The Times articles on Stonewall: 26.06.2021

Interesting re the Times share tokens, they won't work for me either!
God it's so bad, we knew it was bad, but still.

ScotGov "hold my beer"

I omitted the link to Rustin's tweet:

twitter.com/SusannaRustin/status/1408730979712241664

stonewalluk is an anti-feminist organisation.

I think anti-female would be more accurate...

Guardian's Susanna Rustin:

stonewalluk is an anti-feminist organisation. It really is as simple as that. Encouraging & incentivising employers to be "gender neutral" is encouraging & incentivising them to ignore the sex-specific protected characteristic (Equality Act 2010) of pregnancy/maternity

I think now anyone can challenge the stonewall grift - just with a copy of a newspaper. They can’t pretend any more.

Does anyone know how many employees Stonewall has?

151 in 2019, according to the last set of accounts.

I knew it was bad (well, we all did).

I had no idea it was this bad. I'm really shocked.

What can we do about it?

Lorraine just wants to keep her job. Everyone desperately trying to justify their existence and justify their backsides. I wonder how many people with disabilities she has championed?

The doubling down just blows my mind.

I had been writing to an executive assistant to Andrew Haines and given him lots of evidence from reputable sources, but he told me that the decisions about things like this are made by their D&I team.

I work there, but use a pseudonym.

If she thinks I'm going to drop it...

All those articles are alarming and lay bare the protection racket that Stonewall now is. There is no way after this that any Government department, publicly funded institute or service can possibly justify remaining a member of the scheme. Tax payer money is being misused to fund a draconian political lobbying group and implement the agenda of this group. This group has not been elected into power by the voting public and yet there are wielding that level of power and being paid handsomely for it.

Serious and damning questions need to be asked AND answered as to why this was allowed to happen.

A lot of people must be feeling worried about their jobs if stonewall falls, as it surely must.

tbh, if they're in HR or DEI or whatever, I'd like to see them spend their time and effort supporting the array of protected characteristics - such as women, ethnicity, disability etc. etc. All of the boring ones that receive no attention or comparatively negligible resources year after year after year.

From the daily mail:

Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish government is one of many high profile diversity applicants - who are said to have sent details of Pride events attended by the First Minister and examples of dissenting colleagues being muzzled in internal communications.

Muzzled. Breathtaking stuff.

Does anyone know how many employees Stonewall has?

As well as the hours and hours of admin time that organisations must spend on their submissions there must be many hours spent by employees at stonewall scrutinising and marking the homework and dreaming up new goals and recommendations. A lot of people must be feeling worried about their jobs if stonewall falls, as it surely must.

Now in the Daily Mail

Stonewall said to be 'coercing' employers to lobby for sex law changes

mol.im/a/9727701

I see the latest Zoom update (5.7.0) now provides support for gender pronouns - I loathed this already as it's in so many of my virtual meetings and now it's part of the Basic accounts (visible by default) and off by default for all other accounts and to be enabled by the admin or account owner.

The council was also penalised because its internal LGBT network had only gay leaders and no transgender ones. In a letter, sharing Stonewall’s feedback for improvement, a council representative wrote: “Suggestion: Better use of social media accounts. Would like to see examples from the main account because of the reach it has. Need more on trans, especially as they are currently under attack in the media

This is unbelievable. So the more the country wakes up to what is going on with gender ideology, the more stonewall try and strong arm people into supporting them in the face of it.

And, of course, it's all about the T.

The alacrity with which people sign up, and the ease with which they are persuaded that the Ponzi scheme is worth joining, does make me wonder what is in it for these people. Many of them seem to be of exactly the same mind as stonewall. They're not hearing alarm bells, they're hearing fanfares.

gibbons just thinking that. The amount going to Stonewall to deliver a training course is probably a fraction of the amount of staff salaries to attend a course and ditto the amount of time spent on preparing submissions, time allocated from Comms teams for social media etc.

I'd like to know the true amount, that tax payers have subsidised to remove the rights of women.

What makes this fundamentally any different to a protection racket?

It isn't

What makes this fundamentally any different to a protection racket? The stonewall league table is providing 'protection' for other organisations to not be shamed publicly for not meeting Stonewalls diversity demands.

And worse than that. Even paid up companies in the index can have their place in the list improved by compliance, or be demoted for not denouncing colleagues.

As far as I can tell the scoring on the index is very subjective and is therefore open to, and quite possibly used for, manipulation.

Sounds like a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme if you ask me.

Yes that's what I meant. MLMs are also basically that with a few tweaks to keep them technically legal.

I noticed in the article it mentioned a hard sell approach was used to get companies to sign up, described as being like a pitch for a timeshare.

Companies that do poorly on the Index are encouraged to spend more money on conferences to help them address their failings.

Seems like there's always another level to reach, another hoop to jump through.

What makes this fundamentally any different to a protection racket? The stonewall league table is providing 'protection' for other organisations to not be shamed publicly for not meeting Stonewalls diversity demands. How is this any different to a shop owner being threatened to pay up every week or have their business destroyed? It's exactly the same. They need to be held account for this. And businesses need to stop funding them and walk away.

You know what one of the worst aspects of this is? The fact that so many people knew that this must be what was happening - and yet there was no way to raise this that didn't flag someone as a transphobia, bigot, or conspiracy theorist.

We've been working among colleagues who were encouraged to ostracise and report colleagues to prove their own allegiance to a greater scheme for which their body/company/organisation was competing for recognition from Stonewall - a lobbyist that lost its sense of proportionately and any sense of a moral compass long ago.

Not in the Times but also relevant:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.13029

"Sex and the Office for National Statistics: A Case Study in Policy Capture"

FOI responses show friendly exchanges between Stonewall and ONS, a quick turnaround of emails, and ease in securing meetings. This is in contrast to the experiences of the signatories of the 2019 letter of concern.38 For example, the CEO of Stonewall had three personal meetings with Iain Bell in 2020.39 Emails exchanged prior to the ONS round table show Stonewall suggesting additional invitees, and cautioning: ‘I'd strongly recommend that careful thought is applied to how the ONS can practically ensure that, depending on who is present at the roundtable, this is not a hostile environment for trans attendees’, to which ONS responded: ‘I fully empathise with your words around ensuring that a hostile environment is not created and I can reassure you that ONS will consider very carefully how the meeting will be conducted—I will also arrange for a colleague to take a call with yourself ahead of this event to run through your thoughts or any concerns you may have.’ There were in fact no trans attendees present at the event.40

ONS is a Stonewall Diversity Champion, and a member of the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index. Member organisations make an annual submission and are scored by Stonewall under various criteria, and given advice on how they can improve. The score organisations receive translates into a ranking, with employers competing to be in the Stonewall top 100. Essentially, organisations pay to be lobbied and trained in line with the view that gender identity should always supersede sex.41 Stonewall has pressured employers to silence or sanction feminist critics.42

FOI requests regarding this aspect of the relationship between ONS and Stonewall have met with claims by ONS not to have kept copies of their submissions or correspondence: ‘The ONS last made a submission to the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index during 2018. We do not hold a record of the submission due to staff changes since then. The ONS does not hold any correspondence that relates to conditions the organisation was expected to fulfil or any policies the ONS was required to change to meet any standards.’43 These claims to have no record of documentation regarding ONS's relationship with a major lobbyist would seem to represent exceptionally poor record keeping at best.