Stonewall used to be a really well run and focused organisation and it did great work in campaigning for gay, lesbian and bisexual people. It was much needed at a time when schools were under threat of prosecution if they were seen to endorse same sex relationships in any way.
I would hope all teachers now understand that representation of different kinds of relationship and different sexualities is vital for helping pupils not feel alienated or ‘not normal’. Stonewall and others deserve credit for much of that progress.
Unfortunately, gender identity has now taken over the whole agenda to the extent that most lesbians and many gay men feel that Stonewall has betrayed them. In addition, many feminists see Stonewall and other organisations involved with LGBTQ+ ‘diversity and inclusion’ promoting really quite regressive notions of what it means to be a boy or a girl.
Resources that suggest sex change is possible, that children may feel they were born in the wrong body, and that the right to use changing and toilet facilities that reflect an inner feeling of ‘gender’ trump girls’ right to privacy, have been widely used within schools and have often been well received by teachers because they come laden with rainbows and messages about being kind and self acceptance.
Teachers with a more gender critical perspective, those of us who believe that much of the messaging around gender identity is actively harmful for children, have felt unable to speak out, such has been the depth of institutional capture by Stonewall. This has not been a paranoid delusion. Several women have lost jobs for questioning the Stonewall view that transwomen are literally women, and that lesbians are transphobic if they reject the advances of a transwoman purely because they prefer not to sleep with people with penises. One such woman, a black lesbian lawyer, who was a campaigner for gay and lesbian rights all her adult life, is currently going through an employment tribunal. Stonewall pressured her employer, a legal chambers, because she had tweeted her belief that transwomen remained biologically male and her disgust at an employee of Stonewall runnning workshops aimed at helping transwomen overcome the ‘cotton ceiling’, ie more successfully persuade lesbians to sleep with them despite the fact they were still male-bodied.
This has become a bit long - sorry. But I have despaired at seeing schools and teachers let this organisation with all the very best of intentions, when it is currently so very focused on an agenda that denies biological sex as a factor in sexual attraction or as a basis for any legal protection.