BBC I spoke to thinks it was simply down to fear. “I do think the department has just dropped the ball. I have a lot of time for Hugh Pym [the BBC’s health editor]. He’s a sweet guy, and the other health correspondents are good, but my God, what an absolutely extraordinary fact that they just avoided this subject for all those years.”

Exclusive: Fran Unsworth on “progressive madness” inside BBC News

As I came to write this piece, I wanted the most senior managers of BBC News to be held accountable and to explain their side of the story. Only one, Gavin Allen, was willing to go on the record. But then, my long-shot interview bid for the former director of news at the BBC, Fran Unsworth, came off. She is closely associated with the failure of BBC News to get a grip of the problem, and yet was also instrumental in supporting the journalism that salvaged BBC News’ reputation.

Unsworth was never your average BBC News executive. She was a grammar-school girl from Stoke-on-Trent and she went to Manchester University, not Oxbridge. Only the second woman to reach the pinnacle of BBC News, she succeeded James Harding, a charismatic former editor of The Times who had failed to address that big question: how could BBC News make the huge savings required after the depletion in the licence fee? This was Unsworth’s unhappy inheritance, and the reorganization she delivered was her malign legacy. It saved money but left BBC News editorially exposed.

It has been four years since Unsworth left her post as the most senior person at BBC News, and her account of the job feels like a trauma relived. This exclusive interview is the first she has granted since leaving the newsroom, and is the first account from the very top of the organization of how the culture wars buffeted the BBC. She’s still raw from the experience of doing something she loved in an environment she began to hate. “It was bullying,” she tells me from Australia, where she now spends half her year. “But it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe-spaces shit.”

If you were to identify the high-water mark of what, in the absence of a better word, you might call “woke”, it would align pretty much exactly with the period between 2018 and 2022 when Unsworth ran BBC News. She believed in the finest traditions of BBC journalism: editorial independence, open and robust internal debate, and impartial and accurate output that doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects.

In theory, at least, this combination of old-school BBC editorial toughness and political know-how made her the right leader for the moment. The reality was more complicated. Looking back, she concludes that BBC News had become “increasingly unmanageable”.

In seeking to explain why — with the handling of the transgender issue in mind — she returns to the unique environment she encountered in 2018, a time of what she calls “progressive madness”. “This wasn’t something that just affected the BBC,” she says. “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”

I have heard this a lot from other senior executives within the BBC. But it’s a weak defense. The BBC should stand up to bullying, not be driven by it.

“It’s what you might expect of arts institutions or universities,” I say to Unsworth, “but we are journalists. Journalists are skeptical people. They don’t just lie down. They’re supposed to stand up there and think about it first. And there was an absolute absence of that, and just a complete caving. We shouldn’t have done that. That’s not us!”

​“I don’t feel I completely caved,” she says, sounding a little stung. “I really don’t, but I do think that it could have done something more robust. The BBC needed to be better than that.”

But Unsworth is keen to defend her own staff. She says there was an “awful lot of pressure” from “other parts of the BBC if they felt that the editorial direction of the story was not supporting their particular point of view on it. And maintaining impartiality became quite difficult.” In particular, drama and light entertainment approached the subject from a “mono perspective”, pressuring her staff when dissatisfied with coverage. In this climate, “maintaining impartiality became quite difficult”.

Unsworth’s suggestion that the rest of the BBC was more radical than BBC News echoes what other senior figures have told me. The children’s documentary My Life: I Am Leo (2014), for example, could have been scripted by the charity Mermaids. But the suggestion that News’ missteps were driven by pressure from those colleagues is a stretch. Nor is it supported by the experience of the Nolan team or Cath Leng or Caroline Lowbridge. I have spoken to too many people about the concerted pushback from within BBC News to believe that employees were doing so under pressure from their right-on friend in the drama department rather than from their own convictions.

“As you well know,” Unsworth tells me, “editorial decision-making in the BBC isn’t top-down. It’s about editors deciding what they want to put on their programs. And one of the big factors in it is because they took so much heat whenever they went near this subject.”

This implies that program editors only avoided the subject out of fear. But, in reality, we know that their decisions were more deliberate. As I put it to Unsworth, on transgender issues some BBC News journalists, including editors, thought that there was only one legitimate viewpoint and that everyone else was wrong. “Yeah,” she says, “that was how it was.”

We also know that Stonewall was deeply embedded in the corporation. But Unsworth rejects the accusation that the charity had a direct impact on editorial output: “Nobody, ever, ever said to me as Director of News, ‘you need to get points in the Stonewall league table’.” But, more importantly, she acknowledges that “there was a sea in which we all swam… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”

“Do you think that’s a problem journalistically?” I ask.

“I do, yes. I do,” she replies.

​“I think we could have done a lot more,” Unsworth continues. ”But we did set up a whole impartiality training thing, don’t forget, to remind people what impartiality looked like. People went through the whole course. One question you can ask yourself is: why was it so ineffective?”

While Unsworth agrees that the problem “wasn’t gripped”, she offers an audacious explanation based on a technical interpretation of impartiality and “due impartiality”.

According to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, impartiality means “not taking sides, reflecting all relevant strands of public debate and challenging them with consistent rigor”. The need for “due impartiality” arises when treating the two sides of a question equally is inappropriate: the classic example being a discussion between someone who believes the Earth is flat and someone who believes it’s round. Strict impartiality would not be appropriate in such a discussion, because of the overwhelming balance of evidence. There are, of course, less clear-cut issues where the evidence is contested and inconclusive. That doesn’t mean those subjects aren’t covered, of course, but program makers must ensure they are fair.

​It turns out that this concept of “due impartiality” is the crux of Unsworth’s explanation and defense of BBC News’ handling of the transgender story. Here’s how: “Impartiality only operates when you can look at evidence and facts and point to them as the basis of your reporting on this. And the facts at this point were incredibly disputed.”

​But this changed in April 2025, she tells me, when the Supreme Court made clear that a woman — for the purposes of the Equality Act — meant a biological woman. This provided BBC journalists with a “basis of challenge” against those who insisted men could decide to be women. Prior to the ruling, producers couldn’t judge if one assertion (“trans women are women”) was any more true than another (“trans women are not women, they are biological men”).

Can this absurd assertion really lie at the heart of the BBC’s trans tangle? Well, Unsworth tells me, “until the Supreme Court ruling on it, Keir Starmer himself was saying trans women are women”.

Starmer seems a perverse choice of lodestar and the argument seems to make no sense. But then it struck me: the BBC’s Style Guide said that inside the BBC you were a woman if you said you were. It still does. It had already made its choice. The Supreme Court has upended that, Unsworth is saying, so now it’s up for grabs.

Unsworth similarly notes that only since the 2024 Cass report on the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust has there been evidence to support judgments about transitioning, detransitioning, puberty blockers, surgery, and cross-sex hormones. While valid, this is an immense simplification of longstanding concerns about GIDS — concerns that Newsnight journalists were investigating long before 2024. Surely producers should have approached content about young people and gender reassignment with caution and a duty of care.

​Instead, coverage had been constantly, wildly affirmative. BBC Three pumped out content throughout the 2010s that told only one side of the story. CBBC aired I Am Leo in 2014 (it’s since been removed from the BBC iPlayer). Then there was BBC News’ weekday news program, Victoria Derbyshire, which launched in 2015. It was obsessed with the transgender issue, and transgender kids especially, from the start. After just six months, Victoria Derbyshire was crowned Broadcaster of the Year by PinkNews, which stood proudly as a pro-trans publication. Louisa Compton, the editor of Victoria Derbyshire, declared herself “really proud that our first and probably only ever award is a PinkNews award”. Fair enough, who wouldn’t want an award? But on this subject the program, particularly in those early days, felt uncomfortably aligned with one side of the argument.

“Derbyshire was a sort of an ‘I feel your pain’ type show,” Unsworth says. “It wasn’t ‘Let’s look at the issue in the round’. It wasn’t a current affairs program in the same way that Panorama is or Newsnight was. It was a perfectly legitimate journalistic endeavor.” ​The implication of her answer is that a human-interest-led show doesn’t need to worry about balance and fairness like other news programs.

The first item on the first edition of this “perfectly legitimate journalistic endeavor”, aired in 2015, was an “exclusive interview” with two boys who were living as girls, aged six and eight. The conversations with the children focus on “girl stuff”, “boy stuff”, and being “born in the wrong body”. There is praise for the Tavistock clinic and discussion of when parents might consider surgery. A follow-up film included the moment when a transgender girl, Jessica, tells Derbyshire about her fear of growing up with a beard and mustache. “What do you think you could do, possibly, to stop that happening?” asks Derbyshire. “I’ll get blockers,” said Jessica, aged nine.

Cath Leng worked on the program during its early years. She confirms that: “It was really, really affirmative, and it was impossible to get items or guest ideas that came from a more gender-critical perspective on air.” ​Unsworth’s argument is that before the publication of the Cass report in 2024, editors didn’t have the evidence to achieve “due impartiality” when covering stories about children presenting with gender dysphoria. That would be fine if the programs were scrupulously cautious, neutral and impartial, but, then, that wouldn’t win you a PinkNews award.

Unsworth says that the BBC couldn’t ignore “the number of children that were presenting as gender dysphoric”. This is true but I wonder whether the BBC might have contributed to the increase in numbers by airing such affirmative content. Unsworth doesn’t dismiss the idea. ​“We’ll never really know that, will we,” she says, “without looking at the timelines on it?”

Between 2014, the year I Am Leo was broadcast, and 2015, the year Victoria Derbyshire began, the number of referrals to GIDS almost doubled. Between 2015 and 2016, that number doubled again. Obviously it’s impossible to ascertain what role, if any, BBC content played in influencing under-18s to transition, given the other complex factors at play. But in any case, Cath Leng believes it was harmful: “I’m convinced that those two programs are responsible for harming children. They need to acknowledge the mistakes they made.”

​​Unsworth continues to insist, though, that it wasn’t until last year’s Supreme Court ruling that there were facts that you could use to challenge the “trans women are women” loyalty test. But I challenged her, suggesting that there were indeed facts: facts about the reality of sex. Asked whether it is not a fact that trans women are women, she pauses, before reluctantly answering: “No. They’re trans women.”

I ask whether this made it a lie that BBC staff were asked to tell.

“What I’m saying to you,” Unsworth fires back, “is that if the BBC had decided to say, ‘Do you know what? We’re not having any truck with this,’ that would have meant the BBC was on one side of the argument. At a time when certain things weren’t determined.”

​Of course, the opposite was true: the BBC had already put itself on one side of the controversy, “until”, as Unsworth concedes, “certain stories bubbled up, which meant [we] couldn’t hold the Stonewall point of view any longer.”

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Unsworth is constantly hedging on the transgender issue by deploying a useful ambivalence. “I seek to influence and change and bring people along with me,” she says, “that’s how I operate.” And it would have been risky to lay down the law: “If Directors of News are seen as partial in any way, they have no role at the BBC.” (And yet some of Unsworth’s former colleagues have told me they’d sometimes leave a meeting feeling certain she was on their side only to realize the hard way that she’d made no firm commitments.)

There is, then, a sad paradox to Unsworth’s tenure. She pushed through the catastrophic reorganization in 2021 from which, as she admits, “many of the problems the BBC faces actually stem”. But she also did more than anyone else in very senior management, with the exception perhaps of David Jordan, the director of editorial policy and standards, to ensure the most impactful pieces of work on the transgender debate did appear — most notably the Stephen Nolan podcast that helped end the BBC’s relationship with Stonewall. Unsworth admits she saw the podcast as an opportunity to make up for coverage that had been “largely skewed to one side”. And with Lowbridge’s much delayed piece on the “cotton ceiling”, she attempted to demonstrate that staff power did have its limits.

Nonetheless, her overwhelming preoccupation was to remain neutral because she knew, from numerous examples, how that same “staff power” often prevailed at BBC News. “I was only too aware,” she says, “that I could have been cancelled by my own staff, not just on this subject, but on all sorts of subjects.” The fact that she thought she might be taken down by progressive staff by forcing them to get to grips with a contested subject tells you everything you need to know about where the BBC had ended up.

This fear of the threat from some staff to her position and well-being hastened her departure: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult. Actually, it was quite miserable dealing with this hard pounding in the trenches. The BBC is an absolutely fascinating, fantastic place. But I think in this particular period, there was an intensity I hadn’t really experienced throughout my 40-year career there.”

Matt Brittin’s challenge: can the BBC recover trust?

Fran Unsworth still cares deeply about the BBC and worries about its future. “We absolutely need the BBC more than ever in these polarized times,” she tells me. “And I think it really does need to be preserved and cherished, not just attacked.”

I share her view of the importance of the BBC, but it can’t be an organization that unites people in a time of division if it is seen to represent and promote one particular perspective above others.

Even though the overt transactivist presence in the BBC might be more muted in 2026, there are still problems within the organization, including at the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) — the part of the BBC that adjudicates on complaints about its output. Last November, in the middle of the crisis surrounding Michael Prescott’s dossier of alleged BBC bias, the ECU upheld a complaint against newsreader Martine Croxall. The intervention chimed with Prescott’s claims that transactivism remained an issue at the BBC.

In June 2025, Croxall was live on air when she was confronted with a script line — apparently lifted directly from a press release — which referred to “pregnant people”. As she realized what she’d said, she corrected herself and said “women”. Then she rolled her eyes. Some viewers, interpreting her eye roll as an expression of deep-seated transphobia rather than simply exasperation, complained. In November, the ECU upheld the complaints on the grounds that “the facial expression which accompanied the change of ‘people’ to ‘women’ laid it open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity”. This was evidenced, the ECU suggested, by responses on social media that either congratulated her or castigated her, depending on where they stood on the issue.

​In the middle of that seismic November week for the BBC, the one which took out both the director of news and the Director-General and saw them being sued by President Donald Trump, the Croxall ruling was emblematic of lessons not learned. ​This was not the ECU’s first rodeo. Back in August 2023, during an interview on BBC Radio Four’s Today program about an International Chess Federation ban on transgender women from competing in women’s events, veteran Today presenter Justin Webb referred to “trans women, in other words, males”. Since the discussion was about how male brains have an advantage in chess over female ones, it required clarity.

Inevitably, there were complaints; extraordinarily, they were upheld by the ECU, which said the phrase Webb used “could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex” and that Webb “even if unintentional, it gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area”. Asked about the ruling in a Select Committee appearance in the aftermath, the then Director-General Tim Davie characterized it as a foot fault — a very minor offense by Webb — but a fault nonetheless. In light of last year’s Supreme Court ruling, the verdict looks ridiculous, but it stands.

Those close to Webb say he is irritated and a little bruised by the process and is clear that he has done nothing wrong. But he does realize he has got off lightly compared to women such as Cath Leng, who were effectively forced out of their jobs for taking a stand. I understand Webb has taken legal advice and is mulling whether to revisit the matter.

I’d suggest the ECU brace itself in the light of email correspondence I have read in relation to the Webb case, which reveals that the body gives credibility to the fantastical theory that men can actually change into women. In one email, the deputy head of program complaints, Dominic Groves, stated to colleagues regarding the Webb case that the belief that sex is “biological and genetic and therefore cannot be changed” was “vulnerable to the point that many trans advocates (some doctors and scientists among them) say sex isn’t biological and can be changed”.

The idea that the overwhelming body of evidence that sex is immutable is vulnerable to a fringe view like this is absurd. The fact that the BBC’s complaints department even entertains it is extraordinary. Let’s hope the new director-general, Matt Brittin, does the decent thing by reversing the decision and issuing a public apology to Webb and the team at Today, which is one of the few outlets with a record of journalistic bravery on this story)

The question now, as Brittin finds his feet, is how much of a problem the BBC has with activist journalism in its ranks in 2026.

Many I have spoken to think there is still a significant problem and believe an active purge is required. Others believe that the Supreme Court ruling a year ago changed the conversation internally. For instance, director of news content Richard Burgess admitted to staff that they “hadn’t got everything right” in their handling of the trans story.

That’s been built on with a new approach to trans coverage in the current style guide whereby, if it helps the audience’s understanding of a story, the biological sex of an individual will be mentioned. When I asked Unsworth about what regrets she had she immediately said “that we didn’t have a really, really, really hard look at language”. Brittin could decide to do just that.

The DG’s other big challenge is deciding where to find those 10% of cuts. More salami slicing of BBC News is not the answer. He should protect news, current affairs and political programs from further pain. The BBC needs to be a bastion of free speech and diversity of opinion. Politics Live and Newsnight, while diminished, must not face further cuts and the BBC should offer a serious long-form political interview program once again.

Brittin should also demand an audit of the skills and experience of the staff that work in News. The BBC needs to make sure it has sufficient experience and then re-empower program editors to operate independently. Paying for all this will be challenging, but perhaps Brittin should look to non-program-making functions and ask whether the BBC really needs them. Only by rebuilding BBC News intelligently and by insisting every employee signs a pledge to uphold the principle of impartiality can another debacle be avoided.

Another idea, suggested by Gavin Allen, is for the BBC to do as it did with climate change and make clear that it operates on the basis of evidence. Just as the BBC declared it would no longer debate whether man-made climate change was real because the evidence meant there was nothing to debate, Allen argues that the BBC could state that there are two sexes and that people can’t change sex. Once that is taken off the table a constructive conversation about what the transgender community needs that moves beyond the rhetoric of placards and social media might be possible.

A decade ago, transgender people in Britain enjoyed broad public sympathy. In 2016, almost six in 10 people agreed that a transgender person should be able to change the sex on their birth certificate. Only around one in five disagreed. The British Social Attitudes survey revealed a country that was overwhelmingly tolerant on the subject and becoming more so.

But then the discourse shifted. The activists took over. The placards. The threats. The cancellations. Women were hounded out of their jobs for stating biological facts. Academics were driven from their universities. Lesbians were told they were transphobic for not wanting to sleep with people with penises. And the BBC, rather than standing firm as the world went mad, went along with it.

By 2023, support for changing sex on birth certificates had collapsed to just 24%; half the country was now opposed. Nearly half of Britons said attempts to ensure equal opportunities for trans people had gone too far. After the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025, almost six in 10 agreed that a transgender woman was not legally a woman.

The transactivists, with their refusal to engage and their taste for intimidation, have achieved the precise opposite of what they said they set out to do. They have reversed years of goodwill and left transgender people more exposed than they were before any of this started. And the institutions that should have held the line instead capitulated. Let’s hope Matt Brittin, when he starts his new job next week, will take the opportunity to remind those who remain at the hollowed-out BBC, ravaged by cuts and undermined by political enemies, that its demise will be assured unless advocacy journalism for any cause, whenever it rears its head, is stamped out and — well — canceled. 

***

A BBC spokesperson said in response to this article: “BBC News has taken a number of actions relating to our reporting of sex and gender including updating the news style guide and sharing new guidance, making our Social Affairs Editor responsible for this coverage, and where there have been concerns about particular stories, we have addressed them. We continually review our coverage to reflect developments such as the Supreme Court Ruling 

“We recognize the strong feelings and concern felt by many people about the reporting of sex and gender. Our intention is to give clear, accurate and duly impartial information to audiences and to reflect the different viewpoints on the issue.” 

Former vassal states of Stonewall, once enmeshed in one or other of its EDI schemes, also fell strangely mute. There was nothing from the Labour Party, previously so assiduous in its solemn commemorations; nothing apparently on the BBC, whose emotive headlines on the tragic shortness of trans lives were once a mainstay of late November. And what about that time four years ago when the Bank of England building in Threadneedle Street was lit up in the colours of the trans flag? Or the time in 2022 when the Welsh Parliament’s social media manager seemed to confuse the day with Remembrance Sunday, writing a touching eulogy to “the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen”? All gone now. Perhaps it was just a dream.

But no. For nearly a decade, as FOIs have since made clear, Stonewall encouraged hundreds of private and public sector organisations to mark Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR), on pain of losing points in its annual workplace rankings. The most craven performances of fealty came from universities, where vigils would be held on campuses across the country. At the trend’s zenith, vice-chancellors would give awkward introductions, circles would be formed, and candles would be lit. Slowly, haltingly, movingly, some anointed young spokesperson would start stumbling over the pronunciation of the names of hundreds of Brazilian and Mexican people working in the sex trade.

For somewhat inconveniently, every year records would reveal that around three quarters of reported murders came from gun-loving Latin America and the Caribbean — where general murder rates were already horribly high — and around half of victims would be in prostitution, probably the most dangerous occupation in the world anyway. Even so, committed celebrants somehow knew that the root cause of every single death was that ubiquitous phenomenon, “transphobia”, while all other circumstances were just downstream effect.

Even today, despite consistently and thankfully tiny murder rates for trans-identified people in the UK and Europe, the habit of such ceremonies occasionally lingers. Wednesday’s ceremony at University of Central Lancashire involved the trans flag being “lowered to half mast”. A spectacularly mawkish vigil in Reading, streamed live to YouTube, included poetry, sermons, and secular hymns sung by a choir. Still, even in strongholds of the declining empire, it seemed as if hearts are not entirely in it. Cambridge University’s LGBT+ society reminded its members this week that, though it would be offering a service, “You are not any less valid if you don’t come, TDoR is a lot of feelings and we each grieve in different ways”.

Perhaps, now that that this very weird day of observance is apparently on the way out, we have a bit of room to stand back and ask ourselves what exactly was going on there. In an age when Millennial and Gen Z participation in formal religious services is at an all-time low, and mainstream public commemorations such as Remembrance Sunday show similar patterns of decline, how did such a patently ridiculous event ever get embedded in the national calendar?

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In fact, these points are probably linked. Fervent LGBT+ activism does appear to perform a quasi-religious function in a mostly secular world — with its sacred texts and chants, commitment to soul-body dualism, and obsession with resurrection into a new life. But perhaps just as important as the absence of religious doctrine is the attendant diminishing of rituals in modern life — that is, a structured, repeatable ceremonial act with a familiar format, shaped by tradition. The ceremonial aspect to TDoR, repeated annually, seems for a while to have helped fill that gap.

Consider the wedding service: no longer a predictable rite, it has been hacked into a million pieces by high status individualists in search of an event that truly “represents” their coupledom. The actress Rebecca Hall, told The Observer last weekend that her wedding was a deliberately improvised affair, during which one friend “leapt out of the shrubbery dressed as a werewolf” to sing a song by The Smiths, and another “called everybody out to the pond as a blood moon was rising and gave them a candle to hold”. Hall summed up: “It was about saying, ‘This is our world, these are our people and we will define ourselves exactly how we want to’.”

Equally, there are hundreds of resources on the internet about how to write the perfect personalised ceremony. One “professional vow writer” briskly advises Vogue readers to “Address your partner and briefly recap your love story, communicate traits that you admire about your partner, describe what you appreciate about your relationship, list three to six specific promises, and close with how you envision your future together.” When a marriage ceremony stands in need of an accompanying PowerPoint, you start to wonder what was so very wrong with the Book of Common Prayer.

Since organised religion has been the main means of inserting ritual into our lives for centuries, it is not surprising that both are simultaneously in retreat. Christenings, already unfashionable, were given a further blow by church closures during lockdown and have yet to recover. At the other end of the life cycle we now have individualised funerals, where attendees must do things like wear bright colours and try hard not to sob through Another One Bites the Dust by Queen. And in between the major life events, we have largely lost the old Christian rituals: Sunday as a day of rest; Lent as a time of fasting and reflecting; Advent as a time of looking forward. Easter is now mostly for children, and every December there is a spate of media extolling the virtues of spending Christmas alone or otherwise “doing it your way”.

In his superlative book The Disappearance of Rituals, philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes the stabilising role that rituals used to play in human societies, independently of their religious value. They would give the passing of time a structure, acting as comforting rejoinder to Heraclitus’s terrifying observation that no one ever steps in the same river twice. Repetition and the recognition of familiar words and objects, met again and again as a particular ceremony unfolds and repeats, would offer shelter from the exhausting deluge of disconnected experiences and random bits of information. Life would be given a meaningful shape. And in reciting words and performing actions you did not personally invent, but only inherited, you could get a rest from the narcissistic demands of self-creation, as well as experiencing a sustaining sense of connection to those who had practiced the very same rituals before you.

Neoliberalism’s emphasis on the ceaseless consumption of new and transient things — purchases, experiences, bits of information, identities, selves — discourages such unflashy memorialising. Viewed in this context, it doesn’t seem so very farfetched to think that, in the annual histrionic performances of TDoR, and perhaps also in things like annual Pride parades — we can detect a secret hankering for older, steadier rhythms of life. Further evidence for the prosecution includes many sentimental references in LGBTQ+ circles to “trancestors” and  “trans elders”, a practice just as ludicrously hyperbolic as TDoR  and yet perhaps also betraying a longing in spiritually deracinated people for a genuine connection with the past.

And then, of course, there are all the tattoos: not exclusive to the LGBT community by any means, but especially beloved of them. As Han observes, in the context of a ritualised society, tattoos used to symbolise “the alliance between individual and community”. Nowadays, he says, “the neoliberal hell of the same is populated with tattooed clones”. Still, the choice of such an ancient — not to mention, stubbornly permanent — medium for queer (supposed) self-expression seems significant.

The demise of the transactivist empire is going to leave many vulnerable victims bereft — irrevocably marked, both physically and psychologically. Alongside appropriate forms of punishment for the cynical opportunists who literally and figuratively took their cut, it would be good if we noticed the surging emptiness in our culture that made nonsensical dogma look so appealing in the first place. For a few years in the early 21st century, lighting a candle and solemnly incanting a mysterious holy name in the dark clearly felt good to a surprising number of atheist-identified people. The next time a quasi-sacred moral fad grips us collectively, we should hang on tight to the remembrance of things past.

On October 7, 2023, savages murdered, raped, and kidnapped 1,200 Israeli citizens. American Jews reacted by voting for the Democrats.

This November, blacks, Hispanics, gay and straight Americans decided they’d had enough of Government corruption, incompetence, malversation, contempt, and crime and voted for a return to common sense and the protections of the Constitution. They forsook identity politics, save to identify themselves as Americans. Absent from the roll call of groups rebranding themselves as citizens were the Jews.

The Obama-Biden-Harris regime coddled Iran, the sponsor of World Terrorism; they admonished Netanyahu to exorcise “restraint”, not to go into Gaza, nor to bomb Iran. Not only did Harris “cut” him in his visit to Congress, she arguably cost herself the election, sucking up to supposed Muslim voters by bypassing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. She chose instead a grotesque nonentity, who’d abandoned Minneapolis to rioters.

Christian and Muslim citizens, across the country, rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and for peace.

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By David Mamet

They saved the Jewish State.

A Democrat victory would have signalled Israeli isolation. Iran would have escalated, compelled Israel to strike, and brought about a World War. They had made it plain that the United States looked with disfavour on the right of the Jewish State to survive.

To my fellow American Jews: what in the world do you think you were looking at during the last four years? Jewish students were harassed and terrified on campuses receiving Government funds, antisemitic brutality was not given the status of “Hate Crimes”, our President and Vice President shunned their constitutionally mandated duties to greet the Prime Minister of not only a foreign power, but of our supposed ally. Congressionally voted funds for Israel defence were withheld by executive fiat. Our government issued continual calls for Israeli “restraint”, while withholding similar requests from Iran and her proxies.

And my fellow Jews voted for these people.

It is a mistake to suggest that he voted against his own best interests. But what is the American Jew’s benefit in voting Democratic?

The Democrats were the party of immigrants: my grandparents and parents, the first American Generation. Republicans, in my youth, were (fairly reliably) identified as Country Club Wasps — the party of Big Business, while the Dems were for the worker, the unions, and so on. Those were the party’s log-lines.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later “Affirmative Action”, and its bastard child, DEI.

But the new arrivals voted Democrat and have continued doing so until today. Are they just “passing”?

Other minority groups have not only abandoned the Big Stick of the Left, but identity politics toute entière. They voted as citizens. They stood up, not to promote “their party”, but to protect their home. Our country.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents — but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

It is said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago, and American Jews criticised the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.

For 2,000 years, we Jews didn’t have a country. We survived by accepting the various strictures of those governments which grudgingly allowed us (intermittently) to live; and when the strictures abated (to whatever extent) we called it a blessing. And voted, for example, for Franklin Roosevelt “A friend of the Working Man”, whose administration sent thousands of potential immigrant Jews back to their deaths in the ovens.

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A year of hatred

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We grew up with the slander of “Jewish Guilt” — that the Jews were, somehow, children of Original Sin, which could only be expunged by good works, and a dedication to whatever identified itself as social justice.

But Jewish anxiety is not caused by insufficient compassion, it is caused by insufficient Judaism. We cannot escape “the hot thumbprint of God” on our hearts. If we could, we would have assimilated millennia ago.

“I am Jewish but not That Jewish,” or “but I’m not Observant,” or, “but I despise this man Netanyahu,” and so on, are the utterances of fugitives, willing to vote for their own annihilation, rather than face their Jewishness.

But in what does this Jewishness consist? Each person must, of course, answer it for him or herself. The Torah is a traditional guide; its advice, strictures and contradictions and their consideration, are certainly more productive and more rational than the absurd blather of legacy media.

The world is corrupt, and has always been so, as human nature is corrupt. The Bible teaches that is because we’ve fallen away from God; the media, because of Donald Trump and Republican deplorables.

And, yet, the Democratic Party and their chaos has been defeated by our fellow citizens.

The Gay Rights Movement’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” is wisdom. Antisemitism is not the Jews’ problem, but that of our opponents.

To my fellows, you can be proud you are an American. Do so, and you will, subsequently, be proud you’re a Jew.

In pursuing this outcome, Stonewall has resurrected a set of complaints about the equality watchdog that it first co-authored with Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project and sent to GANHRI last year. In a lawyer’s letter also made public at the time, the two organisations claimed that there had been various murky political appointments of EHRC Commissioners “broadly supportive” of government, which had then produced a lack of “pluralism” in the organisation. As a result of these and other perceived infractions, it was claimed that the EHRC now insufficiently complied with the Paris Principles, first formulated in 1993 and described by GANHRI as the “minimum standards” a national human rights organisation must meet “in order to be considered credible and to operate effectively”.

This first attempt at forcing a special review failed; but this week it emerged that, in May, along with 29 other transactivist organisations, Stonewall once again complained to GANHRI and this time succeeded. The new ingredient appeared to be an explicit allegation that the EHRC’s recent attempts to make some women-only spaces genuinely single-sex — disingenuously described by Stonewall as seeking “to enable greater exclusion of trans women” — are “actively harming trans people”. Like thousands of organisations and individuals before them, when faced with the magic words “exclusion” and “trans women” in some combination, GANHRI appears to have succumbed immediately, without much reflection on why physical exclusion of males from a place where women undress, sleep, or play sport might be perfectly justified.

Stonewall bosses are probably now wondering why they didn’t cut to the chase sooner. Certainly, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that their pique at the EHRC’s rejection of the transactivist position on single-sex spaces was the reason behind such superficially high-minded interventions all along. If they really cared about the upholding of the Paris Principles and the knock-on effects for the rights of LGBT people, one assumes they might also have had something critical to say about the fact that GANHRI has awarded coveted A-list status to such homosexual havens as Qatar (where gay sex is illegal, and potentially a capital offence); Indonesia (where gay sex is illegal under Sharia law in one province, and frowned upon everywhere else); and Egypt (where gay sex is de facto criminalised under morality laws).

Instead, GANHRI is now operating psychically for Stonewall as the latest saintly supranational authority figure to be appealed to without question; no doubt pictured by its employees as standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside them in their ongoing battle with whichever nasty bigoted haters are currently standing in the organisation’s way. And this is quite amusing — because historically, Stonewall used to think of both the Conservative government and the EHRC as playing precisely that authority figure role for them at a national level. In fact, when it comes to cheek-by-jowl relationships between human rights organisations and UK government, Stonewall wrote the playbook.

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This, after all, is the organisation that became accustomed to seeing Home Secretaries speak at its award ceremonies; ministers and committee chairs mindlessly parroting its campaign objectives; and government departments vying for top spot in its Workplace awards scheme. In that light, then, we should read Stonewall’s complaint to GANHRI not so much as motivated by a genuine concern for liberal neutrality in human rights organisations, but more like the vengeful retribution of a jilted lover, trying to cause problems for an ex’s new relationship by complaining vociferously to the ex’s mum.

This charity didn’t seem to care about the close relationship between the UK government and the EHRC as long as it was able to give orders to both. For a good while, it seems that it had the run of the EHRC in particular. The chair of that organisation from 2016-2020 was David Isaac, a former chair of Stonewall appointed by Conservative minister Nicky Morgan. This was an appointment criticised at the time for the fact that Isaac’s law firm Pinsent Masons was the recipient of millions of pounds worth of contracts from the government, thereby potentially reducing the EHRC’s ability to hold them to account. It is also clear from FOI requests that the relationship between Stonewall and the EHRC both during and after Isaac’s tenure was extremely chummy, with Stonewall assuming they could review EHRC documents before publication and instructing its office-holders to officially adopt their policy on self-ID. The EHRC was also a Stonewall Diversity Champion until 2021, which in practice means that it would have received every piece of campaign propaganda going, with the usual expectation that it would all be effortlessly ingested and then regurgitated.

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In sum: for Stonewall to have the effrontery to complain to GANHRI about a “lack of political independence” demonstrates as much brass neck as you would expect from the very same organisation that, in 2022, petulantly withdrew at the last minute from partnering the Government in a major international conference on global LGBT human rights — thereby ensuring that the conference, and any resultant progress, could not happen at all — simply because the Government would not endorse their preferred stance on criminalising talking therapy for gender-confused teens. As is so often the case, Stonewall officials have apparently redefined a familiar phrase to mean its exact opposite. In future, when they complain about a lack of political independence, the reader should probably understand that the institution in question has finally found the balls to become politically independent from them.

And it also seems that Stonewall bosses have an idiosyncratic understanding of certain other keywords from GANHRI’s Paris Principles. At one point, the Principles state that a national human rights body should demonstrate “pluralism” in the sense of ensuring an adequate reflection of the “social forces (of civilian society) involved in the promotion and protection of human rights”. Indeed, this seems an eminently reasonable requirement. Yet Stonewall complains in its letter to GANHRI that there is a lack of pluralism at the EHRC, apparently on the grounds that some EHRC Commissioners “adhere to regressive views… out of step with the vast majority of equality and human rights bodies”. Quite obviously, these two things are not equivalent.

Leaving aside the tendentious use of “regressive”, spouting the latest fashionable social justice-speak in lockstep with every other mainstream equality organisation is clearly not the same as reflecting a healthy diversity of thought about the adjudication and balancing of human rights. In their original complaint, Stonewall and the Good Law Project presented examples of what they apparently thought were manifestly heinous opinions expressed by recently appointed EHRC office-holders: a reference to the Chair Baroness Falkner’s alleged “gender-critical” views; David Goodhart’s statement that complaints about systemic racism are “statistically naïve” and his belief that “white self-interest is not the same thing as racism”; and Jessica Butcher’s claim that “feminism, like other forms of identity politics, has become obsessed with female victimhood”. Such thoughts were presented by the complainants as if the mere statement of such heresies demonstrated the thesis that the EHRC was insufficiently pluralist — but of course they do precisely the opposite.

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What Stonewall and other scions of the modern charity-industrial complex seem to have lost sight of is the basic philosophical point that human rights and their relations to other morality claims are not identified and listed like cells under a microscope, but are essentially contested. Even if you believe there are such things as natural rights, you still have to think hard about what exactly those are, and how best to protect them in practice. Meanwhile, if you think of rights as in any way socially constructed — and presumably they must be, since LGBT groups keep discovering new ones every five minutes — then, given their political currency, it follows that you can’t leave special interest groups to dominate conversations about them. Viewed in this light, the views of Falkner, Goodhart, Butcher and others about the meaning and consequences of rights claims are not extraneous to pluralist discourse about rights but are an essential part of it.

Of course, it is not in the interests of those at Stonewall to acknowledge such complexity. Admitting they might not have the last word on how to assess rights claims on behalf of trans people, wherever these compete with claims from other groups, would go against their simple but highly effective business model to date (roughly: transwomen 10; actual women 0). What we really need, then, is a national equalities watchdog, pluralistic enough in composition that it can effectively do this for them. And thank goodness, it looks like we finally might have one.

Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments, a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes” to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings.

On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable — and not just for non-native speakers. The Census asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” Even assuming you successfully parsed its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain.

Is a “gender” a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity? According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it could be any of these. So, whether or not you “identify with” a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a “gender you identify with”) will partly depend on what you think “gender” is. It also partly depends upon what you think “to identify with” means, since this is hardly an everyday term. And then there’s the awkward fact that, if you are an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to have a “sex registered at birth” at all.

One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don’t invite false positives. By the ONS’s own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of “community testing at LGBT History Month events”, which is a bit like gauging atheists’ understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the Vatican. Why didn’t those in charge anticipate that a question couched in obscure genderese might stump noninitiates, even if it would please their Stonewall overlords?

The most obvious hypothesis would be that the ONS was cajoled, guilt-tripped, befuddled and emotionally blackmailed into linguistic compliance, like many a fellow national institution before it. Maybe so, but a wider explanation is also available: that those who designed the question didn’t even realise it was couched in obscure genderese. They took their own standards of linguistic apprehension to be universal and binding.

This is a tendency that extends well beyond transactivism. Word choices can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is to convey the status of the speaker or author. Now that many of us spend our days sitting around scrolling emails and timelines, reading snippets and writing things with our thumbs, word choices are one of the main opportunities to socially signal. Slang, jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords are all ways to imply that you’re in a particular crowd.

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Belonging also requires knowing what words not to use. As social animals, we can’t help but practise what linguistics expert Deborah Cameron calls “verbal hygiene”: trying to purify language of socially problematic word choices. If you’re a well-off Tory, you’ll want to avoid terms such as “toilet”, “lounge” and “settee”. If you’re a well-off Lefty, you’ll want to avoid phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen”, “cancel culture” and “lab leak”. The Right dislikes grammatical solecisms, especially when committed by Angela Rayner; the Left is much more concerned with moral solecisms. Either way, though, it’s at least partly a way of indicating who’s in and who’s out.

Many of us practise verbal hygiene simply in order to have an easier life. Some enjoy throwing the rulebook at others as a means of social control. Still more hubristic individuals — usually with PhDs — try to rewrite the rules altogether, inventing new lexical standards out of the blue and then associating any deviance from them with a suspect character. In certain circles, serious disagreement about meaning is cast as linguistic violence, and semantic power grabs are attributed to everyone but oneself. They want to “create divides” ,“police” categories and “colonise” minds and vocabularies. We are simply building a better world from our book-lined offices, one enforced redefinition at a time.

Whatever their provenance, knowing the speech codes for your own social group is consistent with relaxing them for others. It is possible and indeed desirable to understand that not every deviation from a group norm is a deliberate rule break; that sometimes people just aren’t familiar with the rules in the first place. Children and pensioners should get leeway for most forms of expression; either it’s too early for them or too late. Sometimes a white person will say “some of my best friends are black” simply because some of her best friends are black. She isn’t automatically to know that some count it as a racist dog whistle. And sometimes a man will enthuse innocently about feminist causes on behalf of his “wife and daughters” without realising his supposedly terrible anti-feminist error. He just means it.

Familiarity with your own group’s linguistic rules is also consistent with recognising that observance is a poor general guide to much else about a person. Manipulative types will mould their language in ways that invite confidence and disguise true motives. History is littered with gullible upper-class people, lured into handing over their assets to con artists who can accurately state the difference between “less” and “fewer”. The gunman who killed five people in Louisville last week was reported as having listed his pronouns on LinkedIn.

Trouble also arises when you’re an unreflective type who only ever encounters people in your own tribe, and who takes your intuitions about verbal hygiene to determine everyone else’s impurity. In institutions dominated by those of a certain age, income bracket, political sensibility or educational background, this is a real risk. Exacerbating this risk is the widespread reduction in meeting others face-to-face at work and in socialising outside of the office, both of which remove valuable opportunities to get to know human nature in the wild. If life is a series of highly straitened, professionalised encounters with people like yourself — if, say, you never meet a working-class person who you aren’t paying for something — it’s no wonder that failures of imagination occur about what others might be saying or hearing, by way of the very same words.

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At worst, this myopia can lead to serious miscarriages of justice, especially when the semantically short-sighted have influence on the judicial system. This week also brought news of Christopher Mitchell, a welder from Caister-on-Sea convicted of aggravated “hate crimes” for making statements critical of a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a local library. For writing in a Facebook post that the drag queen in question was “grooming children” and that the parents of attendees “clearly have serious issues and should have their devices checked”, Mitchell received a 12-month community order including 20 rehabilitation days, 150 hours’ unpaid work, and a fine of £1,500. To anyone not already mired in rainbow-sanctioned speech codes — according to which the word “grooming” must never be applied to brave and stunning LGBT+ folk — this looks like a serious overreaction to the exercise of free speech.

But if fear of harming others doesn’t lead to more circumspection in interpreting others by one’s own lights, then perhaps the fear of harming personal reputations will. Mindlessly following unacknowledged tribal speech codes can result in extremely lazy thinking. Those responsible for the Census debacle at the ONS now look ridiculous; as does the BBC reporter who interviewed Elon Musk on Wednesday, so sure of received wisdom that Twitter is awash with hate speech that he hadn’t bothered to memorise any examples before confronting Musk about it. In a similar vein, the FBI were also made to look daft this week, when FOIs revealed they rather histrionically had classified common internet slang such as “redpilled” or “based” as indicative of “violent extremism” linked to the incel movement.

But when it comes to second-hand embarrassment, perhaps nothing tops Stonewall CEO and self-described “data geek” Nancy Kelley, cheerfully tweeting on Census publication day about how happy she was that her manor in Newham was so full of trans people. As Kelley’s fellow Newhamites might put it, it’s amazing what confirmation bias can make you Adam and Eve.

This summer, I had been asked to speak about male violence towards women at a library in Nottingham, in a working-class area, similar to where I had grown up. The talk sold out with mainly young, working-class women planning to attend. But while I was on the train up to the event, I was told it had been cancelled. In fact, it was made clear that I and the organisers would be forcibly removed if we entered the library.

I don’t need a room to make my point, and so in the spirit of feminist resistance, I made it in the library’s car park. Many brave women were there, as well as the predictable group of trans activists. They rocked up, making a show of themselves by playing loud music, shouting slogans and, during my talk, one man pushed right up close to me — close enough to touch — in an attempt to distract me. It didn’t work.

The same day, NCC released a statement: “Nottingham is an inclusive city and as a council we will support our LGBT community and have committed to supporting trans rights as human rights through Stonewall. We did not want the use of one of our library buildings for this event, taking place during Pride month, to be seen as implicit support for the views held by the speaker which fly in the face of our position on transgender rights.”

I have been an out and proud lesbian since the age of 15, and have campaigned against anti-gay bigotry for decades. So the statement was incredibly insulting, if not entirely surprising. In recent years, the “holy month of Pride” seems to be focused only on trans issues, with lesbians so far down the pecking order we feel distinctly unwelcome.

I think something is starting to shift though. As I was speaking to this angry and vibrant crowd of women, messages of support began to flood in, including offers from lawyers to represent me if I wanted to sue. Since I am now so thoroughly sick of being called a fascist and nazi, i decided to go for it.

A few days after the carpark debacle, an email was forwarded to me from Cllr Rosemary Healy in response to a complaint about the cancellation:

“We cannot grant a platform to a public figure who has repeatedly expressed transphobic views. Not only are Ms Bindel’s past statements incredibly hateful to the trans community; she has also demonstrated homophobic and biphobic views in the past that we take issue with.”

Her clarification was helpful. In cancelling me in the way and for the reasons that they did, NCC was in breach of the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Equality Act 2010. It was also in breach of the substantive duties under the Equality Act applying to the Council in its exercise of public functions and as a service provider, for which the Council is susceptible to judicial review.

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My very presence at the library, regardless of the subject of my talk, was deemed dangerous and traumatising. As such, my legal team cited the ruling in Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe, the case in which Maya Forstater successfully sued her employers for pushing her out of her consultancy role because of allegations of transphobia by colleagues.

Initially, NCC refused to admit that I was covered by the same protection as Forstater: “The Tribunal held that Ms Forstater’s views were consistent with the law [but] the same cannot be said of the views as to trans people expressed by the Claimant. There is no evidence that the Claimant’s views are widely-shared, and certainly not among respected academics. Indeed, the Claimant’s views are often deprecated.”

Their stupidity beggars belief. NCC’s evidence of such “deprecation” was a 12-year-old article by a trans activist who, unsurprisingly, disagrees with me about matters of sex and gender.

As well as issuing an apology, NCC has since accepted that it acted unlawfully in cancelling the event. As part of the claim, we also requested that NCC carries out a review of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy, policies and procedures, with assistance from an external body. This is because it was clear that the demands and rights of trans issues trumped those of any other group that faces discrimination. It is also apparent that NCC felt it had the right to review and cancel bookings on the basis of a speaker’s reputation.

This clearly unsettled the trans activists. They began to deny that we had won at all, pulling apart the phrase “procedurally unlawful”, suggesting that the phrase means something akin to “unlawful lite”. In this context, there is no real difference between an action being procedurally unlawful and substantively unlawful. The decision to ban me resulted in NCC taking actions which it should not have taken.

The line, “NCC has agreed that, if Nottingham Women for Change seeks to seek [SIC] to make a booking at any NCC venue by way of a fully completed booking form, the Council will make a fresh decision in response to such request upon a lawful basis,” has also been wilfully misinterpreted, with trans activists claiming that it is phrased in a way that would allow NCC to find a legal way to stop me from speaking at a subsequent event.

This is such an important win because any future refusal will be open to legal challenge. And other local authorities will have to think twice before deciding to de-platform or ban a speaker because they have decided their legal and reasonable views are offensive.

For years, trans activists have been trying to intimidate feminists and other refuseniks of trans ideology but we have fought back hard. And various organisations that have been brainwashed by Stonewall, including Garden Court Chambers, successfully sued by the black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey, have been given a legal kicking of late.

Women’s hard-won rights are not up for grabs. And I think the message might be finally getting through. So let this be a lesson to all councils. You need to follow equality law as it is, not the law as Stonewall wants it to be. Or you will be sued. And you may well lose.

These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.

But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:

“I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children… Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.”

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The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.

That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.

While many drag queens are happy to tone it down, others have made little effort to modify their raunchy style for children. It may be that only a handful of performers fall into this category, but all it takes is a few viral videos for parents’ worst fears to be confirmed. Many such clips have appeared on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account. The most recent shows a drag queen teaching a small child to dance for tips in Palm Springs, California. A previous video showed a drag show at a club in Dallas attended by children in which the words “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself!” appeared in large neon lettering on the upstage wall.

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It’s not just American parents who are worried: the trend of sexualised children’s shows spread into Britain well before Drag Queen Story Hour. Last year, Redbridge Council commissioned an event at a local library which featured an actor dressed as a bare-bottomed monkey with a large fake penis attached to his crotch. In April, The Family Sex Show — devised by Bristol-based theatre company ThisEgg — was cancelled after parents discovered that it featured full-frontal nudity and content about masturbation, despite being aimed at children as young as five.

Do these artists have no comprehension of the innocence of childhood? If so, they’re not alone. Sex education theorists seeking to transform the curriculum argue that children ought to be taught about sexuality as early as possible. But it can hardly be considered prudish to object to five-year-olds being urged to “try sexual practices” with their “sexual parts”, as the website of The Family Sex Show suggests.

All this explains why drag performers are struggling to convince parents their intentions are benign. Inevitably, many critics have raised safeguarding concerns. Protesters disrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a library in Reading last week, chanting “paedophile” and accusing the performer of “child grooming”. Such accusations are, of course, unfounded and unhelpful. Yet they also speak to the emotive nature of this debate, in which some reckless artists refuse to observe boundaries around children.

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In response, library staff have been trained to refer to drag queens as “pantomime dames”, as though they were in any way synonymous. This is misleading, and possibly insulting to the acts, as it strips away the political history of the genre and enervates its impact. There is more to drag than cross-dressing; it is a satirical commentary on gender roles and heterosexual norms, a means to stretch the ambit of decorum. If drag is not transgressive, it ceases to be drag. So why would drag queens sanitise their work?

It is difficult to escape the feeling that all of this is a form of goading, a way to provoke those who are perceived as “conservative” and “reactionary” and to increase the visibility and normalisation of the LGBTQ+ movement. Stonewall recently tweeted a claim that “research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity”. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Drag Queen Story Hour is being interpreted as an extension of Stonewall propaganda.

It’s not just the overt sexuality of some children’s drag shows that is alarming. Drag has long been seen as an excuse for men to mock and fetishise what it means to be female — and has even been compared to black-and-white minstrel shows. Feminists can’t be happy that children are watching men aping extreme stereotypes of womanhood. Surely, it would be prudent for local councils to stay out of this fraught debate?

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The organisers of the current UK library tour of Drag Queen Story Hour say they want to “show the world that being different is not a bad thing, and by providing imaginative role models for children to look up to, we can change the world book by book!” While it is not uncommon for children’s stories to convey a moral message, it does seem strange that so many drag queens are keen to undertake a pedagogic role that, in contrast to their typically bacchanalian late-night productions, must seem somewhat insipid.

Drag delights in the smashing of taboos. There are many genres and art forms that can be sanitised for a younger audience, but drag has at its heart a lascivious energy, a fuck-you attitude to societal norms. If you strip away all that to make it age-appropriate, what is left? Just a man in a dress. And Widow Twankey already has that covered.

But the barrister and lesbian Allison Bailey may have put a stop to this. Yesterday’s ruling in her case Bailey v Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers found that she had been victimised and discriminated against by her employer for expressing gender critical beliefs. Such was the oppressiveness of Garden Court’s actions against her, she was awarded aggravated damages: £22,000. These are only granted where a discriminator’s actions are particularly unnecessary, high-handed or oppressive.

Bailey also sued Stonewall for inducing, instructing or causing some of GCC’s actions — she had accused the charity of “trans-extremism” — but she didn’t win that aspect of the case. As a result, Stonewall and its supporters, including Owen Jones and Pink News, are celebrating. In their blinkered view, she has lost. However, this is to disregard the consequences of interrogating the extreme ideology and methods perpetuated by Stonewall. Bailey’s tribunal has tracked the ideological trajectory of what was once the foremost activist for gay rights, and put the absurdity of its activism under the spotlight.

Back in 2018, Bailey complained to her chambers when they signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme (DCP), which gives training and guidance on how to be “inclusive employers”. At the height of its power, more than 950 organisations were signed up to what Bailey and many others have called the “protection racket“. But she, along with many other lesbians and gay men, objected to the charity’s stance on trans issues, which included its uncritical promotion of self-ID. Such was Bailey’s disenchantment, she helped set up the LGB alliance which advocated for the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. This, in turn, was labelled a “hate group” by trans activists.

There can be no doubt that Stonewall, in its aggressive and uncompromising support for extreme transgender ideology and a refusal to discuss or debate alternative viewpoints, helped fuelled the fire already raging against Bailey for her gender critical views and support for the LGB Alliance. In 2019, Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall’s Head of Trans Inclusion, emailed the heads of GCC accusing Bailey of “making and retweeting multiple transphobic statements online”. Examples included “liking and writing posts referring to trans women as men”, and “writing tweets calling for trans people to lose their current legal rights”. The latter was because Bailey was protesting the fact that male-bodied sex offenders were being placed in women’s prisons.

According to Medcalf, “her actions… threatened the positive relationship that Stonewall and GCC have built with the trans community”. He accused Bailey of making trans people feel “unsafe” if they were to even catch a glimpse of her while visiting GCC. Medcalf stated: “For Garden Court Chambers to continue associating with a barrister who is actively campaigning for a reduction in trans rights and equality, while also specifically targeting members of our staff with transphobic views on a public platform, puts us in a difficult position with yourselves: the safety of our staff and community will always be Stonewall’s first priority. I trust that you will do what is right and stand in solidarity with trans people.”

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According to Bailey, the charity appeared to be threatening to distance itself from GCC if GCC did not make the decision to cut ties with her. During the six-week hearing, at which 30 witnesses in total were cross examined, Bailey claimed that some GCC barristers were invested in trans ideology, and that if the relationship with Stonewall were to become fractious it would be difficult for chambers to take on potentially lucrative trans rights cases.

As a result of Stonewall’s complaints, Bailey was asked by heads of chambers to remove the reference to chambers on her Twitter bio, which she did. However, without her knowledge, GCC then tweeted that the criminal barrister was under investigation by her chambers, which implied she had done something wrong.

An investigation into the complaints about Bailey, including those by Stonewall, was ordered by GCC management and carried out by Maya Sikand QC. Seeking advice from Cathryn McGahey QC, Vice Chair of the Bar Council’s ethics committee, she was informed that two of Bailey’s tweets were “probably over the borderline of acceptable conduct”.

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One concerned a trans activist named Morgan Page, who had recently been hired by Stonewall. In 2012, Page ran a workshop entitled “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”. The “cotton” is a reference to women’s underwear, and a number of lesbians had taken serious offence at the notion that male bodied transwomen had attended workshops in order to overcome difficulties in accessing sex with lesbians.

Bailey, on discovering that Page was working with Stonewall, tweeted that Page is “a male-bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can ‘coerce’ young lesbians into having sex with them”. At the tribunal, Stonewall attempted to deny that Page’s actions had anything to do with coercing lesbians into sex; in evidence, though, Bailey was convincing in her arguments that it was precisely that. Stonewall’s Chief Executive, Nancy Kelley, was revealed, in a leaked email to the BBC, to have described those women who resisted cotton-ceiling indoctrination as “sexual racists” because expressing preference in sexual partners was “discriminatory”.

In giving evidence in the tribunal, McGahey defended the concept of overcoming the “cotton ceiling” and compared it with initiatives to promote racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa. McGahey, at the conclusion of the 2019 investigation, decided that Bailey’s use of the word “coerce” was unfounded and directed that Bailey should delete her tweet. Bailey refused.

Complaints about two separate tweets were upheld — the cotton ceiling tweet, and also one in which Bailey wrote, following a report in The Sunday Times about the investigation she was subject to, “I and many other women are grateful to The Times for fairly and accurately reporting on the appalling levels of intimidation, fear and coercion that are driving the Stonewall UK trans self ID agenda.”

Both tweets were castigated even though they were true.

Although GCC claimed that the language used by Bailey went beyond the belief that sex rather than gender is fundamentally important, the tribunal found that all of Bailey’s pleaded beliefs, not just the belief that “woman is sex not gender”, are protected (this protection was established by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the case brought by Maya Forstater).

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That’s why it was found that GCC discriminated against Bailey when it published its statement on Twitter that she was under investigation. It was also found that in upholding Stonewall’s complaint against her, GCC victimised Bailey. Vitally, the tribunal held that Bailey’s protected gender critical beliefs also include the belief that “Gender identity theory as proselytised by Stonewall is severely detrimental to women and to lesbians” and is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

The fact that a chamber full of experts in human rights law did not adhere to the Equality Law 2010 is staggering; it’s a stark example of how workplaces and other institutions can be influenced by the definition of “transphobia” exhorted by Stonewall.

It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes. This is one reason why it is difficult to take Stonewall seriously when it claims: “The case heard by the Employment Tribunal did not accurately reflect our intentions and our influence on organisations.”

Bailey spent all of her adult life fighting sexism and homophobia and was horrified when she first pushed back against the Stonewall dictats to find that women questioning the new orthodoxy were being labelled Terfs, bigots and fascists. She, too, found herself on the receiving end of death threats; it cost her enormously to stand up and fight. Regardless, Bailey, with Maya Forstater and other courageous truth tellers, has lifted the lid on institutions and individuals who should have known better.

Upon hearing the Tribunal decision Bailey said: “I did not win everything, but I won the most important thing: I have brought Stonewall’s methods into the public eye, and I have shown them for what they now are.”

Stonewall had become as impenetrable and unaccountable as its namesake. But Bailey made sure it was finally held to account and will no longer be able to act with impunity when it comes to peddling its trans ideology and misinterpretation of the law. Organisations that put “Stonewall Law” before Equality Law will now be aware that they could now be acting unlawfully. In removing Stonewall’s right to silence she exposed them for the immoral parasites they have become.

On related issues, our Penny also seems to be a proud member of Team Female. She told Sky News “It makes no sense for government to be prescribing bathroom policies”. She told Twitter that she supported a “science-based approach” to the issue of transwomen in women’s sport, and claimed “It was me that changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender neutral language … to use female terms”. Infamously, Mordaunt is the MP that once mentioned the word “cock” six times in a parliamentary speech, as a forfeit. Is it possible she now believes a woman doesn’t have one?

Yet when as Minister she introduced the highly divisive Gender Recognition Act consultation about moving to self-ID in July 2018, she told parliament: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. And that is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.” Even as late as March last year, she was still intoning the Stonewall-approved mantra. Much of the rest of her narrative has also been contradicted in the last few days by Tory insiders, from former No 10 director of legislative affairs Nikki da Costa, to MP Sir John Hayes, to Attorney General Suella Braverman. This weekend, The Sunday Times revealed leaked documents which suggested that Mordaunt had indeed expressed a wish to remove the dysphoria diagnosis requirement from the GRA — though apparently she had also wished to introduce a medical requirement that the applicant for a legal sex change be shown to be of “sound mind”.

Even treating the matter ultra charitably, and assuming that, in her own mind, she was never in favour of self-ID strictly conceived as including the total absence of medical requirements, it’s still obvious that Mordaunt’s revised proposal, requiring only proof of sanity for legal sex change, would have caused almost exactly the same worries as self-ID — mere proof of sanity not exactly being a high bar in safeguarding terms (ask the victims of Chris Pincher). Equally, on her Ministerial watch a huge number of institutions, influenced by Stonewall, were at that point happily dismantling genuinely single-sex services for women anyway, regardless of whether the male who wanted access to them had a gender recognition certificate or not. This all happened without any interference from government.

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The real interest here is the fact that Mordaunt has felt forced to commit herself to such an easily disproved and desperate lie. I take this to be a fitting tribute to the effectiveness of the grassroots women’s resistance that first formed around 2015 — the year Stonewall first revealed its ambitions to change both the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act in favour of inner gender identity. The fact that the issue has arisen so prominently during the Conservative party leadership contest is the latest indication of this movement’s success. In its infancy, though it’s not quite true to say that women who raised concerns about self-ID couldn’t get arrested — they certainly could, or at least, could be interviewed under police caution – they were treated as pariahs, cranks, or bigoted obsessives. Not so much now.

Today, Conservatives who champion policies based on gender identity are thin on the ground. The focus of public anger rather tends to be upon the embarrassed mutterings of Labour MPs about cervixes. But it’s worth remembering – and especially when commentators talk these days blandly about “toxicity on both sides” of the gender debate – that it’s the Tories who were entirely responsible for setting up the issue to guarantee hot gibbering fury from women from the start. From 2015 on, a succession of Tory Ministers, given jobs in Equalities because they were female, promptly denied that being female was a limiting condition on being a woman. They then sought to dismantle single-sex provision for women without a backward glance at those screaming in frustration in their wake.

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Culprits include Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, and, of course, Mordaunt herself. The trend was set right from the start, with the outrageously biased Trans Equality Inquiry launched in 2015 under Morgan by the Women and Equalities Select Committee, with Tory Maria Millar as its Chair. This Inquiry might have saved itself a lot of trouble by explicitly outsourcing the whole project to Stonewall and Mermaids. Apparently blind to potential clashes with sex-based rights, and on the basis of evidence from some extremely partisan and inexpert witnesses, it recommended both moving to full self-ID — including lowering the permitted age of a recipient of a legal sex change to 16 — and that those males who possessed them should have full access to women’s services, and be able to work in women’s rape crisis services and domestic violence shelters if so wished. The Committee also recommended that the Equality Act should protect the characteristic of “gender identity” rather than “gender reassignment”. Each of these was among Stonewall’s main campaigning objectives at the time.

Other recommendations of this Inquiry have also aged terribly: for instance, that there are only a very few occasions where transwomen can be justifiably excluded from women’s sport; that dysphoric children’s access to puberty blocking drugs should be speeded up; and that all university staff should receive “gender identity awareness training”. Overall, it’s hard to imagine a more divisive bomb to drop on women, parents of dysphoric children, or academics who wished to criticise the problems involved in the proposals.

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Most of these recommendations were received positively by the Government in their response, and a year later prime minister Theresa May herself was announcing plans to move ahead with self-ID at the PinkNews awards. I remember my incredulity as I watched these events unfold from the sidelines, each one smoothly presented as sensible and compassionate by whatever Tory woman was championing it, and with all dissenting voices positioned as bigoted or stupidly misinformed. The Tories were in power, but the Opposition offered no hope of relief either – for Labour and the Liberal Democrats enthusiastically agreed with the reforms too. The mainstream media, peppered with Stonewall Champions, was largely complicit or indifferent. It felt like a total stitch-up. I felt like I was going mad.

It takes a special kind of indifference to half the population to be like this. On the modern Left, we can explain the enthusiasm for self-ID partly as an attraction to sexily complicated-sounding ideology, and partly as an attraction to reforming existing cultural traditions generally. But neither of these explanations are readily available to Tories. They are supposed to be both commonsensical and conserving of tradition. One would think that at the very least, they would be prepared to conserve the internationally ubiquitous tradition of naming biological sex in humans.

Perhaps then, it’s a different and more hidden ideological commitment of Conservatism, individualism, that explains the attraction to self-ID and associated lunacies: explains how both the party generally and some women MPs in particular could have got so thoroughly behind such a radical and damaging set of reforms without blinking at the consequences. For, bar a bit of urine on National Trust toilet seats, most of the worries about self-ID won’t make any negative difference to them personally. They won’t ever have to share a prison wing with a male rapist. Their private hospital ward won’t be impacted by the presence of a chaotic male in the bay next to them. If their daughter starts saying she is a boy, they can fast-track her into whatever kind of therapy they want, rather than rely on the mad ministrations of a captured NHS gender identity service. If their cancer screening information talks about “cervix-havers”, their first language and education will give them the ready capacity to work out what this means. Their heterosexual dating life won’t be impacted by males pretending to be lesbians either.

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In other words: in order to care about the multiple impacts of saying that men can become women by declaring they are, you have to be able to care about (actual) women who aren’t just you, or your friends. The Left, and particularly the old Left, has the habit of this. Despite a massive propaganda campaign to deny it, it was largely women on the Left who organised the grassroots fightback to self-ID in the UK. Organisations such as A Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women, and We Need to Talk, were started by (then) Labour members and voters, who were practised in thinking in terms of social structures rather than individuals, and knew how to feel solidarity with the most dispossessed. They also knew how to organise in order to reach a wide range of women, including voices that are often ignored.

A related question concerns why most Conservatives MPs are on board with rejecting self-ID, whereas previously they were indifferent. Do they actually care about women now, or are they mostly interested in the issue only because they have accurately identified it as a wedge, damaging to a Left currently tying itself into knots on womanhood to the derision of potential voters? One promising sign would be if they also prioritised women’s welfare and interests in other less febrile areas: the disproportionate impact of the cost-of-living crisis on women, say, or scandalously low rape conviction rates. But here they seem much less convincing. One is left overall with an impression of opportunism and culture warmongering, not principle.

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There are of course exceptions within Tory ranks. In the Lords, Baronesses Emma Nicolson and Anne Jenkin have been committed and courageous in getting the word out to others that gender law reform isn’t the rainbow-bedecked path to universal happiness often presented. More recently, both Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch appear to have grasped this point thoroughly too.

But it should not be presumed that the party is wholly cleansed of the temptation to throw women under a bus. Under Tory Chair Carolyn Nokes, last year the Women and Equalities Committee launched another Inquiry into Reform of the Gender Recognition Act, eventually finding in favour of self-ID yet again. I was called as a witness to this Inquiry, and it was clear to me from observing the process that most of the Committee still had no real understanding of the potential impacts of gender law reform on the interests of women and girls.

Throughout my session, Nokes was dismissive, looked bored, and left early, later predictably painting criticism of the Committee’s position as “bile and abuse”. She is also on record as having no idea why you might want to know someone’s birth sex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the current leadership battle, Nokes has come out strongly for Mordaunt.

I’m sure that both these women think of themselves as enthusiastically pro-women. Arguably, though, a pro-women politician who doesn’t know what a woman is, is worse than none at all.

For Home Counties reactionaries, there have been absences from key votes on gay equality and gay adoption, and scepticism expressed in print about gay marriage: “If gay marriage was ok — and I was uncertain on the issue — then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.” There are also suggestions that some in Johnson’s camp falsely represented a rival for his Henley seat as gay, in order to present Johnson as the more palatable candidate.

For the liberal metrosexual Londoner, meanwhile, there was eventual backing for gay marriage, highly publicised appearances at Stonewall award ceremony presentations, the return of the rainbow flag above the Foreign Office after a ban by Philip Hammond, and the frankly terrifying sight of Johnson in a pink Stetson at a Pride parade. And for the ever-present peanut gallery in Johnson’s head, there have been plenty of gags on the way to some other political target: “tank-topped bum boys” as a means of lampooning Peter Mandelson in 1998, or describing Polly Toynbee in 2007 as “the defender and friend of… every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation”.

For most of his career, these lurches in attitude have occupied roughly distinct phases with occasional overlap, depending on who he was trying hardest to impress at the time. The inconsistency has perhaps been somewhat masked by Johnson’s capacity to induce selective amnesia in those susceptible to him. Recently, though, the wild haymaking on LGBT+ issues has become more obvious and more incoherent — forced into the light because of the surrounding political fuss about gender identity policies and their effects.

For when properly understood — as most MPs still do not — this controversy exposes a tension between, on the one hand, the goals of official organisations claiming to speak for gays and lesbians, and on the other the interests of many gays and lesbians as they themselves conceive of them. And clearly, Johnson — and perhaps the Tory party more generally — does not know which way to jump.

In this antagonistic context, the usual lazy progressive gestures from politicians are not going to get the crowd-pleasing results they once might have done. Put a rainbow flag up on a government building and the grassroots automatically see it as captured by Stonewall — as indeed, it often is. A politician may parrot what looks like a safe and indeed utterly vacuous tautology on Twitter — “trans rights are human rights”, say, or “love means love” — and yet the grassroots still will respond furiously, not because they disagree with the sentiment, but because they know exactly which organisation told the politician to express it and why.

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Into this conflict, Johnson appears to have wandered either unaware or indifferent, banking on his usual strategy of being all things to all Tory voters and hoping that nobody notices the mismatch. For instance, at the beginning of October last year, he attended a Stonewall-organised event at the Conservative Party conference, listening to his wife give a supportive on-message speech in familiar Stonewall-approved jargon, and waxing expansively, if not entirely accurately, that “being LGBT+” is “still a crime in 71 countries” and in 11 countries is “punishable by death, just because of who you love” (er.. Carrie, I think you might mean homosexual people). A mere two weeks later he was publicly backing the LGB Alliance — an organisation of which I was then a trustee, whose aim is to protect the rights of same sex-attracted people, specifically. The fact that the aims of these two organisations are diametrically opposed to one another seemed to pass him by.

Since then, his government has lurched abruptly from, first, pushing for a Stonewall-favoured ban on “conversion therapy” for non-standard gender identities — a ban which, experts feared, would criminalise talking therapies for young people confused about their gender identity, including many gay and lesbian youths — to backtracking on the proposal, thereby pleasing practically nobody in the process, and precipitating the collapse of a flagship international LGBT+ conference the government was supposed to be hosting. And at no point during this turbulent period has Johnson indicated any real grasp on why any of this might matter, or moved much beyond spouting with great enthusiasm whatever script an adviser just hastily handed him.

And yet I think there is perhaps a deeper and more interesting problem here than the short-term priorities of career politicians, bad as that is for politics generally. For the cynical prevarication of their leader is at least partly facilitated by a genuine lack of clarity at the conceptual level about how modern conservatism should view gay and lesbian people, and their political interests.

On the one hand, there are the sexual libertarians in the Tory party, prioritising personal freedom above all else. In this, they take themselves to be broadly in line with liberalism generally, though perhaps unlike them, most sensible liberals are willing at least to have a conversation about what happens when the desired freedoms of particular individuals or groups clash. For sexual libertarians, there is a clear and simple line to be taken on sex and gender if at all possible: let the people be free, to sleep with who they want, wear what they want, do what they want to their bodies surgically or medically, and go where they want to in physical and social space.

Their stance seems well represented by MP Crispin Blunt, who recently wrote in favour of the conversion therapy ban for gender identity, and against his own government, by connecting the issue with freedom: “We have no choice but to work to sustain our personal freedoms, to continue to make the case that these freedoms are good for all, economically and socially, in our societies and help those who languish under discrimination and criminalisation win their freedom to the benefit of all”. The present iteration of Stonewall bureaucrats apparently agrees, broadly speaking, though they seem completely unwilling to examine how the constant drive to legislate to protect the freedoms of one particular group (e.g. trans people) might curtail freedoms for those in other groups (e.g. gays and lesbians, or women).

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On the other hand, there are those conservatives more concerned with preserving social order and building a cohesive society than with pursuing personal freedom. Whether these self-describe as One Nation Conservatives or Red Tories or something else, they stress continuity with past traditions and the importance of producing laws and policies grounded in people’s existing values, rather than trying to impose certain elite values only from above.

They also tend to be concerned with preserving traditional family structures in the name of social stability. Though they may not admit it, for this kind of conservative, gays and lesbians — and indeed trans people too — pose a philosophical and political problem, because it’s unclear on what grounds their specific interests should be promoted, over and above the provision of basic human rights. Aside from liberal appeals to personal freedom, there is no pre-existing cultural norm in the UK that you might appeal to in order to justify two women marrying, or two men adopting a child.

On the contrary, what you will tend to find, and particularly in more cohesive traditional communities, is strong suspicion of any such arrangements, and even disgust and fear. And in fact, it’s worse than this, because from the perspective of the traditionalist, appealing to personal freedom in order to justify gay and lesbian rights is likely to open the door to the destruction of other traditional social values and norms in the name of freedom too. And in that, they in fact seem to be right. Put comically, this was presumably Johnson’s point when he discussed the perceived slippery slope from marrying two men to marrying three men and a dog.

This tension within conservatism is rarely confronted in this context — the temptation is often just to stick a rainbow on it and cross the fingers — but I think it is felt keenly by some lesbians and gays left in the middle, between crazy liberalising ambitions of others on their behalf, and the disapproving stares of traditionalists. The modern Left can’t help them either, because it too contains within itself a version of this tension — between the Left-liberals, focused on breaking down traditional cultural norms in the name of progress, and the older socialist Left, comfortable with traditional family structures and so uncomfortable with homosexuality.

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At the grassroots, many gays and lesbians can see clearly what damage is being done by sexual libertarians in the name of freedom around sex and gender identity: medicalising gay children, ruining women’s sport, and bringing inappropriately sexualised materials into schools, for instance. But equally, gay people can’t take solace in pretending that they seamlessly fit into a mostly heterosexual society, even when they try very hard to do so — or that they don’t need a positive political argument to justify their place there. And since they do need an argument, the argument from personal freedom looks to many like the best they’ve got.

A different possibility is to mimic an idealised form of heterosexual lifestyle, differently filled out — that is, to go for the marriage and the kids in a stable home, but with same-sex parents. But equally, there’s no overcoming the difference homosexuality makes to the traditional possibilities of reproduction. And when gays and lesbians attempt to get what they need from the opposite sex in order to “fit in” in this way, whether via sperm donation or surrogacy or something else, they quickly run up against a confrontation with tradition once again. Here too, they need an argument to justify themselves, and here too, the appeal to personal freedom comes calling once again as an apparently compelling option.

Stuck between dangerously unconstrained freedom on the one hand, and dangerously hostile tradition on the other, what the situation of lesbians and gays arguably exposes is the deep ideological fault-lines within modern British conservatism — and even within modern politics generally — hiding within plain sight all along. No wonder the politicians stick to meaninglessly trite mantras. Trans rights are human rights. Love is love.

I was reminded of this curious ritual when I read recently of the “flame purification” ceremony conducted by the board in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Almost 5,000 books judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes were removed from school libraries to be burnt or recycled. Some of the incinerated remains were used as a fertiliser to plant a tree — an uplifting, progressive and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.

Yet perhaps it is unsurprising that activists who are convinced that language causes real-world “harm” should be troubled by the reading habits of children. After all, it’s hardly a fringe view: the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Cambridge this month suggested that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series ought to come with “content notes” (a substitute phrase for “trigger warnings” given that the word “trigger” connotes violence and might therefore induce trauma).

This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market: just as children are deemed so malleable that they might transform into bigots if they read outdated work, it is assumed that they can be indoctrinated in the “correct” way if their reading materials are layered with messaging that reinforces the creed of social justice. As Schopenhauer put it, “there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five”.

The rise of progressive children’s books arguably began in 2016, with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. The idea was a charming one; it contained profiles of exceptional women throughout history offered up as role models for young readers. Examples included Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou, Yoko Ono, and even Coco Chanel, whose collaboration with the Nazis was tactfully omitted.

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Thereafter, the tone of such books became more strident. There was Feminist Baby by Loryn Brantz, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi, and The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks by Amy Kean. All of a sudden, highly dubious ideological positions were being represented as uncontested truth to very young children. Nor was this confined to America. Last summer, the National Education Union — the largest teaching union in the United Kingdom — claimed there was an “urgent” need to decolonise every subject and every stage of the school curricula and called for “activist training for teachers”.

But it’s not simply a matter of race; books aimed at toddlers which advance the idea that they each have a gendered soul are also being promoted by activist teachers and authors. For instance, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee is marketed for children as young as three, and introduces them to identity categories well beyond the comprehension of most adults, including “genderqueer, non-binary, bigender and two-spirit”.

Or consider the following claim from It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity by Theresa Thorn, next to an illustration of a newborn baby: “See, when you were born, you couldn’t tell people who you were or how you felt. They looked at you and made a guess. Maybe they got it right, maybe they got it wrong.” Thorn, it seems, wants children to believe that for years midwives and obstetricians have simply been flipping a coin and randomly assigning male or female on birth certificates.

That is, of course, palpably absurd. And yet it would be wrongheaded to call for such books to be censored or banned. The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege. Last year, the Arizona Department of Education released an “equity” toolkit which claimed that even babies as young as three-months old are capable of racial prejudice. I remain unconvinced that any of this has much of an effect. As one teacher recently said to me: “Teachers are more prone to fashionable nonsense than pupils. Trust the kids. They know bullshit when they see it.”

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But what of the younger ones, those who tend to to accept and repeat the mantras of their elders? It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the emergence of such activism in the classroom has brought with it a sudden rise of young people identifying as non-binary or transgender. Some of these children will doubtless be suffering from a form of gender dysphoria, but most will find such confusions resolved through the natural process of puberty. When children as young as three and four are “coming out” as trans, are we not right to be suspicious that adult influence has played a role? As trans YouTuber Blaire White said: “A transgender three-year-old is like a vegan cat.  We all know who’s making the lifestyle choices.”

Few parents have grasped the significance of these developments, largely because these attempts at indoctrination have been couched in progressive terminology. One exception is in Wales, where the government is currently being sued by more than 5,000 parents and grandparents over their decision to make compulsory the teaching of gender identity and sexual attraction to children as young as three. The government has apparently adopted Stonewall’s misinterpretation of the Equality Act, and have accordingly substituted “gender identity” for “gender reassignment” in its Equality and Diversity Policy.

It may be that the Welsh government is breaking the law. Section 406 of the Education Act 1996 prohibits “the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject”. This applies not only to political belief systems such as Marxism, but also ideological frameworks such as Critical Race Theory. In October 2020, the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch addressed Parliament to clarify the Government’s position. “We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” she said. “And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of Critical Race Theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.” If she is right, it is difficult to see how the teaching of gender identity ideology as undisputed truth could be exempt from these legal requirements.

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It remains to be seen whether current and future legal challenges make any difference. In the meantime, criticism and mockery are by far our best defence. Take the recent controversy surrounding the success of Matt Walsh’s new book Johnny the Walrus. It tells the story of Johnny, a boy who enjoys pretending to be a walrus by using spoons as tusks. The online community mobilises and tells him that he must either choose between being a walrus or being a human, and that he cannot be both. In response, hysterical staff at Amazon held a meeting to discuss the “trauma” the book had caused. Executives are even heard strategising about how to demote the title on their website to limit potential sales.

No books were burnt, but the underlying rationale was the same: namely, that indoctrination of the young is always a temptation for those whose ideas would not withstand adult scrutiny. But as Walsh’s book proves, the idea that small children are in any way interested in intersectional activism is inherently funny, and mockery is always the best way to expose the falsehoods of powerful elites. If there’s one thing that the high priests of this new religion cannot bear, it’s the sound of laughter.

There’s a reason this setup is a classic. Most of us feel that there’s an “us” conceptually distinct from the body we inhabit. In fact, anthropologists suggest it’s a belief held in some form or other across all human cultures.

This ancient dichotomy crops up in Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, a new book from primatologist Frans de Waal. Most of the book is about sex differences in our closest cousins. But de Waal briefly touches on the experience of transgender humans as evidence, supposedly, of innately gendered brains that can be effectively the opposite sex to the rest of the body.

The hypothesis he advances is a steelman of gender identity theory: the idea that whether we’re “really” a man or woman depends on an internal state knowable only to ourselves. In de Waal’s conception (the “scientific” version of the theory), gender identity isn’t an immaterial essence but is physically located in some part of the brain. Supposedly this brain module develops in utero and tells women and girls “this brain is in a female body”, and men and boys that their body is male — but it is possible for this module to find itself in the “wrong” body. De Waal suggests that “in a fraction of human pregnancies, the body takes off in a different direction to the brain”, and this physical mismatch is the cause of gender dysphoria.

De Waal’s argument rests on claims, made by a number of studies, that the brains of transgender people are closer in structure or function to their target sex than to their natal sex. But, unsurprisingly, this is far from settled science.

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For one thing, studies of the brain involve either the very expensive process of imaging living brains, or brain tissue from deceased donors. It’s hard to get a decent sample size — and harder still when the group you’re interested in makes up just a tiny minority of the population. Plus, the pressures on scientists and journalists to produce eyeball-grabbing #content to keep their careers afloat can lead to conclusions being brazenly over-interpreted, especially in areas in which research often attracts media buzz.

On top of this, there are a number of complicating factors, which most of these studies are much too small to control for (if they even attempt to — plenty don’t). Hormones are one such complication: if people have medically transitioned, it’s difficult to say whether any resemblance to their target sex is because they were born that way, or because of their newly cross-sex hormonal profile. Many studies acknowledge this problem, but small sample sizes mean that their efforts to address it are often not statistically meaningful.

The fact that trans people are more likely to have autism or mental illnesses is another potential confounder, one that’s rarely mentioned. These diagnoses are thought to be associated with physical changes in the brain, so any study of average differences between trans people and control groups would need to rule them out as explanations.

Sexual orientation, too, should be taken into account. People who are trans are much more likely to be non-heterosexual pre-transition; if they are only compared to heterosexual controls, then it’s impossible to tell whether differences are down to gender identity or sexuality — especially if your experiment, like this one, is based on volunteers’ responses to an erotic film. This particular study found that trans women responded differently from straight men and similarly to straight women. Is this a sign of a “female brain”, or could they just be attracted to men, like straight women are? We don’t know, because the paper doesn’t say.

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Since sexual orientation is the single most binary psychological variation between men and women (well upwards of 90% of women are attracted to men, and vice versa — a fact often considered so obvious that it goes without saying), you’d think it would be important to carefully control for. Most studies don’t adequately do this, though, and at least one actually does the opposite. The methods section of this paper published in Nature explains that for trans women to participate as subjects, they had to be exclusively attracted to males (i.e. they had to be homosexual), while to be in the male or female control groups, participants had to be heterosexual. The confounding variable of sexual orientation is therefore completely baked into the study, so that it’s impossible to draw separate conclusions about gender identity.

On the other hand, the first study to explicitly factor this into the experimental design reports that once sexual orientation is accounted for, the brains of trans people were sex-typical in most of the variables measured. In other words, comparing like for like, trans people’s brains were similar to people of the same (natal) sex and sexual orientation, rather than the opposite sex.

I don’t think it’s implausible that gender dysphoria could be caused in some cases by some kind of neurological similarity to the opposite sex —just that the evidence for it is currently not especially convincing. On top of this, there are a few troublesome observations that suggest the “brain in the wrong body” narrative can’t be the whole story.

Why have gender clinic referrals skyrocketed for girls in particular — in the UK, there’s been an increase of 4,400% in less than a decade — when gender dysphoria used to be diagnosed primarily in boys? This looks suspiciously similar to documented cases of peer-to-peer social influence in teenage girls (which can be facilitated by social media), but is usually explained away as a decrease in the stigma that would otherwise prevent people coming out. If this is the case, though, then where are all the middle-aged women who should also be coming forward after years of repressing a trans male identity?

And what about the large numbers of male-to-female transitioners who do not seem to suffer from gender dysphoria, may have no desire whatsoever to alter their male anatomy, and behave in strikingly male-typical ways? News of women arrested for sexual crimes — especially those involving a penis — used to be a rarity; now it is increasingly commonplace. One such headline from a few weeks ago reads: “Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public”. Are we really meant to believe this is the behaviour of a “woman trapped in a man’s body”?

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Undeterred, however, de Waal concludes that “it seems […] the brain offers a better indicator of the gender people claim for themselves than their genital anatomy.” This statement borders on the pseudoscientific. How can we believe that the brain, with all its vagaries, is a “better indicator” of whether the average person describes themselves as a man or a woman than the simple binary of what’s in their pants?

But let’s say it’s true that gender identity is an immutable physical property of our brains, and one day we will be able to point to it on a fancy type of scan. Even with this newfound neurological knowledge, wouldn’t we still need to recognise that male and female bodies are different, for instance in contexts such as sports?

De Waal doesn’t think so: to him, rulings that restrict female sports to people with female bodies are no more than “attempts to demonise [transgender people] and make their lives more difficult”. This is despite a less conspiratorial explanation being within reach — as he himself states in another chapter: “body strength is a glaring exception to the general rule that gender differences are gradual and overlapping […] More than two out of three men can lift 110 pounds directly off the ground, but only 1% of women can do the same.”

De Waal refers here to a gender difference, though actually it’s a difference of sex, caused by the physical characteristics of our bodies. Such mix-ups are not infrequent. And matters are not helped by a glossary inset. “Sex”, we are told, refers circularly to “the biological sex of a person”; “gender” is “the role and position of each sex in society” (emphasis mine), while a “gender role” apparently is something else entirely. With a guide like this, the blind are led by the blind.

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Perhaps the strangest thing is how at odds this all is with the rest of the book, in which de Waal is scathing of over-simple politicised narratives from all sides. In a final chapter titled “The Trouble with Dualism: Mind, Brain, and Body Are One”, he argues that thinking the human mind can be separated from our bodies and our animal natures is an arrogant form of “neo-creationism”. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is approvingly quoted as saying that “a mind is so shaped by the body and so destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it”. In other words, you are your body, and the idea of being born in the “wrong” one is a logical impossibility.

It’s hard to believe this chapter is written by the same man who uncritically adopts the language of “boys born with female anatomy”. It’s as if there is a set of beliefs on gender identity which have been downloaded as a self-contained unit, prevented by some kind of firewall from mingling with pre-existing knowledge.

Perhaps this makes sense. Many universities officially subscribe to this set of beliefs (in fact, in the UK they’re likely to pay money to do so, via Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme), and increasingly ask that new hires do, too. Students enforce the beliefs among their own ranks and among their lecturers. Research that asks the wrong questions may be pulled from publication, or have ethical approval retracted. You don’t have to understand — just profess your allegiance so that we all know you’re on the side of decency.

It’s no wonder that some intelligent and well-meaning people seem to decide, consciously or unconsciously, to think the right thing and reach the right conclusions without worrying about whether they’re sound.

When it comes to sex, gender and trans issues, it’s hard to know which information to trust. There is a clear market for non-partisan scientific expertise, to help us sift through the propaganda and hype. In books like Different, we trust that the authors will hand-pick reliable facts for us, rather than buying them wholesale from the merchants. But if even the experts are too befuddled to look at the evidence with a critical eye — or worse, self-censoring — then there is little hope for the rest of us.

Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.

What is it that produces such childish regression in the initiates of the new gender religion? At least part of the answer seems to have to do with the example set by Stonewall. For years now, the charity has acted like a demented primary school teacher gone rogue, encouraging all sorts of unsavoury habits in those under its influence. Via the use of an elaborate reward chart — otherwise known as the UK Workplace Equality Index — it has sown widespread misunderstanding within hundreds of institutions about the actual state of equality law. It has scared people silly with lurid fairytales of murder, suicide threats, and the hate crime of “misgendering”. No wonder the more impressionable are now getting so worked up.

The latest example of Stonewall’s wayward moral leadership came at the weekend, when it was revealed that its flounce from the government’s scheduled “Safe To Be Me” LGBT rights conference will cost the taxpayer at least £650,000, and probably more. Having previously been paid to co-organise the conference, Stonewall’s withdrawal statement was larded with the usual purple prose: hearts were heavy about the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy, trust was shattered, and so on. You would think the government had just announced compulsory heterosexuality for all, and not a pause in legislation threatening to criminalise talking therapies for gender-questioning people, including for gay adolescents at risk of starting a medicalised pathway they might later regret.

Many of those fighting Stonewall’s agenda are mothers — or as the Stonewalled maternity hospital where I gave birth twice would now have it, “pregnant people”. Since the opposition seem desperate to project their serious mummy issues onto us anyway, I reckon we should just lean into it. As most mums know, it’s important to have a few strategies ready for when things get tricky. So — with a nod in solidarity to beleaguered adults across the land having to deal with transactivist drama in their organisations, homes, and friend groups — here are five supernanny-style rules from me.

1. Encourage them to use their words

As with toddlers, in transactivism there is a lot of shouting and stamping and strutting about, but not a lot of thinking. When next a transactivist intones a Stonewall-approved mantra or slogan at you, gently encourage them to use their words and unpack it a bit. For instance, you might ask: if any male who feels like a woman is a transwoman, and transwomen are women, what then is a woman? Don’t be put off by furious complaints that you must be a bigot for asking such a thing — this is a distraction.

Equally, you could ask them: if, as Stonewall tells us, “to be nonbinary is to exist outside of society’s confines and expectations”, then what does this mean for the countless gay people who have spent their lives facing discrimination and sometimes violence because they don’t fit heterosexual norms? How does having an interesting haircut stack up against that, exactly?

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Or if, as Stonewall’s new campaign on behalf of “asexuals” tells us, a “grey-asexual” is someone who “may experience sexual attraction very rarely or only under specific circumstances”,  while “demisexual people only experience sexual attraction after developing a strong emotional bond with someone”, then in fact, aren’t most of us either grey-asexual or demisexual? And more to the point, how on earth does any of this count as a political campaign worthy of large amounts of taxpayers’ money?

2. Praise the good

When raising offspring, it’s important to positively reinforce good behaviour when you see it. This can be an effective strategy with difficult people generally. Transactivists frequently claim that they want to break down regressive stereotypes about how males and females should be. If so, tell them this is fantastic! Give them lots of praise for it — though you might also ask them how they plan to smash stereotypes, when they also seem to think that playing with dolls and wearing dresses might turn a male child into a girl.

3. Set boundaries

This appears to be a particularly hard one for transactivists to accept, tending as they do to think that all boundaries are fascist — so start small. Begin by casually saying things like “apples can’t be oranges” and “tables can’t be chairs”. (If they get cross and start calling you the “fruit police” or the “furniture police”, calmly ignore). Eventually, work your way up to males and females in non-human species on earth: “bucks are not does”, “bulls are not heifers”, and so on.

Once that information is well-tolerated, gently introduce the idea that humans are a sexually dimorphic species too; and that, as with other species, we need mutually exclusive names for the two human sexes in order to talk clearly about them. And after this radical idea has taken root, you could perhaps start to talk about other kinds of boundary too.

For instance, you could talk about the physical boundaries of women’s changing rooms and dormitories and refuges, and what those boundaries are actually supposed to do to protect their occupants from male predation. Or you could talk about the personal boundaries of women who say they don’t want men in public spaces where they undress.

At all times throughout this process, maintain your own boundaries by example. A firm and consistent “no” will be your friend.

4. Ignore derailing attempts

Kids like to copy what you just said and repeat it back to you (“no, YOU are!”). Sometimes they do it just to annoy you. At other times, it’s because they want to argue the toss but don’t know how, so just parrot a version of what you just said in the hope it will stick. In a similar vein, some transactivists like to take points originally made by gender-critical feminists and throw them back, only lightly altered.

For instance, gender-critical feminists often express concerns about the lack of safe-guarding in self-ID policies, and about the negative effects of such policies on female survivors of male sexual violence. Not to be outdone, last week my former colleague and fervent transactivist Professor Alison Phipps wrote on twitter that: “When I go in a public toilet I am incredibly vigilant — I scrutinise every woman I come across and wonder whether she is a “gender-critical feminist”. Their obsession with what’s in everyone’s pants is frightening and as a cis woman and survivor, it makes me feel very unsafe”. Now, either this displays a level of paranoia on a par with Q-Anon worries about lizard people in the White House, or it’s an unsubtle attempt to wind gender-critical feminists up.

Or take Professor Grace Lavery of Berkeley University, in the UK to punt a new book about her penis on Woman’s Hour, and who gave a talk at UCL a few weeks ago. Lavery’s talk was entitled “The Gender Critical Movement Is the Biggest Threat to Academic Freedom in a Generation”. I am told that in the talk, my name came up — you know, that former Professor who got harassed out of her job for saying that biological sex matters —  as someone supposedly personally responsible for recent serious declines in academic freedom of thought.

As with the more junior version, mindless “no YOU ares” like those of Phipps and Lavery are likely to drag you into pointless back-and-forths, which is probably the intention. Try not to let it get to you. Do what mums have done since time immemorial and pour yourself a large gin. Take a swig and read this marvellously warm, perceptive, and witty piece by English scholars Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, written in response to an attempt of Grace Lavery — you know, that Professor who is Very Keen to protect academic freedom — to cancel them in 2018 for allegedly enabling transphobic “fascism” in their writing. (Their alleged crime, according to Lavery, was to defend the sometime use of trans birthnames and accurate sexed pronouns. And the cancellation attempt was eventually successful: the pair later released an abject apology, terrifying for its newly-leaden, generically contrite prose as much as for anything else.)

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In particular, as you read Castiglia and Reed’s piece, linger over these prescient words: “what we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself”.

5. Get them out in the fresh air

This final one is simple enough. Get your transactivist troublemaker away from their screen or phone and into the great outdoors. Inhibit the flow of crazy pronouncements flying into innocent minds via LGBT organisations and bluetick accounts on Twitter. Encourage them instead to run around, take their shoes off and paddle, get muddy and out-of-breath, and generally to reconnect with their physical bodies and the natural world.

And if a member of the opposite sex is around, why not encourage them to arm-wrestle each other, or have a throwing contest? They both might learn something interesting. Perhaps this teaching moment could even feed into later conversations about transwomen in women’s sport

Back in 2018, when the obvious fallacies of gender ideology made me feel merely puzzled as opposed to completely enraged, a friend of mine went to the Commonwealth Games. He’s a sportswriter, and a few years younger than me and so – adhering to the generational divide on this issue – he disagreed with me about gender. He thought I was too rigid in my belief that changing gender is not the same as changing sex, which I maintain is impossible. He also thought my fears that males would disproportionately benefit and potentially exploit from the blurring between gender and sex were overblown. Stop being so binary, daddio, we’re all fluid now!

It so happened that it was at this Commonwealth Games that a trans athlete was allowed to compete for the first time: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. Hubbard was widely expected to win gold, despite being 40-years old and therefore about twice as old as her competitors. My friend watched Hubbard’s event and he texted me afterwards. Hubbard hadn’t won, he wrote, because she injured her elbow. There was a pause while he wrote the next text. Then it came through: “But OK. I understand what you have been saying.”

So I always knew it would start with sport. The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.

While Hubbard was middle aged and in far from peak condition, Thomas is, visibly, a very different story, and her teammates and the parents of other swimmers have been extremely vocal in their protests. Encouraged, no doubt, by the openness of the arguments about Thomas, protests kicked off again when it was announced that 21-year-old Emily Bridges — who, until last month, was racing as a man — would compete in the women’s British National Omnium Championship. Bridges was ruled out at the last minute when someone realised she was, rather awkwardly, still registered as a male cyclist. But a change of tone was palpable in British Cycling’s announcement afterwards that “fairness is essential”, and Sara Symington, the head of Britain’s Olympic cycling programme, said the UCI needed to change its policy of allowing transgender riders to compete against women.

Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

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This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

For several years now, Stonewall has been campaigning hard for self-ID, which is when a person can be whatever gender they say they are without any physical intervention, to be recognised in law. Wallis can now self-identify as a woman and he is a handy illustration of what happens when theory collides with reality. Nothing else about Wallis has changed, not even his all-important pronouns. But according to Stonewall’s argument, he’s a woman. As much as gender ideologues try to paint gender critical feminists as “radical”, they are the radical ones, insisting that everything we know about biology and society is wrong, and that people can see one thing with their eyes, but must say something else with their mouths. How far was the Conservative Party going to allow themselves to go with this new radical position?

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Last week, the Tories executed a double U-turn, the result of which was to press ahead with banning conversion practices in regards to sexual orientation – in other words, outlawing “pray away the gay” practitioners – but not in regards to gender. Iain Anderson, the Government’s LGBT business champion resigned, saying that the Tories were putting “dividing lines between LGB and Trans people”. Stonewall pulled out of the forthcoming Safe To Be Me event, the UK’s first LGBT+ conference, followed by a consortium of LGBT+ voluntary and charity organisations — including “Body Positive Cheshire and North Wales” and “Claire’s Transgender Talks”.

Ultimately, Safe To Be Me was cancelled, but this has certainly not stopped the angry discourse. The author Philip Pullman tweeted, “To ban conversion therapy, so-called, is good. To make a deliberate exception for trans people is pure, cold-eyed evil. No justification, no reason, no excuse: just to appease the transphobes. Evil.”

Language matters. Trans activists know this better than most, which is why they’re so insistent about pronouns and trans inclusive terms such as “pregnant people” and “uterus haver”. Conversion therapy is a terrifying term. Exploratory therapy, or talking therapy, is much less so, and that is actually what was at issue here.

Contrary to what Stonewall, Pullman and the rest of them think, there were many reasons for the Government’s decision, and they are laid out in the Cass review, which was published last month. This echoes concerns already expressed in the courts, and by several NHS whistleblowers. Namely, that gender dysphoria is not the same as sexuality (as Stonewall — of all organisations — surely knows), and there may be many reasons for a child feeling confused about their gender. At the moment, two-thirds of gender dysphoric young people are girls, many display signs of autistic spectrum disorder, some have eating disorders, some may be gay. Stonewall and other organisations insist that the way to treat these children is through “affirmative therapy”, which tells them they are correct to feel uncomfortable in their bodies and should change gender.

But as the Cass review stresses, so much is still unknown about gender dysphoric young people: there may be many reasons for their distress, ranging from sexual abuse to internalised homophobia. These young people need to explore their feelings with a professional, not be rushed into medical treatments that can have deeply damaging long-term effects. That is not an endorsement of conversion therapy, but of good therapeutic practice. After all, in what other scenario are distressed young people encouraged to diagnose and treat themselves?

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Then, yesterday, the Prime Minister felt sufficiently emboldened to say what the Labour leader still cannot, and what so many women — from Kathleen Stock to Maya Forstater — had been sacked for expressing in the past: gender ideology, in its extreme form, doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t work.  “I don’t think it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick-competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have,” he said. He added that “biological males” and should not be competing in women’s sports, and that private spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms should be single sex, thereby echoing the EHRC, which this week said that transgender people can be excluded from single-sex services for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma and to ensure health and safety.

In other words, the feelings of trans people do not, in all instances, trump the needs of women — which is what the gender ideologues have been arguing for all along. Johnson added that he is “immensely sympathetic to people who want to change gender… But these are complex issues and I don’t think they can be solved with one swift easy piece of legislation. It takes a lot of thought to get this right.”

The gender activists loudly cried that this was a re-run of Section 28. But if you heard bigotry in the PM’s words, you weren’t really listening: Johnson sounded moderate and realistic. Meanwhile Labour continues to flail in the background over whether or not men can get pregnant. The Left have handed the Right this victory on a gold platter.

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This was the week when the wheels started to come off the ideological bandwagon, when Stonewall’s grip on British politicians began to loosen. Quite how it all started in the first place is a story for another day, although that story could well start in 2016 when Ruth Hunt — then the CEO of Stonewall, now in the House of Lords — admitted in a speech that Stonewall was having difficulty raising donations after gay marriage was legalised, as donors thought gay people were “all right now”. “And what we’ve had to say to them is, well, you still wouldn’t feel safe enough if you were on the night bus, but well done for being rich enough to get an Addison Lee,” she said. She then reeled off further examples of people who might need Stonewall’s help, and concluded with “You still wouldn’t be safe enough if you were transitioning in your gender.” Did Hunt hype up the gender campaign and sell out women – which, of course, includes lesbians and bisexual women – just to ensure Stonewall’s revenue flow? Like I said, a story for another day.

In the end, it wasn’t one person who pointed out that gender extremism wears no clothes. There were so many: therapists, academics, parents, authors, athletes, politicians, barristers, journalists, scientists, feminists, gay activists, all shouting over the years that this ideology would hurt women, children, gay people and trans people. And this was the week the spell began to break.

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Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.

Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.

More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools.

I first started tweeting about the issue in 2018, back when the UK government was consulting on whether to reform the Gender Recognition Act to gender self-ID. My remarks were deemed so outrageous that the Center for Global Development (CGD) decided not to offer me further employment.

In 2019 a judge declared that my belief (that there are two sexes, that human beings can’t change sex, and that sex is important) did not count as a philosophical belief for the purposes of the Equality Act, that it was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The day after I lost my case JK Rowling tweeted about it, bringing me more public attention than I had bargained for. When my case became internationally newsworthy, lies were circulated about me, meant to discredit Rowling. Tweets and YouTube videos and even newspaper articles have said I “misgendered” or harassed a trans colleague. In fact, I had no trans colleagues, and I told CGD from the start that I would always treat people with respect and politeness in any professional situation.

In June 2020, I won an appeal to overturn the initial judgment. The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal determined that my ordinary belief about male and female people, which I share with the vast majority of people in the world, is not only in line with the UK legal definition of the sexes, but also “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This meant I can continue my discrimination case against my ex-employer. It also means that other people can now seek legal redress if they are harassed or discriminated against, at work or as a service user, for believing that men are male and women are female. If people face workplace harassment for speaking up on this issue, they can point to the precedent of “Forstater”.

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Stonewall’s strategy of “no debate” on its push for gender self-ID has backfired. The unreasonable and unrelenting attacks on people as obviously calm and compassionate as Professor Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling have led more people to look again at the policies being promoted in the name of “trans inclusion”, which chip away at areas of life formerly designated female-only.

My case will be back in the Employment Tribunal starting on 7 March, three years to the day from when I lost my job. It has been a long, slow process to clear my name. And it is vital that I win this final stage — not just so I get justice, but also to demonstrate to employers that these rights don’t just exist on paper. You cannot disregard the usual frameworks of non-discrimination and respect for everyone’s human rights, just because someone points a finger and whispers “transphobe”. And employers should stop doing the bidding of organisations like Stonewall that tell them to do so.

By standing up to the gender bullies in whatever way we can, we are breaking through the culture of fear. My case and others have shone a light on areas of institutional capture. Harry Miller challenged the College of Policing over Humberside Police Force’s heavy-handed response to a complaint about his comical tweets. Keira Bell, a young detransitioned woman, brought a case against the NHS Tavistock gender-identity clinic challenging the experimental medical treatments being given to gender non-conforming children. Other cases are coming, most notably that of Allison Bailey, a barrister and a lesbian who is suing Stonewall, the influential LGBTQIA+ organisation, for colluding in a witch-hunt against her by her legal chambers.

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All these voices and so many others have brought the debate out into the open. As a result of that debate, the UK government ditched the proposal for gender self-ID (although Scotland is still planning to go ahead), and has commissioned an independent review of children’s gender-identity services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK’s human rights law watchdog, intervened in my case to say that my belief is indeed protected. And it has gone on to change its position on gender self-ID laws.

If it wasn’t obvious before that my belief is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, it is now.

One of the worst things about being a claimant in an employment tribunal is how it isolates you. People who know you professionally keep their distance. They imagine I might have done something awful to lead CGD to argue that I engaged in speech so offensive that it “causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act”. And I could not clear my name. My tribunal is the first chance for the full truth to be heard.

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It is perhaps worth noting that the organisation I worked for is the European subsidiary of a parent organisation based in Washington DC. The complaints by people who read my tweets came from the US. The consultants who investigated me were from the US, and so were the decision makers who decided to let me go.

Radical gender ideology arose in the campuses of elite North American universities and has spread to the UK, and other countries. This is not a positive cultural import. The idea of replacing sex with “gender identity” is institutional kryptonite, corrupting organisations, preventing people from speaking truthfully and recording data accurately. It turns organisations away from their principles, in ways that particularly harm women and children, even while allowing those organisations to wave a superficial flag of “inclusion”. This is an American import we should reject. We would be better off without it.

So when Townsend, who has been outspoken in her not unusual opinion that “women are adult human females”, was elected into the role in May, few were surprised. A few months later, she became the first PCC to give an interview denouncing Stonewall’s influence on policing policies.

But while her constituents greeted her comments with admiration, the reception from other quarters was hostile: she has faced calls for her resignation, an inquiry by Surrey Police and Crime Panel (PCP) and a slew of anonymous threats to her life. After receiving over forty formal complaints, in October Surrey PCP finally cleared Townsend of “any breach of public conduct”.

Now, four months on, she’s set to be dragged through the process again — this time at the behest of a fellow Conservative: Crispin Blunt MP.

Blunt, who is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ rights, is one of a small number of politicians within the Conservative Party who fervently supports Stonewall and their stance on gender self-identification: he believes that it is discriminatory to exclude those who are male but identify as trans from women’s services and spaces. His constituency, Reigate, sits within Townsend’s jurisdiction as PCC.

Townsend sighs when I ask her about her latest battle: “I know I’ve done nothing wrong. But it’s the process itself which feels like the punishment — it’s exhausting.

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“Crispin called me after I first went public with my views on Stonewall. He put his case and I listened. I thought we’d agreed to disagree and was content to move on. Then I retweeted something by JK Rowling before Christmas and he called me again.”

The post in question was neither incendiary nor ill-informed: all Rowling did was highlight the absurdity of a policy introduced by the Scottish police which allows male rapists to self-identify as women. To Rowling’s tweet she added her own words: “It’s not a ‘niche’ issue, it’s not hysterical for women to be taking to the streets about it. We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women, or from those who enable them.”

Blunt clearly disagreed. “He called again and effectively told me to stop speaking out. I explained that I wasn’t prepared to do that. I reminded him that I have a duty to defend women’s right to access single-sex refuges, hospital wards and prisons — not just because it matters to me, but because it matters to many of the people I represent.

“He responded with something that sounded like a threat. He said something along the lines of: ‘well, in that case I’m sorry for what I’m about to do’. And then the call was ended.”

Townsend is used to weathering the slings and arrows of politics, but nonetheless, Blunt’s comment left her unnerved. “More than anything, I felt sad because, as a young woman, I used to work for Crispin in Parliament. We’ve known each other for a very long time. When I stood for election as PCC, he was incredibly supportive and there are definitely areas where Crispin and I have shared goals.”

A week after the ominous phone call, Townsend was informed that Blunt had submitted a complaint about her tweet to the PCP. In a lengthy formal letter, Blunt complained bitterly that his attempts to “counsel” Townsend had been rebuffed and that “she remains absolutely determined to take part in this most contentious of public debates”. Blunt argued that Townsend’s “messaging propagates dangerous myths that trans women represent a physical threat to cisgender [non transgender] women”.

Echoing criticism levied at Townsend by Pride in Surrey, he added that by expressing her opinions on the topic, “Lisa Townsend is in breach of her personal obligations under public sector equality duty” and that “tweets like these are an abuse of her position as an elected official whose duty is to oversee the police service under the law”.

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Townsend, who has two law degrees, refutes the allegation that by expressing her opinion she is in breach of her legal duties. “If people disagree with me and want to stand against me that’s fine — that’s democracy. But I am tired of being told not to talk about this because it is really important. For Crispin this is clearly just a trans issue. For me, it is a women’s safety issue.

“At present, we’ve got a situation where, thanks to the lobbying of Stonewall, anyone who decides they identify as a woman must be allowed into female spaces. I cannot see anything more misogynistic than a policy that insists that the feelings of a male legally, morally, ethically trump the rights and safety of women and children.

“I absolutely support the right of trans people to live in the way that makes them feel comfortable; to dress, live and love as they want. But everybody’s needs and feelings deserve to be considered. It is wrong to prioritise one group above another. As an elected official it is my duty to speak up for those who Stonewall and their supporters too readily forget.”

What do those “forgotten” constituents make of her campaign? Well, behind her desk is a noticeboard with scores of thank you cards pinned to it; when her staff logged correspondence in the weeks following the interview, they found that 90% were supportive. “I was overwhelmed by support, and was sent cards, chocolates and even a bouquet in the colours of the suffragettes; people were so grateful that I’d used my position to amplify their concerns.”

Likewise, many within the Conservative Party have applauded Townsend. Nearby Guildford MP Angela Richardson thanked Townsend and urged Surrey Constabulary to record offences by sex rather gender identity (in this she is supported by Home Secretary Priti Patel). Townsend also has the backing of other PCCs, including chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) Marc Jones.

Throughout the Tories more broadly, Townsend believes “the overwhelming majority of grassroots members and elected politicians recognise that women’s safety is compromised by gender self-identification”.

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Yet it was the support of the heads of domestic abuse refuges and women’s organisations in Surrey, women who had previously kept quiet on the issue, that most inspired Townsend. “I read every single card I received. Some of those who wrote to me were women who had needed the support of refuges and rape crisis centres. Others were desperate parents, worried that their children were being forced to use mixed sex facilities in schools which had been advised by Stonewall. They didn’t feel able to share their views openly due to the potentially career-ending accusations of transphobia.

“So many women who’ve got in touch have told me they’re ‘politically homeless’, that they’d probably never vote Tory but were fed-up by the failure of other parties to acknowledge their concerns.”

Despite Blunt’s attempts to censure her, Townsend maintains that the Tory party is a broad church where debate is actively encouraged. As such, she says she feels “frustrated” by attempts by a minority within her own party to shut down debate, and that this is “both un-Conservative and undemocratic”.

She adds: “It just wouldn’t occur to me to complain about another person, let alone another elected conservative politician, because they’d said something with which I’d disagreed. And it’s telling that more widely, nearly all of those who’ve told me to stop talking about this, or who have complained, are men. This issue has really brought home to me just how many men feel threatened by women with opinions.”

And it’s an issue that isn’t going disappear soon — not least within a Conservative Party that could soon find itself in the throes of a leadership election. The sexual politics of transgenderism span far beyond the borders of Surrey, and Townsend is confident that future politicians will be asked for their views on sex-based rights. “It’s an issue every politician has been contacted about,” she says, “and I’m afraid anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“At some point, whether it’s weeks, months or years, the Conservative Party will select a new leader. As a member of the Conservative Party, I will have a vote. And I can tell you now, I will be looking very closely at the candidates who put themselves forward. I will want to know what their view is on single-sex spaces and how they define ‘woman’. And I will vote accordingly.”

As the mother of a son who identifies as part of the transgender community,[1. My son uses the pronouns associated with his sex. I have chosen to remain anonymous to protect his identity.] the prospect of there being an epidemic of trans murders holds an added weight: is my son’s life in danger? Should I be beside myself with worry when he travels to work, let alone when goes out to a gig at a weekend? Suffice it to say that this is not an issue that I can afford to take lightly.

Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.

The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?

To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.

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Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that  the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.

Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.

For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.

Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)

Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.

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Three of the nine victims were murdered by a violent punter while working as prostitutes; another was killed by their husband, who lived on her earnings from prostitution. Another of the victims died at the hands of someone who was also trans-identifying. Another was a gay man who cross-dressed occasionally, and the motive for the murder has been ascribed to both transphobia and homophobia. Two of the murders were linked to drug use.

In other words, despite the way their deaths are often framed in the media and by activists, the large majority of these trans victims were not killed simply for being trans. Almost half appear to involve prostitution — a fact that has been quietly brushed under the carpet.

Nor is this wilful misunderstanding confined to the UK: according to global statistics, 58% of transgender murder victims were born male and work in prostitution. It seems remarkable, then, that “Trans women are women” and “Sex work is work” remain two of the most heavily promoted mantras in trans-activist circles. Indeed, a number of role models in the trans community go as far to claim that it was only because of prostitution that they were able to afford their treatment and surgeries.

Take, for example, trans activist Janet Mock, who has described how the “sex trade becomes a road well-travelled, helping trans women alleviate financial woes while also making many of us feel desired as women”. To be fair to Mock, she has also spoken publicly about the dangers of engaging in prostitution, emphasising the impacts of economic coercion, sexual abuse and trafficking on the trans community. She has also highlighted how prostitution is heavily racialised, with black and Latino communities making up a disproportionate number of transgender “sex workers”.

For reasons of sexual politics, I do not use the phrase “sex work” on the basis that the inside of our bodies, be they male or female, is not a legitimate place of work. That isn’t to say that I believe we should reprimand former prostitutes, or those still engaged in prostitution, for using this phrase. I know of former prostituted women who say this description was a survival strategy and allowed them to distance themselves from their experience.

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But that doesn’t make the phrase helpful — especially when used to describe transgender people. In recent years, the fetishisation of the transgender body has come increasingly into focus: PornHub’s annual report for 2021 — yes, they do an annual report! — showed there had been a 126% increase for porn searches using “trans”. There is clearly a “market” for trans-identified sex acts; and paired with the vulnerability of trans people to violence and murder while engaged in prostitution, the association of trans activism with “sex work” becomes even more dangerous.

Presented in this light, it seems obvious to me that we need to rethink the accepted narrative around transgender murder rates, regurgitated with monotonous regularity by both politicians and the media. For example, rather than holding vigils, those concerned with the tragic deaths of transgender people would do better to watch The Sex Map of Britain, a BBC documentary that follows two young men who were both homosexual and rejected by their family. In one of the most heart-breaking scenes, Mia, now a transgender escort, is brought to tears when talking about maternal rejection for the crime of being gay. Later Mia seeks reassurance from a client that they enjoy each other’s company. The punter answers that he does not want to cause offence, but he is only there because of the sex on offer. In another scene, Mia talks about hoping to find love in sex filmed for pornography.

It pains me to say it, but I see my son in Mia, and of one thing I am certain: looking for love, validation and self-worth in porn and prostitution won’t help him. Likewise, pretending that there’s a trans murder epidemic, when incidents are isolated and largely confined to prostitution, is equally unhelpful and even dangerous — not just to people like my son, but to the women whose murders are quietly forgotten in favour of performative headlines about an ‘epidemic’ that doesn’t exist.

It was a wave that meant that when I was publicly “cancelled” by the Royal Academy of Arts this summer, I was swiftly “un-cancelled” in a spectacular fashion. More importantly, it was a wave that finally smothered Stonewall’s ‘No Debate’ strategy — and dragged a conversation they had tried to avoid for so long kicking and screaming into the public sphere.

Things started to fall into place when, within a few weeks, Maya Forstater won her court case, protecting gender critical belief in law, my own story hit the headlines, and the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published a damning essay, It Is Obscene, revealing the horrendous treatment she had been subjected to after saying that transwomen are transwomen and not women.

Of course, it was a moment that had been brewing for a long time. Many feminists had been warning about the concerning impact of gender identity ideology for years, sounding the alarm and being vilified, ridiculed and ostracised in response. No doubt, the inimitable JK Rowling’s decision to make her views on the subject known last year helped pave the way for an increasing number of women to stand up and speak out; finally, everything is out in the open.

Yet this debate is far from won. Activists often still succeed in framing it as a “trans rights issue”, rather than something that actually concerns women. Looking at the vast political capture, it’s sometimes easy to lose hope. We see the Mayor of London tweet ideological dogma such as: “Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all gender identities are valid.” We see the leader of the Labour Party say: “it’s not right to say that only women have a cervix, it shouldn’t be said”. We see MPs such as David Lammy, who has made clear that he doesn’t even know what a cervix is, state unchallenged that there are “dinosaurs hoarding rights in the Labour Party”, referring to brave women like Rosie Duffield who keep pushing back against this ideological land grab.

To be fair, that last point resulted in a new trend for wearing dino costumes at most feminist gatherings and protests, so I suppose a thank you is in order, Mr Lammy.

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Yet even his buffoonery shouldn’t be laughed off — if only because it distracts from the more insidious repercussions of the transgender debate. In many institutions and companies, “preferred pronouns” are now being implemented from the top down under the guise of “diversity and inclusion”. Anybody who dares to question this may find themselves quickly under investigation for alleged “transphobia” or called a bigot and cowed into silence.

Let’s make no mistake: “preferred pronouns” aren’t, as some would have you believe, just a courtesy. They are a form of compelled speech; they ask people to no longer trust their eyes, but instead do as they are told or be ostracised. I have previously written about the parallels between the current climate and the East German Stasi under which my whole family used to live. And it is becoming clearer by the day that those comparisons were not an exaggeration.

Just look at the state of academia, where professors who dare to acknowledge the biological reality of the sexes are being de-platformed and hounded, regardless of the toll the often-aggressive behaviour has on their well-being. The use of smear campaigns and intimidating “protests”, with individuals donning balaclavas and waving smoke flares, seems to have washed over from the US and are now commonplace whenever a “heretic” has been identified and needs “dealing with”. Just ask Professors Joe Phoenix and Kathleen Stock.

That this ideology has also crept deep into the Arts, once the most tolerant of disciplines, was clearly highlighted by my attempted cancellation. It was by no means the first time an artist has been attacked and ostracised publicly for her alleged thought crimes, but it was certainly a turning point due to the involvement of the Royal Academy. The public apology and reinstatement of my work in their shop thrust into the spotlight something that has been happening quietly but constantly for quite some years now.

Petty groups like ‘Terf’s out of Art’ and ‘The White Pube’ have long bullied artists, most of whom are women, into silence. Their success is proved by the fact that many of these cases don’t make the headlines, even though they still cost these women dearly, in some cases their entire career. Meanwhile, for those who are yet to be publicly called out, there’s another chilling effect: don’t expect to be invited to give talks at universities or to create public artworks with Arts Council funding. If you’re deemed ‘unacceptable’, you’re on your own.

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These silent cancellations are just as vicious as those fought out in public; perhaps even more so, because they leave their victims utterly defenceless. Being de-platformed for your views is something one can challenge. Being quietly excluded from any kind of platform and conversation altogether leaves you with nothing.

When I wrote on these pages in August about the deafening silence within the arts establishment following the attempt to cancel me, I did so with a sense of despair. It seemed to me that the blue-haired activists had won; that ‘diversity and inclusion’ now only matters as long as you repeat the mantras and toe the party line.

Things still look bleak. But after everything that has happened this year, a sense of optimism has started to creep in. That isn’t merely because the alternative is a dystopian hellscape of authoritarianism that history has seen many times before. It’s because the truth has a habit of prevailing.

What’s striking this year is the growing number of women and men who have started to say: Enough. One court case verdict follows another, holding the line against a vicious new orthodoxy that seeks to burn witches while screaming “JUST BE KIND”.

The Forstater ruling has cemented the protection of “gender critical belief” in law. The charity LGB Alliance has now firmly established itself as a much-needed alternative to Stonewall. Grassroots organisations such as FiLiA, FairPlayForWomen and Women’s Place UK provide support and resources to a vast and growing number of gender-critical women who have found their voice. And for everybody who dares speak out regardless of the consequences, there are many more waiting in the folds, preparing for their moment to be brave.

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Fortunately, in my own case sanity prevailed and, like a monsoon rain, the stains my detractors tried to smear me with have washed right off, leaving me free to continue to create work without censorship, encouraged by a rapidly growing number of patrons and supporters. And I am not alone: despite great efforts to the contrary, heretical artists are finding new ways to exhibit work and bypass gatekeepers.

That is the lesson of the past year. Finally, the tide is turning. We have not been silenced; let alone defeated. So to those art students with a firm grasp on reality who may feel a bit hopeless: don’t be afraid. Come on in, the water’s fine.

They were from a particular subculture within the lesbian movement, known for flaunting their predilections for sadomasochism, pornography, and public sex. They were outrageous by most people’s standards — including my own. These women argued that the practice of S&M was rebellious and liberatory; that it allowed women to break free of the expectation to be sexually submissive.

Memories of it all came flooding back as I watched Rebel Dykes, a film about that particular tribe. It follows a group of close friends who met at Greenham Common peace camp and became part of that significantly rebellious lesbian subculture. There are clips of the women having public sex shows at BDSM nightclubs; marching in full regalia on anti-Thatcher rallies, and joining forces with gay men to demand action around AIDS.

Of course, my tribe of lesbians was at odds with the rebel dykes. We campaigned against male violence and abuse of women, and, like the US feminist Robin Morgan, believed that “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice”. We railed against acts of sexual sadism and fought hard to dispel the misogynistic myth that women enjoy being abused and degraded during sex. In my view, the S&M that the Rebel Dykes celebrated was simply a re-enforcement of the way violent men treat women.

For their part, they painted us as dull and sexless, dismissing us as joyless prudes. Roz Kaveney, a transwoman involved in the ‘kink’ scene back then, would mock my tribe, saying that lesbians like me thought that “holding hands in 20 different positions” was hot sex. That’s another thing that struck me about the film: the parallels between now and then. Lesbians and women who are critical of porn and S&M and sexual exploitation today are treated in exactly the same way as we were back then: portrayed as anti-sex prudes.

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The talking heads in the film have great fun re-visiting their youth, spinning tales of drunkenness, sex with multiple partners, and direct action. They talk about Greenham Common women’s peace camp, where a group of them broke into the squaddies’ bar and stole all the booze. But the film mainly focuses on the squatting culture in London, and the so-called “lesbian sex wars” that raged through the UK in the early to late Eighties. Those wars were fought over the turf of porn, kink, S&M, and public sex.

In April 1985 I went along to the very first extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the newly founded Lesbian and Gay Centre in London. The centre should have been a haven for the entire community, with its café, bar, bookshop, creche, meeting rooms, media resource, offices for rent to lesbian and gay projects and enterprises, and a regular disco. It could not have been more perfect, on paper. But its management committee was involved in a huge dilemma. Who could use the centre, and for what, and which views would be acceptable to be aired in the premises? At that stage, the management committee was an all-white group of men and women, and they were keen to make it more accessible to a diverse crowd.

The main item on the agenda at the EGM was the S&M issue. Although the Management Committee had initially allowed groups advocating for and practicing S&M to meet at the centre, they had reversed that decision following complaints from the Lesbians Against Sadomasochism (LASM). These women objected to the sight of leather, chains and Nazi regalia in a space that was supposed to be protective of persecuted minorities. The packed meeting was extremely tense, and nothing was resolved.

The film includes fascinating, grainy footage of the event. One clip shows Linda Bellos, a black, Jewish, working-class lesbian opposing S&M ideology, while a young S&M dyke in the audience, also black and working-class, was being nudged by white women to speak up “as a black lesbian”. The attempt by both sides to use identity politics as a way to claim more credibility and ‘right to speak’ was counter-productive, as each time a Jewish woman, for example, said how offended she was at symbols of Nazi Germany (such as the peaked leather cap) being used in S&M role-play, one from the other side would claim she was ‘subverting’ its meaning.

In a subsequent meeting, the extremely polarised issue of dress codes came up. A group called the Sexual Fringe, which represented the S&M contingent, wanted an “anything goes” policy whereas the hard-core feminists wanted to ban leather jackets (something I was opposed to, on the grounds that leather jackets per se were not in any way offensive). The main topic of conversation was whether certain items of clothing and accessories could be seen as racist, fascist or antisemitic. There were some sadists who liked to lead women (who identified as masochists) around on all fours on a leash. There were others who liked to wear chains, swastikas, whips and handcuffs. This was an unusual meeting in that certain things were resolved, for once. It was agreed that the swastika should be banned, and it was also agreed, albeit grudgingly, that leading a woman around on a chain on all fours should also be banned.

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Generally, though, neither side saw eye to eye. When the fetish club Chain Reaction was opened by the S&Mers in London in 1987, home to everything from mud wrestling to exhibitionist sex shows, and strippers. LASM picketed the club. We handed out leaflets explaining why, as far as we were concerned, eroticising pain and humiliation was the very antithesis of women’s liberation. Our leaflets read: “there can be no defence of a practice which is racist, anti-Semitic and woman hating. How is this different from what men do to women?” But the party went on inside. Nothing was resolved.

At another meeting, in 1988, Joan Nestle, a “sex positive” lesbian heavily into butch/femme role play spoke. There was a massive debate between the feminists and the pro-S&Mers during that meeting, and I could see why so many were captivated by Nestle. Funny, charismatic and honest, she appealed to so many of the working-class women in the audience who felt judged by the hard-core feminists. More than once in the film, references are made to how middle class the anti-S&M feminists were in contrast to the Rebel Dykes, but this gives an inaccurate impression. I was one of many working class protesters against S&M, and the sexual libertarian movement that inspired much of the Rebel Dyke standpoint was rooted in French post-structuralism — hardly a topic for down The Dog and Duck.

The Rebel Dykes loved being provocative and bad taste riffs were common, verging on harassment. For example, when Lisa Power, a Stonewall founder who is interviewed in the film, started the lesbian sex-toy business, Thrilling Bits, she named “our smallest and most inoffensive vibrator ‘the Sheila’” after anti-porn feminist Sheila Jeffreys, which was a pretty ugly move. The black dildo in the Thrilling Bits collection was named “the Whitney”, (after Whitney Houston) but interestingly this was not mentioned in the film.

The arguments over S&M, public sex and anti-Semitism raged in America, too. I visited San Francisco in 1985, having been told that a new magazine, aimed at lesbians, had been launched into this crucible. It was called On Our Backs. The title itself was poking fun at the feminist magazine, Off Our Backs (meaning “women, there is no need to be on our backs for the patriarchy”). On Our Backs took a pro kink, pro porn stance, and featured S&M content.

I requested an interview with the editors of On Our Backs, and turned up looking like something out of Bunty magazine. In my pale blue linen trousers and white cotton blouse and Birkenstock sandals, I exuded an air of innocence that sharply contrasted with the image of the leather-clad editors. Looking me up and down, one of the women told me that she had considered asking me to pose for the magazine, but had now decided against it. I was not offended, merely relieved.

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By Julie Bindel

During the conversation I asked the women if they had a line in the sand that they would not cross in terms of pornographic and sadomasochistic content. One of them gave me an example: “We had a story submitted by a woman to fantasised setting fire to her I lover, and it was very graphic, but we couldn’t decide between us whether or not it was too extreme to run it, so it is still sitting in our in-tray.” If it was not already obvious to me that there could be no peaceful coexistence between feminism and S&M practitioners, that moment crystallised it.

The film, rather than draw any conclusions about the Rebel Dyke scene is a nostalgic trip down a particular memory lane. A number of the interviewees, including Roz Kaveny and Lisa Power, are still actively campaigning to discredit feminists — in particular those of us who critique pornography, kink, and extreme trans ideology.

That’s what struck me particularly forcefully: that not much has changed. Today, feminists who oppose porn and prostitution as forms of violence against women are seen as anti-sex and ‘whorephobic’; the Queer movement is enthusiastically embracing kink as an identity as part of the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIA+. But the Rebel Dykes did not have the institutional support that the feminist hating Queer Isis of today does.

For all the S&M lesbians saw themselves (and clearly still do, going by the views expressed by the talking heads in the film) as edgy, progressive and sex-positive, they were anything but. Buying in to the misogynistic myths that women love to be hurt and humiliated during sex — that pain is erotic; that pleasure can be derived from the steel-capped boot on the neck — is nothing short of capitulating to patriarchy. I will continue to fight for the liberation of women from sexual violation, because for me, the true rebels are those who refuse to see masochism as anything to celebrate.

I have known Kathleen since 2018, when I discovered her research on gender identity and women’s sex-based rights. We have remained close since then, and I have looked on with horror at the abhorrent treatment she has been forced to endure in recent months.

Watch the full 50 minute interview on UnHerdTV below, or listen to the podcast version here:

When I interviewed Kathleen for UnHerd this morning, she detailed the true extent of the aggressive campaign of targeted harassment she’s been forced to endure. Kathleen might be a mild-mannered, liberal academic, but she is not one to shy away from a fight. Her decision to leave Sussex after 18 years teaching there was no easy decision.

“I went to work as normal, and saw stickers all over my building about the ‘transphobic shit that comes out of Kathleen Stock’s mouth’,” Kathleen says. “That was obviously distressing but the next day it escalated.” As she walked to campus from the train station, she was confronted with a number of posters calling for her to be sacked: “Fire Kathleen Stock”, “Kathleen Stock’s A Transphobe”, “We’re Not Paying Our Fees For Transphobia With Kathleen Stock”.

“They were setting off flares… And they later took a picture of a man in a balaclava, all in black, looking just like Antifa. The imagery was obviously intimidating: holding a massive banner saying ‘Stock out’, while setting off pink and blue flares because those are the colours on the transgender flag.

“I ran back to the station, got the train home, tried to teach a class on Zoom, burst into tears and my dear students said I must be having a tough day and they let me off,” says Kathleen. “It was the beginning of the end of the campaign to intimidate me out of my job.”

The campaign to push Stock out of Sussex began after she self-published a number blog posts critical of extreme transgender ideology. Kathleen was concerned that the majority of academics, including philosophers such as herself, were reluctant to criticise campaigns to introduce self-identification for transgender people. After all, she thought, why should we just ignore material categories such as sex?

But to implement self-identification without question is to ignore a key safeguarding problem. As Kathleen puts it, “Self  ID policies trade on a fantasy that suddenly putting on a dress or saying ‘I’m a woman’ will change your basic nature. But, in fact, what was there before will be there after. Humans are humans, and if you make it the case that you can self identify into a better situation than you were in — i.e. a woman’s prison as opposed to a male prison, which are usually less intense, aggressive places — then some people will do it, whether they’re trans or not.” And as both Kathleen and I keep saying, this isn’t about every trans person. It’s a safeguarding policy.

Further reading

The hounding of Kathleen Stock

By Timandra Harkness

“These academics were not attending to the obvious consequences for women,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, there were plenty of academics who were cheerleading self-ID, ostentatiously moralising about it, and talking about Terfs and transphobia.”

Kathleen continues: “Gender identity theory is egregiously false. It is terrible, pseudo philosophy and would fail a first-year essay. As a philosopher who cares about logic and truth at a basic level, I couldn’t believe that all these academics were just waving it through.”

One aspect in particular that baffled her was the claim that a person’s belief about their psychological identity, whether they are male or female, is more important than their material sex at birth — not least due to the impact such categories have on medicine, sport, science, education and more.

“I’m a lesbian and a feminist,” states Kathleen. “I assumed that academic feminists were covering women and girls’ rights and I didn’t need to get involved. I started to see that they were not only not covering it, but they were also actively undermining women’s rights in the name of feminism, and there were all these knock-on consequences for lesbians. On all those levels, it annoyed the fuck out of me.”

Although Kathleen is understandably upset by the conduct of the small number of abusive students, she is adamant that many of them are taking a cue from the influential adults around them. “I don’t think they’ve actually read what I think. There’s a lot of enabling, or inciting, of individuals in this story,” she says.

Further reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

“Many of these academics contribute to an environment in which some pretty terrible things are happening to, for instance, children in gender identity clinics. I can see why they had a vested interest in shutting me down.”

She stresses: “I absolutely believe that trans people should be protected in law, so I’m never going to waiver from that. I just disagree about the laws that should be used.”

Like a number of other women in the public eye who have been deemed to be transphobic, Kathleen is tired of being “lumped in with holocaust deniers” as the personification of all evil.

“I’m not even a free speech absolutist,” she says. “This is preposterous framing and entirely set up by our enemies to mean that we can’t win. All we’re doing is insisting on basic obvious facts of biology and their social significance. Nearly 99% of the planet agrees with us. The most I can get out of people is a tentative ‘Well, we absolutely support Kathleen Stock’s right to say what she thinks’ but they won’t say ‘And yeah, of course we agree with her because it’s bloody obvious’.”

And this insistence on keeping silent has had a toxic impact on the transgender debate, allowing small groups of extremely vocal and aggressive activists to fill that gap. For example, Kathleen firmly believes that Stonewall is in large part responsible for the current witch hunt mentality. As someone who has experienced the ensuing vitriol first-hand, it is hard not to agree. During the past few years, its business model has prioritised promoting a very narrow conception of what they would call trans rights.

“I would say these rights don’t benefit trans people,” says Kathleen. “But they were already embedded in all these national institutions, government departments, the CPS, the EHRC, almost all of our universities, schools and local authorities. And being in one of their schemes means these institutions get a constant stream of instructions such as: ‘We would really appreciate it if you would put out a tweet lobbying for this project’. Our national institutions have almost unwittingly been instruments to be used by extremists.”

Those extremists are swift to accuse Kathleen of “weaponising her trauma” if she ever dares talk about how the attacks have affected her personally. Which they have, obviously. She insists on talking about it, though, because it’s not just affecting high-profile characters like us two. “It’s what’s happening now in every institution, not just universities, to women who feel like they’re choking,” she explains. “They cannot get their words out — or if they do, then they’re put through complaints systems, they’re socially ostracised, they are told by their bosses, ‘we’re watching your Twitter feed.’ There’s just this feeling of surveillance that is unacceptable. So that’s why we have to talk about the human cost.”

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What was the final straw for Kathleen? She tells me it was when the Sussex branch of the University and College Union (UCU) put out a statement in support of “our trans and non-binary students” and against “institutional transphobia”.

“At that point I was just hanging on. I was teaching from home. I saw the posters. I was advised to stay at home for my own protection. The police were coming round. I’m getting security stuff delivered to my house, trying to think about the future. I thought I’d  have to stay off campus for the rest of the term but at least I can teach on Zoom. I hoped they would support me.”

And then her UCU branch issued its damning statement. “It was a pompous peroration about ‘standing with our trans and non binary students against institutional transphobia’” Kathleen explains. “And all they could possibly mean by that is that I was there”.

“There’s nobody else who speaks out like I do. Plus, every second communication that comes out of the university is about trans and non-binary spaces in the library and trans or non-binary support groups and LGBT issues. There’s a staff network; there’s a Centre for Sexual Dissidence; there’s a Centre for Gender Studies.

“It’s literally saturated with positive messaging. It’s in Brighton, one of the most queer-friendly places in the world. So all they could mean by institutional transphobia is: ‘We haven’t shut that bitch up yet’. It came through on my email and it just felt like a punch in the gut.

“But this is a union! They are supposed to protect employees from their bosses and to offer solidarity with anyone who is an employee — especially in a university where they are being targeted for their academic research and their philosophical beliefs, which are also protected in law under the equality act.”

And, Kathleen tells me, this intolerance trickles all the way down from the top of UCU. As far back as 2019, for instance, Jo Grady, UCU’s general secretary, boasted of her decision to instal ‘Terf Blocker software’ on Twitter, which automatically blocks any account that has been deemed transphobic.

“Grady is not unusual in academia,” says Kathleen. “She has these relatively extreme views but they’ve become the norm and it’s all so moralised. These people are a small number of hardcore totalitarians.”

I ask Kathleen if there’s anything we can do. How can we enable students to critically examine controversial topics without being scared to speak out?

“What we can do is demand that universities reduce the influence of lobbying groups like Stonewall, and insist that senior management do not make politically loaded pronouncements in controversial areas of public dispute.”

Further reading

Nobody wins the gender wars

By Mary Harrington

She explains that having transgender flags on campuses, holding quasi-religious ceremonies such as Trans Day of Remembrance and so on are not neutral gestures, despite how they are presented. These are political gestures and managers should not be participating in them.

Despite all the abuse she’s received, Kathleen believes there is better news on the horizon. She has seen a tsunami of support from Government ministers, students, feminists and, of course, right-minded liberals who are now less afraid to speak out, having been inspired by Kathleen and others who have put their heads above the parapet.

“We’re obviously having some success because I see more and more people speaking out. I think as the public becomes better educated about the basic issues and our particular position, which is the opposite of how it has been represented.

“One thing that’s happened recently is that the Guardian and the BBC are no longer presenting our views as anti-trans or transphobic. And at least some of the people working there seem aware that there’s actually a proper intellectual dispute here. Beforehand, I honestly think Guardian readers hardly knew about any of the implications of self-identification. They just were being protected from that information, because it wasn’t serving the newspaper’s business model very well.”

What will Kathleen do next? “I’m not going to stop,” she tells me with defiance. “In leaving Sussex, I’ve become even more able to speak out and now I’ve got a bigger platform.”

What she does with that platform is yet to be seen. But I suspect it won’t be long until we find out.

Its founders, including Ian McKellen, fought a very public, often personal but ultimately successful battle to bring about political change through changing hearts and minds. John Major’s government, the New Labour government of Tony Blair, and finally the Conservative-led coalition of David Cameron saw every single one of the unequal treatments of gay British people rescinded. By 2013, when the Coalition passed the gay marriage act, the battle for gay rights was essentially won.

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.

So, it appears, was the case with Stonewall, who around the time that the Conservatives passed the gay marriage act, decided to pivot onto an entirely new cause: gender ideology.

Trans rights had always been part of the LGBT cause. Most gay people were sympathetic to the small number of trans people we met in bars or clubs. But their cause was not the same as ours — and, besides, most trans people seemed to want to just get on with their lives, passing as the opposite sex and being accepted. This all changed the moment Ruth Hunt took over as chief executive of Stonewall in 2014. With her arrival, the organisation’s focus changed. And the cry of Stonewall adverts “Some people are gay. Get over it”, morphed into a more complex set of assertions. This included the claim that some people are trans so, therefore, biological sex does not exist and, in fact, there is an endlessly growing number of different gender identities.

Perhaps Hunt and her colleagues did not realise the explosive device they were placing beneath their own movement. For if you accept that there is no such thing as sex, but only self-identifying “gender”, then same-sex attracted people are erased. This means you delete your core constituency if you are an organisation like Stonewall. Regardless, Stonewall persevered. Not least because by now they had discovered an especially lucrative business.

This was summed up in what became known as the Stonewall Equality Index and Diversity Champions Scheme. The charity would effectively audit companies and other public and private sector organisations to grade how good they were for LGBT employees and how advanced they were in LGBT rights. Again, at the start of this project in the 2000s there was something to be said for it. But by the 2010s, it was charging companies £2,500 just to apply to be part of the Diversity Champions Scheme. Commercial interest had taken over. As The Times demonstrated, Stonewall confected arbitrary rules to force employers into doing more to become Diversity Champions. It coerced those involved in the scheme to lobby for Stonewall’s point of view. And it misrepresented the law in relation to trans rights, confusing the law of the land with Stonewall’s preferred law.

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After publication of The Times report, Equalities Minister Liz Truss called for government departments to leave the Stonewall scheme. Around the same time, the Equality and Human Rights Commission also left, saying that it was not best value for money. The fact that Stonewall had been appraising the work of the EHRC was a demonstration of just where the organisation had been sitting in the new clerical class that had come to dominate Britain. The principles of this new elite were centered around the new religion of “diversity” and “equality”, and the groups which claimed to be the holders of the doctrines of this faith had done exceptionally well. Until now.

As things started to fall apart Stonewall and its allies responded in the way of all trapped elites. They continued to accuse their critics of malicious-intent (specifically, in this case, bigotry) and refused to take any of the criticisms onboard. So a devastating summary judgement came down upon them which they did not even bother to answer. It came from a somewhat surprising source.

The BBC is among the corporations to have been caught up in Stonewall’s various schemes. And yet the questions over Stonewall’s connection with the BBC and the wider British elite came from a far-flung, if noble, corner of the great BBC empire: Stephen Nolan of BBC Radio Ulster.

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Nolan takes 10 episodes to fully investigate the influence of Stonewall and its empire. This includes the gender ideology that Stonewall pushes, its closeness to government, its penetration of Ofcom and, finally its closeness to the BBC itself. It is a remarkable act of journalism, demonstrating that among the finest attributes of the BBC is the ability of people at the corporation to question their own bosses.

It also, inevitably, takes some time to get through. And so the response has been predictably ill-informed. Stonewall’s defenders — and those pushing the same ideology as the group — immediately attacked the podcast and its makers. They did so suspiciously fast, given that you’d need to dedicate at least eight hours to listen to the whole thing. As Stonewall’s foundations started to collapse, they attempted to rise above the fray. As Gareth Roberts noted, their response was a deeply unserious tweet asserting that they were simply working towards a better world.

https://twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1448654195658088453?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

They didn’t address any of the very serious questions raised by Nolan: questions about Stonewall’s undue influence inside and outside government, its misrepresentation of the law, its displacement of the law with its own interpretation of it (or hope for it) and its ability (through OfCom in particular) to effectively mark its own homework.

Stonewall has tried to pretend that it is above answering these very significant questions. But it is not. One clip from Nolan demonstrates this above all. It’s with Ben Cohen, the founder and Chief Executive of Pink News. The legacy online gay publication likes to act as a sort of ideological enforcer for Stonewall, pursuing their perceived opponents and otherwise engaging in activism in the guise of journalism. They attend the same black tie dinners and Downing Street receptions.

But worth the price of listening to the Nolan show alone is the moment in episode three when Nolan asks Cohen to define a couple of the gender-bollocks terms that Stonewall and others expect everyone in the UK, including BBC presenters like Nolan to be able to understand and all those “Diversity Champions” out there. What is “two-spirit?” Nolan asks Cohen. Cohen cannot explain. What about “genderqueer”? Again Cohen is stumped. While undeniably funny, this moment also represents something very serious in Stonewall’s wider collapse.

It is one thing that a group should be caught out in a dodgy money-making scheme. It is another that people should be seeing through their influence-peddling operations. Yet it is far worse when a clerical class cannot explain the doctrines of their own faith. A faith they have been busy trying to spew out across the whole of society, but which is so baseless, that even the priestly class doesn’t know what they are talking about. It is the end of the faith.

Dressed head to toe in black, her hair swept into a glorious silver-grey chignon, she told me she was “in mourning” for her former lover David, who had not died but left Claudia many years ago. Describing David as “a cross between George Best and Jesus Christ”, Claudia told me her life story.

Born male, Claudia grew up on a run-down estate in Glasgow, where she was mercilessly bullied for being gay. Then, in the early Eighties, Claudia met David, who soon announced he was “not gay” and that therefore Claudia “must be a woman”. She had genital surgery in 1986.

“I changed for all the wrong reasons,” Claudia told me. David walked out a year after the operation. Claudia and I became firm friends and remain so to this day. I later wrote about her for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, but the editors decided not to put the article online, so it was not widely read.

Not so my now-infamous column in the Guardian, entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”, in which I railed against a trans woman who had tried to have a rape crisis centre in Vancouver shut down by tying its staff up in years of litigation. The fall-out was immediate; the Reader’s Editor received more than 200 letters of complaint, many as a result of lobbying by trans activists. (He would later distance himself from the article, claiming “it abused an already abused minority”.)

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I began to receive death and rape threats by email, as well as messages that I was “being watched”. I was used to my feminist views being unpopular: those of us who name and blame men for violence towards women are often warned to keep quiet. But nothing could prepare me for the misogyny of extreme transgender activists.

Despite the hostility, I contacted a number of trans people to see if they were willing to talk. Over the years I had debated countless prominent activists at public events. It was always respectful, warm and, in some cases, truly enlightening for both sides. I kept in touch with some of my opponents and friendships were formed.

In 2007, I was asked by the BBC to take part in Hecklers, a live radio programme with an aggressive format. I was asked to put forward my view — that sex-change operations constitute unnecessary mutilation — before an audience of doctors and transgender people at the Royal Society of Medicine. Two trans people, a gender clinician and Peter Tatchell were put up to argue against me.

I was convinced I would mess up, and was too scared to invite my feminist allies to watch. But I survived, and afterwards stayed for a drink with several of the audience. Two individual trans men came up to me, lifted their T-shirts and showed me their double mastectomy scars. A trans woman told me that before transition and hormones she was being “poisoned by testosterone”. There was no animosity, except for the fact that Claudia, who had insisted on coming along to support me, was cruelly snubbed by her own community. Solidarity never extends to those who speak out against the transgender doctrine.

The following year, I was nominated for the Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall for my work on anti-lesbian violence. I had no interest in the nomination, which had come from the public as opposed to an internal vote by the charity. But when the gay media decided to go absolutely berserk about my nomination, I changed my mind: I had to go, despite the fact that I had long made public my view that Stonewall prioritised rich gay men over lesbians.

Soon social media was awash with petitions, open letters and plans for a demonstration at the event. There was talk of how to storm the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the event was being held. But Stonewall held firm.

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The crowd greeting me on arrival was loud and aggressive. My name was plastered over dozens of placards, and “Bindel the bigot” was being screamed through loudhailers. Once I had managed to enter the building, I was told by one of the judges that I was the clear winner, but the panel had received strict instructions that I was not to be given the award. So it was given to a heterosexual agony aunt.

The impact of that decision would extend far beyond the handing-out of a mundane prize. It galvanised the modern day trans-rights movement: the old guard — such as Press for Change founders Christine Burns and Stephen Whittle — started to be dismissed as irrelevant and too conciliatory, with the younger blue-fringe crew declaring themselves the new overlords.

From 2008 onwards, whenever I was invited to speak alongside a transgender activist or ally, the event would face threats of being shut down or disrupted. In 2010 I was invited to speak at “Queer Question Time” at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I turned up to face a massive demonstration of well over 100 trans activists, shouting my name through loudhailers, jostling me as I tried to enter the building. Many of the protesters came inside for the event, and every time I opened my mouth, screamed over me.

The atmosphere became so toxic that one of my co-panellists, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, was forced to say: “I’m sure that you do have people that put you in danger, but I can’t imagine Julie Bindel is one.” From the floor, an object was thrown across the room and hit me just below the eye. I was terrified, even though it turned out to be a lanyard, thrown by a trans woman.

But at least the event had been able to take place. From 2008, the UK National Union of Students (NUS) has included me on its “no-platform” list, alongside fascist groups and individuals. This meant that even when I was invited to speak at universities on male violence towards women and girls, the NUS would threaten to withdraw any financial support it had given to the organiser. Inevitably I would be dropped, publicly, to protect the event.

For many that still wasn’t enough. In 2011, upset that I was still invited to speak at the occasional university event, the NUS Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) conference voted to no-platform me once and for all. The motion summed up their spiteful worldview: “This conference believes that Julie Bindle [sic] is vile.”

And on it went. In Denmark, at a conference on how to end the harms caused to women by the global sex trade, I had to be escorted out of the venue by police officers after an angry mob started to bang loudly on the windows and scream through loudhailers. At another event, in Spain, where I was asked to deliver a keynote speech on rape, I was stopped from going on stage with minutes to spare. I later discovered that a major funder of the organising group had raised concerns about “transphobia, as reflected by the invitation to Julie Bindel to speak.”

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I am, of course, not the only activist to be harassed. Over the years, I have made friends with a number of trans people who have also been harassed and de-platformed when attempting to have discussions with feminists such as myself. I’ve interviewed dozens of de-transitioners who have been cast asunder after expressing regret about transitioning. I also know many trans people who are perfectly happy with their decision — but none of them believe it is reasonable to demand that they encroach women-only spaces such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services, prisons or hospital wards.

The problem, after all, is not trans people. It is extreme trans activism — a men’s rights movement which has grown out of the backlash against feminism, in particular the type of feminism that seeks to eradicate male violence towards women and girls.

For me, the costs of being targeted in this way have been enormous — and not just in relation to my unpaid activism. The mob follows me around, preventing me from speaking on how to end male violence under the guise of “protecting trans-rights”. Whenever I speak about prostitution, an expertise of mine, I am told that I “clearly hate trans sex workers”, as though everything comes back to that.

Faced with such vitriol, my mental health took a hammering. I began to feel ashamed of the trouble I was causing for those who invited me to speak. I would find myself apologising to them, which they would graciously accept as though they had done something commendable by having me there, despite my decades of active feminism and public profile.

I started to wonder if perhaps I was a monster — and I was ridiculously grateful to those who did not hide or apologise for the fact that they had any public connection to me. My self-confidence fell to rock bottom, as I doubted my abilities, skills and knowledge. On hearing of the latest cancellation, I would end up highly distressed and in floods of tears, knowing that mud often sticks. I was offered a newspaper column only to have it withdrawn after several staff members announced they would publicly argue against my appointment.

I spent years trying to warn my fellow feminists that if they stood by and let them scapegoat me, eventually they would come after every dissenter. First on the list would be the lesbians, because we are a thorn in the side of misogynistic gay men. Yet when I appealed to academics to stand with me and not cancel an event I was speaking at, most turned the other cheek and decided a quiet life was better.

And so now, here we are. The witches are being drowned and the bitches burned at the stake. Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd and many other women whose names you will never know are being put through hell.

But another, largely hidden cost of this war is the lost opportunity for solidarity. As a young lesbian, trans people were my friends and allies. That is how it should be. Those of us who live on the margins of society, and who are discriminated against, should have each other’s backs. We are all victims of this bloody battle.

To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.

It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.

But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.

It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.

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The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.

For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.

But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.

The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.

Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)

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How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights

By Douglas Murray

This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.

Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.

As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.

But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?

For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.

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Why I can't trust Stonewall any more

By Jonny Best

For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.

Art, he warned, is in its final throes, largely thanks to its obsession with cliches. He went on to describe a group of children who were asked what they thought artists did. One child responded: “They notice things.”

Much has changed in the art world, as well as the world at large, since those lectures were recorded. Perry’s crossdressing is no longer seen as unusual. It would not raise a single eyebrow amidst all the gender identities, “preferred pronouns” and codes of conduct that have rapidly taken hold of Britain’s institutions.

Guided by Stonewall and its Diversity Champion Scheme, companies and Government departments now require its employees to comply with new and increasingly wide-ranging speech rules. That Stonewall deliberately misrepresents the existing equality law does not matter. These employers are desperate to appear inclusive and diverse — whatever the cost.

I noticed things.

Just over a month ago, thanks to a blog post I had written in 2019, I was publicly “cancelled” and then swiftly “un-cancelled” by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in a spectacular fashion. I had criticised and questioned the dangers of gender identity ideology, its effect on women’s rights, single sex spaces and services, as well as its corrosive impact on language itself. Something was shifting in our society; even the act of noticing, discussing or creating work about gender had started to feel uncomfortable, creating tangible repercussions for those who did.

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The Royal Academy's woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

As a self-taught “outsider artist”, I have never aspired to be a member of the cultural establishment. That is partly because my chosen artform of embroidery had long been relegated to its little “women’s craft corner” and not taken seriously as fine art, and partly because I had not taken the traditional route into my art career. I came into it sideways via a 22-year-long hairdressing career, making it vastly more difficult to be taken seriously as an artist.

So perhaps I should have had no expectations towards the art establishment during the RA episode. And yet I found it remarkable that my peers remained silent. Artists, after all, require freedom of thought and expression to be able to create something that is vital, engaging and sometimes challenging to the viewer. So why would they choose to absent themselves from a discussion about those values?

With very few exceptions, the entirety of the UK arts scene stayed well clear of the spectacle. Rachel Ara, a fellow “cancelled” artist, withdrew her submission from the Summer Exhibition in solidarity with me, and one Royal Academician reached out in support. One.

Was everyone else too scared to speak out? Certainly Grayson Perry kept quiet — as he has done throughout a number of debates over transgenderism and censorship in recent years.

Is “being a cliché” no longer a problem? Is “sucking up to an academic elite” now more important than “noticing things” and conveying them through our work? Perhaps loss of courage is the trade-off one makes for a successful career within the arts establishment. I wouldn’t know, but I noticed things.

Having grown up in East Berlin — a breeding ground for its own type of severe authoritarianism — I am increasingly aware of the parallels between today and the censorious regime that shaped most of my grandparents’ lives and my parents’ formative years. There is a creeping anxiety towards expressing any thought that could be perceived as criticism or scepticism towards an orthodox narrative. You can be punished, socially ostracised and fired at a moment’s notice. In effect, nobody is free from the consequences of their speech.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Jess De Wahls

What, then, is the meaning of free speech and expression?

As a society, we define freedom of speech as a principle that supports an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship or legal sanction. The term freedom of expression is usually used synonymously but, in a legal sense, includes any activity of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used.

The recent Forstater Judgment determined that gender critical views (or as I like to call them: “an understanding of the immutability of sex”) are now protected under the law. And the public outcry in response to my mistreatment by the RA gave a good indication that such views are far from unusual or in any way hateful, despite great efforts to portray them as such.

Germany has a troubling legacy in more ways than one. I have often spoken to my octogenarian grandmothers about life under the Nazis, and read an abundance of literature about the period. I personally caught the tail-end of the German Democratic Republic, which saw itself as a “people’s democracy” but was, in fact, a dictatorship.

Many people hailing from such places, who have witnessed the creeping ideological hold of authoritarianism first-hand, have contacted me to share their concerns about the present. Like me, they can see how censorship is starting to seep into every walk of life.

The question now is how to respond. I have often wondered if, had I been alive in 1930s Germany, I would have spoken truth to power. Would I have recognised the moment when the mood started to shift and things started to go awry? Or would I have been like a frog in tepid water that is slowly brought to the boil, not aware of the imminent danger until it’s too late?

It is impossible to say, but we all fancy ourselves the hero of our own story. But surely it says something about our current situation that a vocal but tiny minority of voices, amplified by social media, is able to force a major institution such as the Royal Academy of Art to forget its raison d’etre and publicly disavow an artist for her perceived thought crimes?

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How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights

By Douglas Murray

Yes, in my case it backfired. I refused to back down and, with the help of a number of journalists, dragged the incident into the public realm kicking and screaming.

But what about the two previous years, during which I had to leave my job at Soho Theatre after it was threatened for renting out their space to me? What of the work collaborations that were boycotted due to guilt by association, so much so that I stopped them altogether in an attempt to protect my former partners?

That is my story — but I am far from the only artist who has been forced to live it. For every news story in the national press, there are dozens of quiet cancellations and insidious demands for language to be changed.

Artists have long been the canaries in the coal mine, providing advance warning once they detect dangers that others haven’t quite seen yet. That is why they “notice things”. Because when they no longer do, the rest of society suffers.

When I sought legal representation to bring a claim against my ex-employer, two major law firms refused to take my case, with one dropping it just days before I was due to launch a crowdfunding appeal because of concern about “transphobia”. When I complained to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, it said that it was not a breach of professional standards to vet and reject clients.

In the meantime, I looked around for another job in the international development sector, but was told I was too controversial to employ. Then a person I had never met complained to The Scout Association that I had referred to them as “he” rather than non-binary “they” in a short exchange on Twitter,  reporting me as a “bigot” and “transphobe”. The Scouts launched a full investigation, concluding that I might not be fit to continue as a volunteer Scout Leader because I responded to the complaint by saying that, although my pronoun slip-up was an accident and I would generally try refer to people as they felt comfortable, if I came across someone male in the ladies’ showers at Scout Camp I would not worry about respecting their pronouns. The judge in my employment case also took this as a sign that my views should be condemned.

I asked the Fawcett Society, an organisation that dates back to the Suffragettes, if it would speak up about my case. It declined. Its former CEO, Sam Smethers, singled me out on the day she left the organisation as someone she wouldn’t miss. Stonewall and a host of LGBT organisations wrote saying it was a “kick in the teeth” when the Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened to argue in support of my right to freedom of belief. Amnesty International and the TUC have only commented on my case to emphasise the rights of transgender people.

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My experience, however, is far from unique. I have heard from hundreds of people who faced similar harassment, victimisation and discrimination because they have refused to fall into line with the new dogma of gender fluidity. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that our common, everyday view — despite being painted as controversial and dangerous — aligns with the law of the land.

That there are two sexes, and that people cannot literally change sex, are plain statements of fact that also align with British law. Sex is recognised as a matter of biology. Since 2004 the Gender Recognition Act has enabled people to change their legally deemed sex for certain purposes, but it also recognises that this doesn’t change their actual sex (for example in relation to motherhood or fatherhood, sport, religion and inheritance).

A powerful lobby group led by the charity Stonewall, which used to campaign for gay rights, has told organisations to go “above and beyond” the law. As a result, we now live in a society where articulating the law is deemed an offence for which powerful people and organisations will try to ruin your life, while others look away.

And so I sued my ex-employer for discrimination and victimisation. Victimisation has a specific legal meaning: being treated badly because you have taken action to protect your rights under the Equality Act. My “protected act” was to highlight what the law says about the sexes — that men are male and women are female.

My legal team argued that as well as this being the law, I was also protected against belief discrimination. People who hold the opposite belief — that only gender identity matters, that “trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid” — are also protected. This is as it should be in an open, pluralist society.

But the Center for Global Development, my ex-employer, argued that only one belief system — one that rejects the UK legal definition of sex — should be tolerated, and that those who share my belief (and agree with the current law) are bigots who should have no protection against being harassed by colleagues for their views and having their livelihood destroyed.

Shockingly, the employment tribunal agreed with this, judging my belief “unworthy of respect in a democratic society” and thus excluded from the protection that is given to other beliefs (or lack of beliefs) such as in the doctrine of the Trinity, transubstantiation, ethical veganism, stoicism and Scottish nationalism.

Last month the Employment Appeal Tribunal reversed the employment tribunal’s decision. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Choudhury, remarked that “where a belief or a major tenet of it appears to be in accordance with the law of the land, then it is all the more jarring that it should be declared as one not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The idea that the law is out of date and can be ignored is widely embedded in organisations’ diversity policies that confuse and conflate sex and “gender identity”. A key reason is that many are signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme, which, according to Stonewall itself, covers a quarter of the UK workforce. Members include Whitehall departments, universities, NHS trusts and police forces, as well as large swathes of the corporate and voluntary sectors.

Gender-identity lobby groups even train the media and the judiciary. Views similar to Stonewall’s, for instance, are echoed repeatedly in the “Equal Treatment Bench Book” — the guidance written by judges, for judges, on how to treat people fairly in the justice system. The Bench Book says that the language used in the Equality Act 2010 is “now widely considered to be out-of-date and stigmatising”. It tells judges that “man” and “woman” are genders, not sexes, that there are “people who identify with no particular gender or who are gender-fluid”. The gender landscape, it says, “is rapidly changing, as is the terminology in the field”.

That government departments, public bodies, professional regulators and the judiciary are disregarding the law in favour of rapidly changing terminology controlled by a lobby group should be alarming to all. It undermines democracy, justice, freedom of speech and the integrity of organisations. Most importantly, by confusing adults and children about sex, it undermines safeguarding.

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By Douglas Murray

Only last month, for example, the employment tribunal heard another case of a woman punished for speaking up; Sonia Appleby, the safeguarding lead at the NHS Tavistock Clinic. In 2019 she raised concerns about the treatment of young people suffering from a feeling of disassociation from their sexed body, saying that safeguarding failures were a “Jimmy Savile waiting to happen”. The Tribunal heard that instead of responding to her concerns, management put a letter in her personnel file and told clinical staff not to talk to her.

It’s cases like these — and many other that we have heard — that led me, together with a team of lawyers and academics, to establish a new human-rights organisation, Sex Matters, earlier this year. It campaigns for clarity about sex in law and policy, seeking to help other organisations wake up from this nightmare.

One way is do this is by using freedom of information requests to shine light on the influence of gender-identity lobby groups. We are also calling on employers to leave the Stonewall scheme. The Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, Ofsted and the Equality and Human Rights Commission are among the 40 organisations we know have left. But 800 or so are hanging on. The Government Legal Department (which advises other departments on what the law says) remains an enthusiastic member, as do the Home Office and the Scottish Government.

Interestingly, Stonewall has responded to criticism by changing its public story. After years of telling employers that the law is outdated, it now claims its advice is in line with the law it has derided, as set out in the Statutory Codes of Practice for employers and service providers.

Yet as analysis published by Sex Matters today reveals, in our report “Understanding the Risk of Following Stonewall Advice” there is an alarming gap between Stonewall’s advice and the Statutory Code of Practice for employers. Stonewall’s approach ignores the rights of other employees, focusing only on advancing gender ideology. In particular, Stonewall’s advice, replaces the Equality Act’s protected characteristics characteristics of sex (being male or female) and “gender reassignment” with a single characteristic, “gender identity” — so that women and trans women are said to have the same “gender identity”. It also states that employers must allow people to choose which toilets and other facilities to use based on their gender identity — and that challenging or denying them access amounts to harassment.

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So what can be done? Well, we will plan to send our report to every Stonewall Champion and to every minister, MP, peer and member of a devolved legislative assembly. Concerned readers can also write to their MPs and representatives, and to organisations they have links with, asking them to leave the Stonewall scheme and return to following the law that protects all their employees.

We are also today sending an open letter with over ten thousand signatures to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We are calling for a public inquiry into how so many public bodies could have abandoned the Nolan principles of acting in the public interest with integrity, objectivity and accountability, and instead adopted policies that make people afraid of complying with the law, or even of saying what it is.

Such behaviour is not worthy of respect in our democratic institutions. I have already experienced first-hand what can happen when we allow the law to be misinterpreted. And if we don’t wake up to the way it’s being distorted, I certainly won’t be the last.

The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.

There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.

Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.

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Instead Stonewall went the other way, and decided to cash in on its victory. This is, of course, unsurprising. For it is at the point at which you are victorious that you are most popular, and those who were once not by your side swiftly become your allies.

So it was with the corporate world and the machinery of government. Both the private and public sector suddenly provided Stonewall great reservoirs of cash to keep the organisation’s coffers full. Both were willing to invite Stonewall in to tell them what they could or should do better.

For instance, Stonewall had for some years been producing a list of the top employers for gay people in the UK. Yet even though the battle for equality was all but finished during the Blair and Cameron years, major companies suddenly decided that they wanted desperately to be on the list; having Stonewall’s gay stamp of approval became essential. With time, it became standard procedure for a company to invite Stonewall in to grade their commercial operations. Thus was born a relationship which was compromised from the outset and rife with vested interests.

Meanwhile, the Government became increasingly obsessed with obtaining the same gold star from Stonewall, asking the group to instruct departments what to do in their own workplaces, as well as craft policies in the wider world.

In particular, one of Stonewall’s most influential money-making programmes of recent years has been its “Diversity Champions scheme”, in which members are invited to pay a fee to Stonewall to allow the group to vet their internal policies. Among the 850 groups who have signed up are GCHQ, MI5, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice.

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Why I can't trust Stonewall any more

By Jonny Best

Yet the degeneration of Stonewall has been evident for years; indeed, you can see it in the calibre of people involved at the top. When Stonewall started out, its leaders were prominent in the British media and public life. They were known to people who were straight, and certainly known to people who were gay.

Can the same be said today? I doubt it. In fact, I suspect if you were to visit every gay venue, you would find that fewer than one person in a hundred would be able to name Nancy Kelley as the current head of Stonewall. They would not know who she was or what she does. And that is because the group is neither at any forefront, nor any barricade. It is instead a business still running largely for the comfort of its employees.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Stonewall is merely rich and benign. Far from it. For it is at just such a moment, when the coffers are full and the beneficiaries are content, that an organisation is liable to take a wrong turn. And that is what Stonewall has done in recent years. It says that its job is to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. But in reality, the first three letters of that acronym slipped off Stonewall’s radar at least six years ago. That was when Stonewall decided to sustain what campaigning impetus it had by arguing — along with a number of other legacy organisations — that nobody who is gay will be free until all TQ+ people have the same rights as everyone else.

And there are several problems here. Firstly, it is not clear that trans rights have any intersection (to borrow a popular term) at all with gay rights. In fact, they run very distinctly counter to them. It is, for instance, perfectly possible that boys and girls who do not conform to gender stereotypes may grow up to be happily straight or gay.

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Britain is not a transphobic country

By Debbie Hayton

Surely a group which protected gay people would recognise that there is a need for nuance here? It would certainly not jump on the increasingly dogmatic bandwagon that claims — running against all the progress made by the gay rights movement — that such children are most likely of the opposite sex.

Yet what is worse is that rather than being open to a discussion with gay people who differ on these issues, Stonewall has decided to undermine them — and in some cases actually persecute them.

The recent case of Allison Bailey is instructive. Bailey is a criminal defence barrister, a feminist and a lesbian who, in response to Stonewall’s “trans agenda”, helped to set up the LGB Alliance. Stonewall, as a result, attempted to get Bailey into severe trouble at work, not least by helping to get her barrister’s chambers to put her under investigation because of her views on sex and gender. All of this and much more reveals the despicable bullying tactics deployed by Stonewall. It has, to put it simply, turned into an organisation that hounds gay and lesbian people who dare to disagree with them.

This week sees the group celebrate its 32^nd anniversary — a landmark which nobody but its employees could possibly celebrate. Yet even they will likely do so with a sense of profound unease; in recent days, one of its founders, Matthew Parris, publicly urged Stonewall to stay out of the trans wars, while the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that it would not be renewing its membership.

And quite right, too. No taxpayer-funded entity should be funnelling money to Stonewall. And private companies who continue to do so should be made aware that they are supporting a group which has stopped looking out for gay people and started hounding them in their workplaces instead.

So happy 32^nd birthday, Stonewall. And no offence, but I hope you don’t make it to 33.