In some ways you’ve got to hand it to Stonewall. A Supreme Court ruling that it has been misinterpreting the law for years might have given a lesser organisation reason to pause. But not this one.
Since its whole-hearted embrace of trans ideology in 2015 (which added a sudden T to its previous LGB), Stonewall has told the many institutions it’s worked with — among them the BBC, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice, any number of British universities and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — that anybody who identifies as a woman should be regarded as one when it comes to such things as single-sex spaces. It continued to do so even when a lot of them (including all those above) left its Diversity Champions programme, citing anxieties about the overly hardline approach.
But after the Supreme Court ruled that under existing law, “woman” means a biological woman, rather than accepting it was wrong all along, Stonewall has adopted a firm policy of prevarication, advising its remaining supporters that it’s still too soon to figure out what the judgement’s implications might be. Now, responding to a letter from Maya Forstater of Sex Matters saying that this advice is “wrong and dangerous”, a spokesman not only indicated that the charity would be sticking to its prevaricating guns (“This is widely acknowledged to be an incredibly complicated ruling and its wide-ranging impact is still being worked through”); he also added a remark that’s either completely delusional or a shameless fib. “Stonewall’s guidance,” the spokesman said, “has always reflected the law.”
Faced with this sort of historical reminiscence, it’s hard to know where to begin. But how about in the early 2020s when the EHRC and the arbitration service Acas began what would become something of a stampede for the exit from the Diversity Champions programme? Both departures reflected growing official unease that Stonewall’s advice mightn’t be compatible with UK equalities legislation and therefore with the statutory duties of public bodies.
Or perhaps in May 2021, with an academic review by barrister Akua Reindorf of the no-platforming of two gender-critical female academics at the University of Essex? Ms Reindorf concluded that the university had misapplied the Equality Act by relying on a policy that reflected “the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”.
The same year, an analysis by a consortium of barristers writing as “Legal Feminist” reached a similar conclusion. Assessing Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index and associated training materials, they stated that “although Stonewall purports to provide organisations with advice on complying with the law… in reality it has been pursuing its own law reform agenda”.
Unambiguous though all this may have been, none of it made any difference to Stonewall. Two years later, the think tank Policy Exchange published Asleep at the Wheel, about the organisation’s promotion of the conflation of sex and gender identity in schools. As a result, the report found, some were allowing gender-distressed children to access opposite-sex facilities or change their name and pronouns without parental knowledge, “in ways that are problematic when viewed through the lens of safeguarding”. Policy Exchange maintained that many schools were inadvertently breaching Department for Education guidance, and potentially the Equality Act itself, by following Stonewall’s ideological advice.
Commissioned in 2024 to provide a legal opinion on King’s College London’s (KCL) equality training and policy materials, Ms Reindorf duly found the same flaws she’d identified in Essex three years before. KCL’s Stonewall-influenced Introduction to Equality, Diversity & Inclusion module — mandatory for academic staff seeking promotion — contained “numerous incorrect or misleading assertions” about the Equality Act. Moreover, the Stonewall-influenced commitment to allow self-identified trans people access to single-sex facilities placed the college “in considerable legal jeopardy” by allowing “an ill-defined, self-identified subset of male people to use spaces and services which have been designated as single-sex in order to protect women from sexual violence and harassment”.
Now, of course, Stonewall has comprehensively lost it — even if it’s still reluctant to admit the fact
Even then, the penny failed to drop. The following month, Baroness Butler-Sloss — former President of the Family Division of the High Court — criticised Stonewall for “muddying the waters” around the law and transgenderism, describing its recent leadership as having misrepresented equality legislation while exerting undue influence over civil servants and public institutions. Lady Butler-Sloss, once a supporter of Stonewall’s campaigning on gay rights, declared that the organisation’s current legal claims were no longer credible.
Somewhat unexpectedly, a previous Stonewall Chief Executive appears to share her reservations about its recent leadership. In a letter to the Guardian last week, Ben Summerskill, head of the organisation from 2003 to 2014 (i.e. the year before its embrace of trans ideology) wrote:
Sadly, a significant contribution to the prevention of sensible, two-way discussion of this sensitive issue was Stonewall’s 2015 decision to adopt an approach of “no debate” – online, on public platforms and in the broadcast media. This has now had huge reputational and financial consequences for the charity. If you decline even to enter a debate, you rarely win it.
Now, of course, Stonewall has comprehensively lost it — even if it’s still reluctant to admit the fact. Or to acknowledge, despite the weight of expert opinion and a ruling from the highest court in the land, that its guidance may not always have, er, “reflected the law” after all.
