ChateauRose, I know two lesbians who resigned from their regional Stonewall committee over the trans issue more than a decade ago. There was a transwoman on their regional committee long, long before the T was formally added to the LGB. There was also a non-binary man doing a PhD in gender studies who came to meetings and secretly recorded proceedings with the knowledge of the committee chair but not the ordinary committee members.
When my lesbian friends asked questions about what these trans and queer individuals were doing on an LGB committee they were talked down to and persuaded that they were being petty and unkind by the lesbians who chaired the committee and headed up the regional branch of Stonewall at that time. They received no support from the gay men on their committee and things were made so uncomfortable for them (in retrospect they were clearly gaslighted) that they resigned. They were both ordinary women and most of the committee was made up of academics and those working in public policy sectors and so on – ie, being on the Stonewall committee was a career move.
The non-binary gender studies student later gave a public lecture at at least one of the local universities in which he quoted the two lesbians questioning what T and queer people had to do with LGB issues and he used this to ridicule them and illustrate how lesbians were attempting to block the advance of trans and queer ideology.
The two lesbians he quoted were easily identifiable by anyone who cared to look a list of committee members. They only knew about the lecture and the secret recording when a someone who'd attended the lecture worked out who they were and contacted them to warn them what was going on.
They complained to the Stonewall committee: the chair just shrugged. So then they complained to his PhD supervisors who pleaded with them not to put in a formal complaint to the university because then he would have wasted three years of his life on his PhD. At that time none of us had any idea how complicit Gender Studies academics were in promoting trans and queer ideology. The irony of it is that the two Cardiff University academics who supported the secret recording and the use of unauthorised quotes in a public lecture presented as lesbians.
Transgender activists have been busy in Stonewall for a very long time. It has been a no-go area for GC lesbians for more than a decade. We've been telling people about it but we're only everyday lesbians, we're not academics, we're not people of influence and we've never counted. Lesbians have been in the majority at Stonewall meetings over the years, we've made the tea, we've kept lesbian events and social circles and support groups going – but we've been treated with total disdain by the women who've been fronting the organisation for years. Don't imagine that Ruth Hunt was the first or only Stonewall woman to treat fellow lesbians like dirt.
I don't want anyone to imagine for one minute that it's just been men and trans ideologists who have sold lesbians down the river. There are dozens, hundreds probably, of high-profile, influential lesbians who have been complicit – most of them, I suspect, because they saw being woke as being more helpful to their careers than being GC.
Sorry to write at such length, but some of us have been dealing with this shit for years. There'll be loads of other lesbians all over the country who will tell you similar stories of being put down, ridiculed and patronised by the very people we thought were our allies.