Friday 13 May 2022 01:50 AM Trans activists have wrecked all the good work of Stonewall trends now
Writer and Broadcaster Simon Fanshawe is pictured. He says the work he poured into founding the LGBT organisation Stonewall in the 1980s 'is now in danger of being wrecked'
My jaw hit the floor during the Stonewall discrimination trial this week when the LGBT charity’s ‘head of trans inclusion’ Kirrin Medcalf took the stand and declared: ‘Bodies are not inherently male or female. They are just their bodies.’
But as those words sank in, my heart sank to my boots too. I was one of the six co-founders of Stonewall in the 1980s. Along with the others, I poured all my energy into making the organisation a formidable force for gay and lesbian rights.
All that work is now in danger of being wrecked, Stonewall’s reputation discredited, and its credibility squandered, by trans activists — not all trans people, I hasten to add — who believe they can dictate what everyone is allowed to say and think.
People such as Kirrin Medcalf imagine that reality can be reshaped to fit their requirements.
Asked whether there is a difference between biological sex and gender preference, Medcalf denied it.
According to the official Stonewall position — and to disagree is to be regarded as a heretic or, in the current lingo, ‘transphobic’ — people are literally whichever biological sex they choose to be.
JK Rowling is pictured with her friend Allison Bailey. Ms Bailey claims that the LGBTQ charity convinced her employer Garden Court Chambers to investigate her support of gender-critical beliefs and is suing both the charity and the chambers for discrimination
Kirrin Medcalf, head of trans inclusion at Stonewall, is pictured. The Stonewall employee took the stand at the court during the defamation trail this week to declare: ‘Bodies are not inherently male or female. They are just their bodies’
Medcalf appears unaware of the screaming contradictions in this position.
One barrister asked pointedly about whether there are any circumstances where it would be OK to treat someone according to their biological sex.
The Stonewall employee offered that this would be OK ‘at a cervical screening service’.
So it seems that even in Stonewall’s world, there are still occasions when the reality of sex stubbornly resists the pretence.
But it is Stonewall’s trans activists, apparently, who have the privilege of choosing those occasions.
Other people don’t — and, in particular, the definition of what ‘a woman’ is must never be left up to women themselves.
This trial has become a spectacle of ludicrousness. The barrister Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers, Garden Court in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes.
She says she has been punished for speaking out against Stonewall’s trans policies and arguing that it is undermining the hard-won rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in its determination to promote its trans doctrine.
The trial descended into confusion before Kirrin Medcalf even took the stand. The activist’s mother, solicitor and dog all had to be present at the tribunal to provide ‘support’ — requirements that were apparently sprung upon the court without warning.
When the hearing finally got under way, the statements became ever more baffling. Medcalf claimed that Stonewall had no choice but to advise people to avoid Garden Court Chambers, for fear of meeting Allison Bailey.
Her statements were supposedly so virulent and hateful that any trans person who encountered her would be ‘at risk of physical harm’.
This is simply nonsense. Allison Bailey has never physically threatened anyone.
She doesn’t believe transwomen are actually women, and this enrages Stonewall, but it’s a world away from physical violence.
Medcalf appears to believe that words are the same as actions, that to say ‘I don’t like you’ is the same as punching you in the face.
A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat. According to Medcalf, any trans person encountering Bailey is at risk of attack. This is a completely imaginary scenario.
Stonewall was set up in 1989, as a response to legislation known as Section 28 that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools. Now the lawyer, who is a lesbian, founded the LGB Alliance group, in 2019, which argues there is a conflict between the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and transgender people - and opposes many of Stonewall's policies, including the assertion that 'trans women are women'
Nothing of this
