Stonewall’s influence has no place in our public institutions
There is a person I know who works in a large university. This person is liberal and has spent years trying to improve the educational opportunities of those who have had a hard start in life. This person has led a life of outstanding public service. This person is a member of a secret WhatsApp group because this person and their colleagues cannot have an open conversation about what is going on in their workplace.
This person uses the pronouns she/her because this is required of her and this person is, of course, a woman. A composite of many I know. Her boss uses the pronouns he/him because he is, in fact, a man. There is no doubt about that, but performative pronouns are a signal that you have signed up to the idea that gender identity is deeply significant. This is the rigmarole to which most of our public institutions still capitulate.
Many people I know cannot be “out” about their gender critical beliefs in their workplaces because those in charge still do not know the difference between what Stonewall says is the way to do things and the actual law. It is an act of gross negligence and groupthink that the leaders of our institutions do not care to inform themselves of the difference between the two. But they need to, sharpish.
If the Cass Review broke the medical dam, then the many cases heard in employment tribunals are breaking the legal one. You are entitled to believe that men can be women and therefore enter any space that previously excluded them, from toilets to prison, to refuges. But I am allowed to believe that this is not so.
This has been brought home once more by Rachel Meade not only winning her case against Social Work England for harassment and sex discrimination but winning – unusually – exemplary damages. Meade had been a social worker in Westminster for 20 years. On her private Facebook page, she linked to petitions about keeping male athletes out of female sports and prisons. She also liked tweets written by well-known gender critical people such as Graham Linehan and JK Rowling.
For this, she was reported as “transphobic” by another social worker and Facebook friend Aedan Wolton. She was suspended by Westminster City Council and after a year given a written warning. A disciplinary investigation was launched and she was told she could be sacked for misconduct.
This poor woman! Perhaps as a trained social worker she knew something about safeguarding. Perhaps when we read the statistics on the numbers of children who went through the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) who had been in care or “looked after” as the jargon has it, we might see the concerns of a middle-aged professional woman around this issue? But no.
The regulator did not bother to check out anything about the background of the person who complained, a trans activist, as the tribunal notes. Aedon Wolton is now working for Sport England as their “strategic lead on equality”. This is the grift, isn’t it? These people who want to get women fired from their jobs fail upwards. See also Nancy Kelley, the disastrous former chief executive of Stonewall, who then becomes a director of Lesbian Visibility Week. Kelley believes men can be lesbians.
It’s the same old drivel, financially rewarded and regurgitated by those who think silencing women and allowing men into female space is actually the new “civil rights” as opposed to patriarchy in a lurid spandex dress.
Meade won her case, just as Prof Jo Phoenix won her case against the Open University, just as Denise Fahmy won her case against Arts Council England.
All of this is because of the bravery of Maya Forstater, whose 2021 appeal means that gender critical beliefs are a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. Basically, people can believe what they wish. This does not mean anyone may act in a discriminatory manner in the workplace and I would not support any of these women if there was ever any evidence of this. There isn’t. They were threatened for the expression of their views.
The judge in the Meade case made it clear that the managers of Social Work England need to go away and do some training. Indeed any public body that has only received training from Stonewall needs to do so. Urgently. Things will not change overnight but this horrendous culture of snitching on colleagues for wrongthink has to end. It is telling that it is always women who are reported.
It is the role of a human resource department, whatever they are, not to mindlessly reward the banal McCarthyism of someone reporting Facebook posts. This is extremist behaviour that has been tolerated for way too long. All those I know of in WhatsApp groups are not saying anything incendiary, unreasonable or even anti-trans, they are mostly just talking about resources being misdirected or false information propagated. They are afraid that if they question anything they will not be promoted.
This is madness and what we are now seeing is that when all those private conversations come out in the open, the wheels come off the gender identity bus really rather quickly.
Those who were forced underground can now see the light and anyone who thinks this is a side issue has not been paying attention. Hello Scotland.
