Maya Forstater is right. Stonewall's fraud merits its own Truth and Reconciliation process

From Sex Matters, a proposal that meets the moment

by Jebrux

How many lives have been upended, how many friendships dissolved and livlihoods destroyed, because organisations like Stonewall were captured by Queer Theory?

Queer Theory came from academia like some dreadful Cthulloid experiment and attached itself to a healthy host. That host went on to corrupt 850 institutions across the UK.

They thought they could actually force people to stop using the word ‘mother’. They thought they could strongarm Ofsted into grooming the next generation.

Well, it’s all over. The newspapers are finally on to it after five years of women losing their social circles, their platforms and their livelihoods while trying to convince the world they were under attack.

There is a lot of harm to undo. I’ve often said we needed something similar to a Truth and Reconciliation process, but Maya Forstater on Sex Matters here lays out exactly why it’s so important and what that process might look like. Some excerpts follow.

---

“We have written to all 850 Stonewall Champions and are tracking the trickle that may turn into a flood as they leave. 

Many are citing value-for-money considerations and a bland rationalisation of membership of external schemes. The Equality and Human Rights Commission left, saying that its membership of the scheme only ever concerned employment and “internal affairs”—as if making employees afraid for their jobs and careers would not impact on the decisions they make.

This will not hold. It is a scandal. We have seen examples of Stonewall coaching the communications teams of government agencies on how to respond to public questions about sex and gender, and on how to respond to FOI requests so as to withhold embarrassing information from the public. The ONS, CPS, EHRC, Care Quality Commission, MoJ and Government Legal Department, to name but a few, have clearly been influenced in their external positions and policies. At the most basic level, if you erase the distinction between males and females in your data collection and Equality Impact Assessments, as Stonewall advises, then you have no mechanism for assessing whether any policy decision in relation to “trans rights” harms women, or any other group. And if you punish anyone who points that out, you are sure never to find out. 

…Several members of the Stonewall Champions scheme have responded to our Freedom of Information requests with the implausible answer that they filled the several-thousand-word questionnaire directly into Stonewall’s online submission portal and didn’t keep a copy. Others claim exemption from FOI obligations on the basis of the harm that publication might do to Stonewall’s commercial interests. Bedfordshire University responded on corporate letterhead bearing the Stonewall Champions logo, saying that it had never had a relationship with Stonewall (it then said a staff member working from home had used old letterhead, and then that its legal team was investigating). The ONS claims that because a single staff member left, it no longer has access to the information it submitted to Stonewall. 

Departmental Ministers and Directors General should make clear that they will not accept these cat-ate-my-homework and then cat-fell-into-the-shredder excuses from their teams. 

First thing on Monday morning, they should be demanding the full Stonewall files on their desk to see just what their organisations have done—at what cost, and with what harm, and what needs to be undone. And they should be thinking about a proactive plan for disclosure, rather than waiting for the army of polite and persistent, but also very angry, opponents of gender-identity ideology to drag it out of them through war-of-attrition FOI requests, internal reviews and appeals to the Information Commissioner’s Office. 

A strong steer from the Cabinet Office will help to stiffen the spine of senior civil servants who, to date, have themselves been afraid to challenge the he/hims, she/hers and they/thems in their organisations. The Reindorf Review is helping University Vice Chancellors do the same. 

We suspect that many already know that something has gone badly wrong in their diversity and inclusion policies and departments. As Senior Psychiatrist David Bell said of the many clinicians with concerns about the youth transitioning GIDs unit at the Tavistock Clinic: 

“It was peculiar. You could see that everyone knew about it and yet no one wanted to know about it. In the adult department, there was a sense that we didn’t want to find out what went on there, because we might not have liked it if we did.”

…So what should the government do? It should tell (or recommend where decision-making is at arm’s length) ministries and government agencies to suspend renewal of their membership of the Stonewall Champions Scheme this year pending review, and not to participate in this year’s Workplace Equality Index, which opens on June 15th. 

Instead, they should initiate a process of “truth and reconciliation”, both internally and with the public. This starts with “finding” the missing information from previous years’ submissions to the Stonewall Scheme, and the associated decision-making, and publishing these in full. 

They should divert the time and money that would have been used to undertake the Stonewall survey and compliance scheme this year towards investigating it. Instead of initiating the annual Stonewall staff survey, they should carry out an information-gathering process with staff to find out what they really think about the gender-neutral toilets, conflation of sex and gender identity, pronoun announcements, rainbow lanyards and mandatory IDAHOBIT appreciation. To make this meaningful, they will first have to convince staff that they can speak the truth without fear of losing their job. 

…Ultimately, the government should establish a wide-ranging independent inquiry into government bodies’ use of the Stonewall scheme, and their reliance on external lobby groups for training and accreditation around diversity and inclusion in general. 

But the first step for Monday morning is transparency and setting a new tone from the top. Let the sunlight in and declare a decisive end to the era of “no debate”.