the times | Wednesday February 16 2022 25Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Stonewall is about politics not common sense
As the equality commission is discovering, the LGBT charity carefully polices views that deviate from its ‘consensus’
critics appealing to “a body whose
expert committee recently appointed
as its rapporteur a longtime
representative from Uganda, where
homosexual acts get you life in
prison”. In targeting Lady Falkner,
Phillips notes, Stonewall and its
collaborators are demanding that a
“Pakistani-heritage Muslim woman
be judged by a body whose advisory
group proudly features
representatives from Saudi Arabia,
China and Russia”. The rights of
people who disagree with Stonewall
seem to count for little.
The EHRC has said: “The way the
commission is governed, and
commissioners appointed, is set out
in the Equality Act, and has not
changed since the commission was
established.” Indeed, until August
2020, the EHRC was led by David
Isaac who, in a previous role, ran
Stonewall. We can only assume that
when Isaac was in charge, the EHRC
was not at all politicised.
When the EHRC obligingly
nodded through Stonewall’s agenda,
it was simply enacting a common
sense outlook. It is only now that the
EHRC is raising valid concerns that
critics are labelling it as political.
Mann was right. Everything is
political. But this is a good thing. We
need to step out of our consensual
bubbles and engage in debate.Alice Thomson is awaythe right to question transgender
identity without being abused,
stigmatised or risking their jobs. Last
month, the EHRC called on the
governments in Holyrood and
Westminster to pause before
enacting laws governing legal gender
recognition and conversion therapy.
Suddenly Stonewall spies politics.
The charity is leading a coalition of
organisations, including the Good
Law Project and Mermaids, in
rallying international support behindits criticisms of the EHRC. It has
submitted a 19-page complaint to the
Global Alliance of National Human
Rights Institutions, an international
body that co-ordinates human rights
organisations with the United
Nations. The paper accuses the
EHRC of lacking independence from
the government and demands that it
be stripped of its independent status
because it has become too politicised.
The EHRC has defended itself,
saying it is “fully committed” to
LGBT rights.
Sir Trevor Phillips, chairman of
the EHRC and its predecessor
between 2007 and 2012, highlighted
the paradox in the organisation’slanguage and pronoun badges, but
not single-sex spaces.
Stonewall’s success came with its
capacity to promote its training
programmes and diversity schemes
not as political interventions but as
compassionate, progressive measures
designed to create inclusive and
tolerant workplaces. That doing so
meant ignoring women’s insistence
on maintaining their sex-based rights
rarely caused concern.
However, women such as
JK Rowling and Rosie Duffield
would not let women’s rights be
relinquished without a fight. Maya
Forstater lost her job after saying
that people cannot change their
biological sex, but fought back to
win an appeal in an employment
tribunal, ensuring that the conflict
between gender self-identification
and sex-based rights was recognised
and debated in public.
More recently, the Equality and
Human Rights Commission
(EHRC) has begun to question
Stonewall’s influence. After the
appointment of Lady Falkner of
Margravine in 2020 as its
chairwoman, the EHRC withdrew
from Stonewall’s diversity champions
programme. Lady Falkner has
defended the right to hold “gender
critical beliefs” and noted that there
was “‘genuine public concern” that
trans rights conflicted with women’s
rights. She has said that women have‘E
verything is politics,” said
the novelist Thomas
Mann. The problem, he
should have added, is
that we only ever
realise this when confronted with
opposing views.
This dynamic has long played out
in universities. To some, free speech
on campus is curtailed by trigger
warnings and no-platforming. To
others, the whole idea that
censorship is rife is a right-wing
myth. Which side you fall on
correlates with the extent to which
your own views rub against the grain
of fashionable thinking.
If you agree that the curriculum
needs decolonising, that people
should declare their pronouns and
that sexual consent training should
be mandatory, you are unlikely to
find yourself challenged or silenced.
“What free-speech crisis?” you may
well ask. Question these practices
and the censorious nature of higher
education soon becomes apparent.
When our own views reign
supreme we convince ourselves thatwe exist in the realm of common
sense, not politics. When we mix
only with the like-minded we believe
not only that we are right but that
there is no debate to be had. It’s only
the awkward people who disagree
that insist on “politicising” issues. In
this way, decisions to fly the pride
flag on public buildings, change the
text on a historical plaque or leave
the word “woman” off an advert for
cervical cancer screening are nodded
through countless committees before
ever confronting opposition. When
disagreement comes it feels like an
affront. How dare people politicise
the bureaucratic march of progress?
Stonewall, the LGBT charity,
has, until recently, done extremely
well for itself by cultivating a sensethat it’s not political if we all agree.
It held considerable influence in
universities, the BBC, branches of
the civil service and corporations.
Increasingly focused on the concerns
of transgender activists, Stonewall
promotes the idea that our internal
sense of gender identity, rather than
our anatomy, should determine
whether we are treated as male or
female. It backs gender-neutralIf we mix with the
like-minded, we think
no debate is needed
The charity backs
pronoun badges but
not single-sex spaces
Joanna
Williams@jowilliams293