Stonewall’s greatest betrayal It is tearing our community apart, not protecting it
LGBT has become a meaningless term (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Lesbian and gay people have often disagreed about what it means to be lesbian or gay, though wider society will not necessarily have noticed.
To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.
It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.
But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.
It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.
The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.
For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.
But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.
The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.
Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)
This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.
Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.
As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”
This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.
But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?
For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.
For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.
There has been an irreversible shift.
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SubscribeThe article states the facts exactly as I understand them. Stonewall moved from a position of perfectly reasonable to unreasonable.
No-one, except ultra conservatives and certain religious groups, thought that gays and lesbians didn’t deserve total equality in society. Even if you were anti this equality for some reason, you could not argue that the rights of other groups were being affected. That has all been changed and I hope the new intolerant and hate mongering Stonewall is thoroughly and completely discredited.
Hear hear.
According to my understanding, LGB is about what (and who) you want to do in the privacy of your bedroom. Its very core relates to sexual preference. The T seems to me to be something completely different; namely the desire to change one’s gender from your biological sex. I can’t understand why LGB people should feel obliged to align themselves with T’s campaigning goals, any more than they should with flat earthers, Spurs fans or members of the local folk club. Why is this?
Yes, they are at odds. For example some Ts identify as gay. Therefore a male who simply identifies as a gay female, believes that a lesbian should be attracted to ‘him’. Um, no….!
JP Sears in one of his Youtubes did a thing on an inmate in a woman’s prison who attacked other female prisoners, getting one pregnant. (a true story)
He put it like this
“What is wrong with women now days, sexually attacking other women, and getting them pregnant?”
…pretty simple…with the battle for social acceptance and legal equality largely won, even amongst people of a pretty conservative disposition…the only thing left was to either pack up their tents, OR take on the few religious conservatives who consider their lifestyle to be a sin against God deserving of severe punishment (possibly death)…or keep in business by picking a safe fight with the wider society, even if it was on nonsensical grounds…
…so it’s either fall out with kindly people who won’t generally hurt you physically however unreasonable and exasperating you are…or start barracking bearded chaps at conservative places of worship who might easily beat you to death or bomb your gathering places in the certainty that God told them they should.
A continued pay-cheque for self righteous media appearances, or possible death? It’s a bit of a no-brainer I reckon..!
Unfortunately you look like you are right; this seems to be about career mongering, the adrenaline rush of political struggle, goal displacement, organisational and group dynamics.
You are correct – there is absolutely no logic to this position at all, which was by the way foisted on the gay community with minimal debate. This is the same way as identity political organisations always operate, they don’t want any scrutiny from the unwashed masses. Stonewall is no longer the representative and campaigning organisation it was founded as, but yet another extremist ‘there is no debate’ woke political body.
Gay men and lesbians were, if you pardon the expression, often uneasy bedfellows and had different priorities, but one was not a direct threat to the other. The downplaying, verging on denial, of biological sex is actually a huge threat to gay men and lesbians.
I was instinctively against same s*x marriage but I always supported civil partnerships. Although I’ve wobbled since it has become increasingly clear to me that my original instinct was correct. I’ll try to put words to that feeling.
Marriage is a millennia old institution of union between opposites. It is universal. If you re-define it as a union that can be solemnised between the same, then you start to erase the concept of s*xual polarity which marriage embodies. The logical next step is where we are now – the attempt to deconstruct the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in every nook and cranny of society.
For some, SSM wasn’t about equality before the law (extending civil partnerships to straight couples would have achieved that, leaving marriage intact). It was about a ‘liberationist’ path to a society without any firm boundaries. An Australian activist for SSM even said this at the time – that SSM was only the start.
At its core SSM was never a small-c conservative cause because it erases fundamental human boundaries and points to evermore radical upending of definitions as ancient as humankind itself. SSM was a radically transgressive first step, grooming classical liberals for its end-point: the Queer society where every norm is challenged and undermined.
So it should be no surprise that after achieving SSM, Stonewall moved on to the idea that men and women are just a figment of the imagination, a provisional designation that can be changed at will.
I was against equal marriage because I am against marriage. The idea of voluntarily entering into a legal contract that shackles you to another human being is bizarre. In the past, and in misogynistic religions and cultures, it wasn’t and isn’t voluntary. Women who openly state their disquiet about the hijab were often married in church, in a veil, with the appalling ‘Who giveth this woman?’ What do they think those things symbolised?
Civil partnership is a means of becoming each other’s next of kin, and taking equal responsibility for children, without taking on the anachronistic religious and cultural expectations of marriage. If people have a desire to live in couples (and it must be a desire, not a financial need), that is the way to go.
If you feel that way about marriage and prefer the civil partnership route I’m fine with that. As I said in my comment, an obvious way of equalising same s*x unions was for civil partnerships to become open to straight couples (which, predictably, occurred anyway after ‘equal marriage’ was achieved).
Civil partnerships gave gay couples all the legal protection they needed and equality with straight couples could have been easily addressed via this route. But the SSM lobby wanted something different – for some, the ‘charisma’ of the marriage ceremony, for others, to invade and undermine the institution by detaching it from s*xual polarity. If the latter the intent was not the final act of gay equality, but the first act in the deconstruction of boundaries – which most gay people themselves deplore because it supplants same s*x attraction with self-identified ‘gender’. S*x categories not only make sense of heterosexuality; they make sense of homosexuality. So, we all need them.
Caroline, yes, the continuation of “ Who giveth this woman?” in an age of feminism is remarkable. I would suggest it demonstrates the autocratic hold of emotionalism over marriage (the Hollywood “falling in love” effect), rather than the importance of the promises made of lifelong fidelity.
I understand your dislike of such institutions but they are proven to be the most successful in bringing up children who go on to be contributing members of society and personally fulfilled.
In addition to Judy’s thoughts on the campaign for SSM (the proponents of Civil Partnerships stated adamantly in 2005 in Parliament that they did want SSM), I would suggest the desire for equal marriage was also motivated by the same emotional affectation.
Not only that. What about the name changing? That is something I could never understand. Even women who run businesses who then confuse their customers (and need to renew their stationery).
That’s never been a legal requirement, merely custom.
@Caroline Watson You seem to have a very narrow and old fashioned view of marriage. My wife and I walked into church side by side, together in 1983. No one gave her away. No one promised to obey. From 1990 (When D1 was two and D2 not even a twinkle), I was the home based parent and my wife worked full time while I looked after the kids and did a very small amount of self employed work. Our marriage was always, and remains, an equal partnership.
Why would you be against marriage, when it’s proven to be the best way to bring up children?
Of course, women (and men) make many mistakes when choosing a life partner. But that’s not marriage’s fault.
Or would you prefer women to have no protection whatsoever?
‘The idea of voluntarily entering into a legal contract that shackles you to another human being is bizarre’.
Yet when a wedding is in the offing, all the women I know can scarcely contain their excitement.
I had been with my partner for 16 years when we got married. Both of us married for the first time at 61 and 62. He had been a serial commitment phobe and devoted bachelor and I had never particularly pursued or considered marriage. For various practical reasons we got married and we both love it. While we are not religious, it certainly conferred a more serious weight and loving commitment into our relationship.
“The idea of voluntarily entering into a legal contract that shackles you to another human being is bizarre.”
I respect your opinion and of course everyone’s right to express their opinions. Logically, though, don’t you have to look objectively for answers as to why the vast majority of modern society does NOT view the commitment of marriage to be a “bizarre” decision?
For most people, family is everything–nothing really replaces it. And marriage (and children) are the most likely way that you can get more family. Your parents, aunts, and uncles will die before you and that is a deep grief. Friends will likely fall away as their lives take different paths. Having a committed spouse, and children, can be a profound happiness. They give meaning, personal growth, stability, and continuity to life that no other life choices can match.
LGBQT groups seem keen on setting up a rainbow police state where the ‘right’ to every kind of sexual proclivity is rigorously defended and pushed upon people through their public institutions. This is all about sexually grooming people to accept the unacceptable.
Gender critical trans youtuber Blair White suspects the next phase is making pedophiles or rather Minor Attracted Persons, MAPs, socially acceptable.
Personally I think one should be allowed to marry ones self. This works well in today’s Solipsist mentality – but it would also make the tax law much more equitable, all working single people to now claim the married benefit.
(actually, just joking – but as society has become utterly degenerate one awaits the inevitable weirdness of even more broad marriage laws)
This has already happened, Sanford. It’s called Sologamy.
In South Africa where I live, civil partnerships do not confer the same rights as marriage, even though the constitution is very liberal – even if there is a legal document in play. Individuals are more protected from issues in respect of a living will right through to protection when dissolving the partnership if they are married.
When their bones are dug up by archaeologists in the future, they will be labelled M or F, however they identified.
I am against SSM because if you want to join a club, you abide by its rules. However I share some of Caroline Watson’s concerns. For many people it is legalised prostitution. What happens if the woman no longer wants to have intercourse with her husband?
She says no. If he forces her, it is rape
I both agree and disagree with this point of yours – It is true that for many SSM advocates that SSM was a first small step towards the giant leap of demolishing every cultural institution the West holds dear. Your observation of that is true, but I think the slippery slope argument you provide is, in and of itself, an insufficient one.
Let me explain: by the rationale you give, it might also have been argued once upon a time that abolishing slavery was a first step towards “human rights gone mad” and that, therefore, it was necessary to safeguard the institution of slavery in order to prevent the end point of rights trumping all duties and responsibilities.
I think it’s possible (and desirable) for society to debate its practices and, in certain cases, decide some of them are not consistent with its values, and change those practices. It’s only in this way that moral progress is possible. We need only look at the severe Islamic republics to know what happens when societies don’t engage in these kinds of debates and compromises.
As with all concessions and changes, the danger is that there will always be those power hungry self righteous types who, like small children, will take any redrawing of boundaries as a weakness to exploit, and who will up the the ante and demand ever more concessions.
With this in mind, it is always incumbent on wider society, in my view, to make concessions to new ideas in certain cases, but then say, “no more!”. This is what most of right-minded society I suspect would do given the opportunity. The problem is that a small number of power-hungry Leftwing ideologues are in the seats that make decisions about these things, and who are at odds with the generally sensible sentiments of wider society.
I remember a large study, a few years ago, intended to gauge people’s responsiveness to dating trans people, the upshot of which was that the attractions of all sexualities were most definitely rooted in biological sex, either the same or the opposite. Gender identity barely got a look in.
A body of the legacy gay press, probably Pink News or the like, were claiming that this was “shocking” and “controversial” when, in fact, most people would have responded with “Well duh!”.
Stonewall’s definition change has nothing to do with people’s actual desires and behaviours. They seem to be wanting to ‘change the rules’ unilaterally, ignoring who people actually are and trying to impose identities onto them. They’re only really concerned with the Ts, Qs and other twiddly bits of the acronym, which is fine, but they should drop their claims to speak for the Ls, Gs, and Bs.
In Douglas Murray’s excellent book, The Madness of Crowds, are prescient comments predicting this schism:
‘LGBT … is a form of absurdity. For even on its own terms this composition is wildly unsustainable and contradictory.’ p35
Uniting for purposes of equality in legislation I suppose created an artificial community. Now those ends are largely achieved I suppose the experience of power is too addictive to give up.
But in a wider context, is this a symptom of the ‘sexual revolution’ eating itself?
Interesting article. I think the move to denying the validity of a same-sex attraction is well underway in all progressive circles; as an example the BBC (a Stonewall mouthpiece) uses “Bi” rather than spell out “bisexual”, uses “Queer” rather than “gay” or “lesbian”, and the misleading “coming out as”, to describe a decision to claim oneself transgender /non binary. They are stealing and erasing the language of gay and lesbian communities and deliberately obscuring the fundamental difference between homosexuality and gender self-identity.
How strange to find outright homophobia returning – and how tragic.
Agree wholeheartedly with your comment. Until ‘They are stealing and erasing the language of gay and lesbian communities…’ yes those others who stole (rather appropriated), words from the heterosexual community, including gay meaning ‘free and happy’.
How spot on Monthy Python was….
“Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?”
“F*** off! ‘Judean People’s Front’?. We’re the People’s Front of Judea!’”
How you live your life is up to the individual. How they dress, how they work, and what hobbies they have is personal – and should be noone else’s business. Except for the birth biology that a person with.
Then, there’s no need for special pronouns, nor for personal sexual self-identity.
Exactly. And public, school and workplace lavatories and changing rooms must be divided by biological sex, not the ludicrous ‘gender’.
as a boy in the 1950s attracted to other boys groomed at boarding school by a hiusemaster who subsequently seduced me then abandoned me to find my own way in the world I have never felt the need to label or identify myself. Only recently have I appreciated the seriousness of the abuse and how it shaped and harmed my life. maybe i would be considered homophobic by some but I have no desire to celebrate the endless media obsession with the “joy” of being gay. Being raped in the woods as a teenager was hardly a good start in life.
I am so sorry. Protecting vulnerable young people like you must be a priority.
Ah, the new definition of what means to be LG was changed in 2015?? I never knew. I always assumed it was much more recent.
I can’t understand why Stonewall hasn’t collapsed in itself then, or become only a TQWERTY organisation, while the LGB bit go and do their own things.
Seems we need to get more education in logic. Morally, in most Western democracies does anyone want to do harm to anyone’s consensual private life. However by atomising gender into a myriad of identities, it seems to my simple mind, you end up with individual subjective fluidity which means you can’t argue about or discuss anyone else’s thoughts at all. That means any generalisation such as straight, male, female, gay etc etc loses all meaning because anyone’s subjective inner thoughts and emotions can’t be expressed through any objective language at all? Wittgenstein: ‘that of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence’?
In other words gobbledygook post modernism applied to sexuality and gender. The denial of reality.
When anything is allowed to go, then ANYTHING will go eventually. Wait until bestiality becomes the norm.
You aren’t far off there. Kathy Rudy in her odious Gender Theory book almost promoted the idea of bestiality being acceptable. “Viewing bestiality in the frame of queer theory can give us another way to conceptualize the limitations of human exceptionalism.” she also goes on to say“Stated differently, the widespread social ban on bestiality rests on a solid notion of what sex is, and queer theory persuasively argues we simply don’t have such a thing.”
Not only that.
Normalising already underway … zoopride, with flag and all. Ditto for pedophiles, who are remarketing themselves as minor attracted person (MAP).
God help us all!
Of course Stonewall wants it’s “No Debate,” demand to stand. How could they agree to a debate in which they would have to defend women being put at risk through loss of safe spaces?
Don’t forget that the whole point of politics is division: “us” vs. “them”. And when you’ve achieved all your objectives, the last thing any political activist does is go home.
So no surprises.
That is why I say that politics and government should be limited to actual and physical safety, where the “them” really are people that want to kill “us”.
Interesting discussions in this section of marriage, including producing children, but unheard is NOT ONE comment on the inescapable fact that gay men need to rent a woman’s uterus in order to become genetic parents. Feminists must speak out about the woman’s disproportionate role in human reproduction. A woman does not, as some men have described it, just “pop out” a baby. It begins with insertion of semen, by whatever means, and from that point on, the mining of her body by the developing fetus, a process involving various hazards, all the way to the pain and mortal dangers of delivery. As an endless stream of published images of a woman with her hand on a hugely swollen abdomen testify, men revel in the idea of pregnancy as a specialized form of male-imposed bondage.
Gay men have many options for being parents. In addition to conventional adoption, men can contract to buy a baby produced from unrelated egg, sperm , and “carrier.” The agency and adopting parent(s) may provide no source of information to the child produced under these commercial arrangements. [See Jennifer Lahl’s “Stop Surrogacy Now” for details.] Justifiably British politician and gay activist Gary Powell opposes contract pregnancy for gay or straight buyers, not to mention male buyers posing as women. https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/03/gary-powell-why-we-should-say-no-to-surrogacy/
Composed by Twiss Butler, mother of 5 children.
Language needs to be useful and unambiguous. I think it would be useful to have a term that describes what you might encounter in engaging in intimacy or a desire to reproduce with another person and male/female based on anatomy can achieve that. If there is no such term then one has to rely on instinct. If that is covered then man/woman/human can be used for distinctions in social situations. The law would need to use the appropriate term.
I sympathise with the dismay Best feels about the way Stonewall has insisted on equality for trans with no debate. As he points out it has caused divisions in the gay movement and been difficult for women. But is this the first false or fake equality being insisted on? Perhaps the prior insistence on straight and gay being equally valid was the first departure from reality? After all is a**l gay sex really the same-ontically-as straight vaginal sex? Natural selection, for starters, would ‘suggest’ not. The vagina is strong – it’s the birth canal and self lubricates – the happy valley – and is suitable for sex while the a**s is weak and dry and really is not. Ask the doctors who have to deal with the results.
Now if the incongruity in insisting on equality here is not immediately apparent, consider being asked to explain to children in school what mummy and daddy did – quite a lot – to bring them into the world, with illustrations and what Uncle Joe did with his boyfriend, again with illustrations, and consider the children’s response. The argument that where there is love the bodies don’t matter doesn’t really wash if you consider for a moment the shepherd, fond of his sheep – I love ewe – who needs to be told to leave them alone. Yes, I understand this is sensitive but while tolerance must not be denied to gays – who manages what we have between our legs very well- approval can be denied – I think of gay marriage – and the question asked, who are the bullies now?