In the first part of a major three-part investigation, the Mail reveals how Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, continues to exert significant influence over taxpayer-funded organisations and politicians, dictating policy and shaping plans. From healthcare to education, its ideology-driven campaigns and diversity programs have raised questions about the prioritisation of gender identity over other protected rights and the impact on public institutions. Here’s an excerpt:
Last year, officials working for an NHS Trust in Bath, Somerset, received the results of an assessment they had undergone a couple of months earlier.
Alas, they had not done well.
Out of a possible 159 points, they had been awarded just 49, meaning they failed even to qualify for an entry-level ‘bronze award’.
Many reasons were given for this lamentably low score, among them: clinical staff at the Trust had failed to avoid using ‘gendered language’ such as ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘husband’; the majority also failed ‘routinely’ to ask patients their sexual orientation or if they were transgender.
The shamed Trust was further marked down for its failure to put sanitary bins in all toilets — irrespective of whether they were the Gents or the Ladies — although it did gain some credit for the fact that some of its staff chose to wear badges displaying their preferred pronouns.
The report further asserted that many employees had ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic’ views. But on closer inspection, these did not seem particularly egregious.
For example, one person stated that their colleagues’ sexuality or gender identity was ‘not relevant’ to their job. “Like everyone else they should come to work, focus on their patients, do their work and go home at the end of the shift,” they had declared.
Another concerned staff member admitted: ”When I enter the hospital and see the rainbow flags, road crossings and full-size rainbow-badge poster boards, I feel fearful and anxious. It gives me the impression that the hospital is prioritising trans rights over all other protected rights.”
In light of the report’s blistering conclusions, the Trust felt the need to issue a cowering response.
”We are very aware and there is huge willingness from the whole team but at the moment we just don’t have the time or resources,” they spluttered. “We do what we can. We have discussed this survey as a team. It is a bit demoralising for us not to be able to do more.”
Which organisation had struck such palpable fear into the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust? Was it a Government department? A supervising body responsible for budgets? An official regulator?
No. It was Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, which — as the Mail reveals in the first part of a major three-part investigation — has successfully weathered years of controversy to remain a powerful political force.
To this day, despite many serious questions raised about its conduct, Stonewall continues to dictate policy to many of the country’s key taxpayer-funded organisations and to politicians themselves — as well as to the world of business. In some ways, it has never been more influential.
Stonewall began with laudable aims. Founded in 1989 by a small group of people who had been active in the struggle against the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act (which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality), it grew into a powerful body advancing the cause of equality for disenfranchised groups.
Its campaign for equal rights helped to bring about the Civil Partnership Act of 2004, which allowed same-sex unions to be officially recognised for the first time and helped pave the way for gay marriage in 2014. Stonewall also secured the equalisation of the age of consent, lifted the ban on gay people serving in the military and secured legislation allowing same-sex couples to adopt.
In recent years, however — and in particular since 2015, when the charity extended its remit from fighting for the rights of gay and bisexual people to cover trans people — its fight has pivoted to more ideological territory.
And no more so than when it comes to gender identity, which disregards the immutability of biological sex to suggest that the gender a person ‘believes’ themselves to be is more important — and possibly different from the sex they were ‘assigned’ at birth.
In 2021, it seemed as though Stonewall’s relentless march to conquer Britain’s public bodies had been halted.
Following a ten-part podcast by BBC broadcaster Stephen Nolan and his producer David Thompson, called Nolan Investigates: Stonewall, as well as a raft of negative press coverage, the precise nature of Stonewall’s dogmatic campaigning was laid bare.
In the ensuing furore, the BBC and Ofcom pulled out of the charity’s programme. The same year, Liz Truss, then the equalities minister, called for all Government departments to withdraw. MP Miriam Cates wrote in 2022: “Stonewall’s decline now appears to be rapid and terminal.”
Stonewall’s income has taken a hit. It received a total income — from grants, donations and fees from the diversity scheme — of £7.8 million last year, down from £11.5 million in 2021. Yet in other ways it has gone from strength to strength.
Never-before-seen documents and new statistics revealed by the Mail following a series of Freedom of Information requests uncover the sheer scale and extent to which this unelected body is still shaping plans and strategy.
From the NHS to schools and universities, politics to business, Stonewall is raking in millions of pounds from its £3,000-a-year ‘Diversity Champions’ workplace programme — and its influence over our most important public and private institutions remains as strong as ever. Critics accuse those signed up as paying to be indoctrinated by pernicious gender ideology.
And nowhere more so, arguably, than in healthcare, where, courtesy of recent ‘diversity programmes’ and ‘rainbow badge’ schemes — like the one that Bath’s NHS Trust fell victim to — Stonewall has strived to eliminate mentions of biological sex, which is a ‘protected characteristic’ under the 2010 Equality Act.
Strikingly, we have discovered, many NHS trusts have removed the word ‘woman’ from their websites and information materials — so as to not offend a tiny minority of trans people.
The extent of Stonewall’s looming influence is illustrated by new data from the campaign group Sex Matters. This organisation was set up by Maya Forstater, who was one of the first to fall foul of ‘gender ideology’ when she lost her job as a researcher at a think tank after tweeting that people cannot change their biological sex.
Forstater’s group has scrutinised the membership of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, discovering that no fewer than 86 NHS trusts out of 215 are still signed up, alongside other crucial healthcare bodies including the General Medical Council (GMC), National Institute for Health Care and Excellence (NICE), the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the Royal College of Midwives and the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Also among them is the Royal College of Psychiatry (RCP), recently named in Stonewall’s ‘top 100 employers’ list.
Last year, the RCP called for the Government to reverse a reported decision to exclude transgender people in the planned ban on ‘conversion therapy’ — the controversial practice of trying to ‘change’ a person’s sexuality. This despite widely voiced fears that such a ban could deter psychiatrists and therapists from helping a troubled person to explore their desire to change gender.
Chilling? Dr Louise Irvine, GP and co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender — a group of healthcare professionals now questioning gender ideology — certainly thinks so.
“Stonewall’s ideological influence has been profound,” she says. “As a doctor, you see it everywhere. Remember, these are very important organisations. The GMC is the regulator for doctors. The CQC is the regulator for healthcare providers. Healthcare Education England oversees all healthcare training for all healthcare professionals.
“These are organisations at the top of the pyramid that give direction to everything else in the NHS below them. They tell us the language and concepts we should be using. The leadership of the NHS has completely bought into Stonewall ideology. It’s frightening that medicine seems to be bending to unevidenced ideology that could cause harm to patients.”
Worth reading in full.
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