Stonewall let sleeping dogs lie

It’s been argued, for instance by Andrew Doyle on GB News, that when Great Britain legalised same-sex marriage in 2014, Stonewall had achieved everything it had been created to achieve, and was therefore faced with an existential dilemma. There were only three options for the charity: Wind down, campaign for LGB issues outside of the UK or embrace gender ideology.

Just a few weeks after gay marriage came into law, Stonewall’s preferred option became clear. Following a six-month consultation period with more than 700 people who identified as transgender, the organisation announced that it ‘will start working for trans equality’ (note that the likes of Aimee Challenor and Benjamin Cohen were named in this 2015 article as being particularly pleased with the announcement).

Stonewall has talked about almost nothing other than trans issues since, and hasn’t seemed to care about the criticism for this - until, apparently, now. Earlier this year a new charity - the LGB Alliance - made it clear that it will address homophobia around the world.

Now, having barely mentioned foreign affairs in years, Stonewall’s social media activity contains several posts about Afghanistan, including the promotion of a (seven sentences long) letter that it wrote to the prime minister and foreign secretary, urging them to ensure ‘LGBTQ+ Afghans’ can leave the country.

And then came some particularly odd posts.

First Stonewall’s CEO Nancy Kelley wrote a bizarre thread highlighting the work her colleagues had done to arguably save lives over the Bank Holiday weekend. Except she supplemented the self-congratulatory thread with a picture of a dog, talked about how tired she is from her holiday, randomly inserted that she and her organisation ‘don’t always get things right’, asked for money and gave zero details of anything Stonewall had done or achieved ‘to help get LGBTQ Afghan siblings to safety.’

One of the few people allowed to reply to this was Robbie de Santos, the director of communications and external affairs at Stonewall, who responded to this thread about people potentially being murdered over their sexuality with a series of vomit emojis.

Some organisations might have thought it best to not promote these tweets (Nancy has less than 7,000 followers and Robbie less than 3,000), but not Stonewall with it’s more than 230,000 followers, which quote tweeted Nancy, and also talked about ‘working to get LGBTQ+ Afghans to safety’, also without providing any details of what had been achieved.

Some people therefore asked for those details.

As yet, neither Stonewall nor any of its employees have responded to any of these questions, not have they given any statement that provides details.

At least one account (mine) was even blocked by Stonewall just for asking for some information on this.

So far Stonewall has revealed more information about its CEO’s holiday within its posts about Afghanistan, than what it has actually accomplished, but has still stated that what it did was so impressive that you should donate money to the charity.

Why won’t Stonewall reveal what it achieved in getting ‘LGBTQ Afghans to safety’?