I was in London on Friday, protesting against the ideological capture of many UK public bodies and institutions by the charity Stonewall. There’s some wheelchair stuff in a bit, but first I want to talk about Stonewall, the protest and the wonderful people who came.

If you’ve heard or heard about Steve Nolan’s excellent BBC documentary on Stonewall, you might be newly aware of the extent to which British institutions have become captured by a harmful ideology.

Stonewall is an LGBT charity with an excellent heritage, formed in 1989 to campaign against the homophobic Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities.

In recent years, however, Stonewall has arguably achieved its goals beginning with the repeal of Section 28 in 2000 (in Scotland) and 2003 (in England and Wales). It’s been said with some credibility that facing a loss of relevance, well-meaning but misguided Stonewall activists began to neglect the LGB in favour of the T. It’s certainly true that the Stonewall of today is primarily a charity focusing on trans issues, with lesbian, gay and bisexual interests sidelined at best and sometimes actively campaigned against.

That is perfectly fine, of course. Charities focusing on trans issues should certainly exist where they are needed and Stonewall is free to change its remit as its members and administration see fit. Some trouble began in 2019, however, when Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark and Ann Sinnott formed the LGB Alliance. The LGBA, now a registered charity, was formed to focus entirely on the interests of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. This is not, as many (including Stonewall) have wildly claimed, transphobic; the LGBA in no way opposes the right of trans people to organise, meet, form charities, discuss issues relevant to them and lobby for legislative and societal change. Unfortunately, the same is not true of Stonewall and its supporters, many of whom actively oppose, slander and libel the LGBA, its members and its supporters.

This fury is entirely unwarranted as the LGBA is happy to accept lesbian, gay and bisexual trans people as members and to fight for their LGB interests. It’s not exclusive of trans people, it just doesn’t centre trans issues in its activism.

And therein lies the problem. Much of society and many UK public services and in the UK have become captured by an ideology that makes little sense and is entirely intolerant of dissent. Trans issues are often elevated above all others, even where there is conflict between putative trans rights and the rights of women, homosexuals and bisexuals. Where such conflicts exist, we’re told debate is not acceptable. When debate begins, it is quickly stifled and the protagonists ostracised, threatened and harassed.

There are many examples. JK Rowling has famously received many threats of violence, including sexual violence, for writing an essay primarily about her being the survivor of domestic abuse. Much earlier, in around 2015-2016, the blogger, author and columnist Ophelia Benson left the blogging network Freethoughtblogs after an internal harassment campaign by the bloggers themselves. Her crime was to question the ontological status of “woman” in the claim “trans women are women.” This would seem an essential part of such a claim and certainly of any free-thinking about it, but that debate was quickly jettisoned as heretical by the now ironically-named network. Fortunately, Ophelia refused to be stifled. In 2020, the journalist Susanne Moore was similarly motivated to leave her job at the Guardian after fellow journalists attacked her for what might now be called gender critical views. She now writes at Substack. The list seems endless. A web search for any of these women and countless others will yield more abuse, lies and obfuscation than truth or substance. Maya Forstater, Ceri and Lauren Black, Alison Bailey, Bev Jackson, Helen Staniland, Graham Linehan and many, many others have seen reasonable questions and criticisms met with fury and abuse. Mothers Marion Millar and Ceri black have been targeted for abuse by the same man and are under unfounded investigation by ideologically captured police forces in Scotland and Ireland. I wrote about that here. Many of us who question gender ideology and the capture of public organisations (and social media giants) by ideologues such as Stonewall are smeared as ‘TERFs’ and singled out for abuse like this.

The much-maligned ‘gender critical’ movement (insofar as it is a movement at all) wishes to redress this balance. We believe that trans people should have the same rights as everyone else. Where there’s conflict between any new demands of trans people and the existing rights of women and same-sex attracted people, boundaries should be set in public. Debate should not be stifled. Abuse should not be a substitute for reasoned discussion.

It’s an uphill struggle for the gender critical movement. This is largely because many UK public services and institutions have been ideologically captured by Stonewall. Now the mantras of “trans women and women” and “no debate” have become an axiom and anyone who questions it, a heretic.

The Nolan Investigates podcast series on Stonewall is at last alerting people to this ideological capture. It focuses on the capture of the BBC and its regulator Ofcom. This is an especially pernicious position: both the BBC and Ofcom take advice from Stonewall about what is broadcastable and what is not. This raises the urgent question of whether people and organisations with views opposed by Stonewall can ever be aired by our national broadcaster. This is a breathtakingly dangerous situation for free speech and an alarming demonstration of what harm can be done when we’re not, as a nation, paying attention.

The series also investigates the confidence trick that is the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme. This scheme rates organisations on their friendliness to LGBT (read ‘almost exclusively T’) people and groups, as judged by Stonewall. The confidence trick is that Stonewall also sells courses to redress ideological deficiencies it discovers, which harm an organisation’s rating. It’s a nice gig if you can get it: organisations pay Stonewall to tell them they need to improve, then pay again to move up in the ratings. Nice diversity rating you’ve got there, shame if something were t happen to it.

This would not be such a serious situation if Stonewall had not quietly inserted itself into public institutions, which use taxpayer’s money to compete in an unwinnable arms race to ideological purity, with women and same-sex attracted people the undoubted losers.

So on Friday I went to to London to protest against Stonewall’s ideological capture of our public institutions. Here I am along with about half the people and a fifth of the dinosaurs who attended.

One of the problems with being in a wheelchair is that people always make you go to the front of photographs instead of hiding at the back.

We made a nuisance of ourselves outside various government departments and finally the BBC, following an episode of dinosaurs being on the bus during which I’m told at least one Peak Trans Event occurred.

It was a brilliant day and the people there were amazingly nice and kind. They helped and looked out for each other all day. They helped me in and out of the pub and fretted when I crossed busy roads. It would be hard to imagine a nicer or more caring group of people – mostly women – from all sorts of background. It was kindness and giving without thought, caveat or obligation.

The shouting and singing were good, but the part I’ll remember most is a woman holding one hand of a dinosaur (whose other hand was clutching a handbag (which was presumably full of hoarded rights)) and guiding it along the pavement like a rally co-driver:

OK, left around this bollard…. mind the kerb there… there’s a puddle here that might be piss or might be just rainwater, do you want to just walk through it?

I wish I’d been able to film it, but I need both hands to get around. Getting around London in a wheelchair will be the subject of Part 2 of this post (to come). For now, I want to thank the brilliant women and men of the protest for being so kind, thoughtful and helpful and to DJ Lippy for organising it and keeping us more or less in line. You can see more photographs and video on Twitter using the tag #ComeOutOfStonewall.

In breaking news this morning, the Home Office has announced that it will instruct the police to record crimes by the sex of the perpetrator rather than their stated gender. This is an excellently positive move, very much against the wishes of Stonewall, and might indicate that the stone walls are crumbling. I doubt our shouting at the Home Office (and, for a while, mistakenly, the Foreign Office) was entirely responsible, but I’m going to take credit anyway.

Now we should campaign for the BBC to do an investigation of the sudden, huge spike in violent and sexual crimes recorded as being perpetrated by women in the last few years (but actually committed by men who say they are women). That this is the result of ideological capture of the police by Stonewall is unquestionable. The harm done to women and to policy-making by these false statistics has yet to be determined. The true crime stats are probably forever lost. Let’s hope we can redress that harm and move forward as a nation more like a happy dinosaur than a malevolent clown.