Nolan's Stonewall documentary is a game-changer

It represents the best and worst sides of the BBC

Stephen Nolan’s multi-part investigation of Stonewall is blowing the doors off that organisation. Many of the details will be familiar to those of us who have been yelling about the issue for the last four years, but it’s a massive relief that the ideological coup Stonewall implemented in institutions all over the county is finally getting mainstream attention.

The best thing about the podcast is that people will actually listen to it. Nolan acts as a Candide figure, dropped into an absurd situation and trying to make sense of it. “You’re making it up as you go along” he says to Pink News propagandist Ben Cohen while the latter struggles to explain both ‘genderqueer’ and ‘two-spirit’. We’ve been saying it for years, but Twitter banned us for it, and Cohen is predictably thrown by the absence of a ‘report abuse’ button.

It’s an extraordinary situation that the BBC has refused to answer questions from one of its own journalists. With the license fee, the public are now paying both for Nolan’s investigation and the BBC’s stonewalling (in either sense of the word). But it’s a positive sign that the podcast happened at all. Perhaps when the BBC leaves the diversity champions scheme, and are no longer subject to the non-disclosure agreements on which Stonewall insist (episode 6), we might learn more about how they carried out this great fraud on the country.

It’s peak-trans gold. Send it to friends and family and to those who are on the fence. And let’s start piling the pressure on for a full investigation into Stonewall, who tried and failed to sneak Self ID past the women of the UK.

And don’t forget that Friday is a day of resistance.

Here’s my interview with DJ Lippy about the protests.