Tom Bower attacks Stonewall for its anti-woman agenda

[zanahoria]

www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/iain-dale/author-condemns-trans-debate-anti-women/

Who?

Thanks for the link. It’s reassuring that these discussions about Stonewall have moved from drip drip to a river of people standing up.

I don’t think Stonewall UK will look back on Pride month 2021 and remember it as one of their best.

Google is your friend, Nutella. I didn't know him either but I'm pleased he said what he did.

No idea who he is but I watched the clip and pretty much agree with him. I think the more people willing to say they disagree with the erasure of women and put their names to it is a good thing.

He is known for his political biographies of Maxwell, Branson, Boris and Corbyn

Not very coherent but I'm pleased more people are speaking up. More sunlight on the issue

Good to hear this being said in everyday conversation and interviews with non-activists. The more people hear this, the more will have a WTF? moment and realise Stonewall is no longer about harmless gay rights.

@thinkingaboutLangCleg

Good to hear this being said in everyday conversation and interviews with non-activists. The more people hear this, the more will have a WTF? moment and realise Stonewall is no longer about harmless gay rights.

Lols. The same thing being said about Stonewall now is what they said about gay rights under section 28 in the 80s.

The struggle was on then, and it continues today.

Trans equality is nor harmful. All they are looking for is equality and fair treatment. Providing equality to someone else is not trampling over someone elses rights. Its an additive.

Sadly people cant see this and beat down on a vulnerable set of people just trying to live their lives and fit in. How very brave.

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose. But everything else really smacks of bigotry just like the very same arguments were used against queer people in the 1980s.

Hard to see it when you are in the middle of an echo chamber of fog.

Yes it’s great to see more people talking about it and not shying away from answering the question.

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose.

And Stonewall has been campaigning to remove them. And telling organisations that they don't exist or the exceptions can't be used.

Providing equality to someone else is not trampling over someone elses rights.

Do you think it affects women if men can identify as women and be treated as women in all circumstances?

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose. But everything else really smacks of bigotry just like the very same arguments were used against queer people in the 1980s.

And stonewall et al are trying to undermine this.

If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose.

Stonewall wanted to do away with that. Had you missed that crucial point? And of course in effect it has been done away with in some situations where it's needed (temporarily, we have to hope).

I will never see why SW sacrificed their well deserved reputation by trying to remove* women’s existing legal rights and redefining same-sex attraction, instead of turning their formidable power to ensuring that trans people have discrete, bespoke facilities to allow them to exist comfortably within society.

• i do see it really; it’s because women, be they lesbian or straight, don’t matter

MishyJDI, the issue tripping Stonewall up everywhere now is that their Diversity Champions scheme trained people with an inaccurate version of the law. The protected characteristics you will see in the policies of many organisations with Champions badging have been tweaked so that the word sex is replaced by gender, and gender reassignment is replaced by gender identity. Check out the website of a Stonewall Champions badged organisation or three that you know of locally and see if I'm right. Try a school or a health centre near you.

The protection women are legally entitled to under the act was being not so subtly erased. Under the banner of fairness and equality, the actual majority (just) population was being shunted into a siding and ignored. Never say that rights for trans people are not potentially harming others when this goes unnoticed and uncorrected!

I know TRAs hoped and expected the law to be changed and the wording tweaked, but it wasn't. Self ID did not come in. It's disingenuous of Nancy Kelley to say it's just the difference between 'natural' and 'mandatory' language: these words carry precise, legal meanings; meanings that matter.

If companies are not treating sex as a protected characteristics, data will not be collected and discrimination will not be recognised, recorded or tackled. All the hard slog that has gone in on women's rights for decades could be brushed aside and women could be left unable even to articulate the issues because the precise terminology has been rendered unusable or meaningless and the waters have been muddied.

We are looking at quite a small, but very important, overlap or clash of rights around women-only spaces and definition of who can access them.

It seems we can't have a rational discussion of how everyone's rights can be recognised without alarmist cries of "cruelty" and accusations of people being driven to suicide and loud, empty sloganising. It's not a good look for TRAs or organisations like Stonewall to be blustering and shouting and denying the issue instead of addressing it.

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose. But everything else really smacks of bigotry just like the very same arguments were used against queer people in the 1980s

Oh give it a rest. When vulnerable, incarcerated women are being forced to share space with male rapists as part of their sentence, women being protected on the basis of their sex is a concept that is entirely fucked.

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose.

Absolutely. Now tell Stonewall that.

Proportionate and legitimate purposes would be, in my view, maintaining single sex sports, dormitories, hostel rooms, school loos, hospital wards, train sleeper carriages, breastfeeding groups, medical trials, refuges and prison facilities.

What would yours be?

I wonder how many people who bang on about section 28 were actually active in campaigning against it or have any real time memories of it? Or have the first idea that many GC women are the same people who campaigned against section 28, and can see that the Stonewall driven TRA movement actually harms the rights of LGB people in a way that makes section 28 look like a warm fluffy hug. Or for that matter, appreciate that the care, attention and de-stigmatisation of male victims of Aids was in huge part carried out by the now older, GC lesbians that they despise so much.

Trans equality is nor harmful. All they are looking for is equality and fair treatment. Providing equality to someone else is not trampling over someone elses rights. Its an additive

Allowing males, regardless of any identity into female only spaces IS harmful to females and removes their right to single sex spaces. This is trampling over female rights.

Equality isn't demanding 99% of the population stop using sex based language or telling us we must pretend 'gender' is now the most important thing, over our sex. Especially the 50% of us whose oppression is sex based.

Equality isn't demanding others must provide constant validation to other people's internal, subjective feelings. This is trampling over people's rights to free thought and speech.

Equality isn't making female sports mixed sex just to provide validation to adult males Why do you thing fairness and safety of females should be ignored? This is trampling over our sex based protections.

Equality isn't telling same sex attracted females that they are bigots for not wanting to date or have sex with a male. That is homophobic, and 'trampling all over'
the protected characteristics of sexual orientation and sex.

Teaching children that a small minority of people feel uncomfortable with their birth sex or suffer from dysphoria and prefer to present as the opposite sex, no problem. Telling children that EVERYONE now has this thing called a 'gender identity' and must all pick one and alter their bodies to fit sex roles stereotypes is not equality.

No one is trampling on or removing 'trans rights' in the uk because they already have the same rights as everyone else in their own sex class. That is equality.

Nothing other than complete capitulation to this new othodoxy ever seems enough. Not equality.

@OldCrone

Sex is a protected characteristic, and there remain protections for sex only places where a legitimate purpose.

And Stonewall has been campaigning to remove them. And telling organisations that they don't exist or the exceptions can't be used.

Providing equality to someone else is not trampling over someone elses rights.

Do you think it affects women if men can identify as women and be treated as women in all circumstances?

Exactly. And the deliberate exchange of 'sex' for 'gender' is part of it.

If providing equality for someone else is not trampling, then why are transwomen so hell-bent on trampling on female rights in the name of their own?

And Stonewall's manifesto has absolutely been the abolishing of all the sex based exemptions that allow a body to exclude anyone holding a Gender Recognition Certificate; coupled with their push to change the protected characteristic of gender reassignment via a GRC to a self declared gender status. They are trying to rip the Equality Act, vis a vis the sex group women, to shreds, and have succeeded in this with gullible bodies such as Girl Guiding UK, whose inclusion policies comply with Stonewall Law, but which break the actual law.

And why is calling a transwomen 'he' a crime, when calling me (a woman) 'sir' isn't?

Or indeed all those older books and laws in which ‘he’ is assumed to include ‘she’, Jaxhog.

So fed up with the rank hypocrisy of likening disagreement with the trans ideology to the persecution of LGB people when the ideology directly undermines the equality act definition of homosexuality.

How can you ever use section 28 to uphold an argument, when your argument directly contravenes the very basis of homosexuality!

I was just thinking about this yesterday with the Radio 4 interview where the editor of Pink News said that Stonewall didn't want to get rid of women's-only spaces.

Sure! But how does he define women? Once you believe that:

a) transwomen are women, and

b) transwomen include anyone who identifies as a woman, dresses however temporarily as a woman, feels strongly that they are a woman despite possessing a penis, "lives as a woman" (whatever that means) etc

then a "woman's only space" no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

If you couple with the fact that there are now TRAs who seem to genuinely believe that transwomen have actually changed sex, then even the concept of a "single sex" space no longer has any meaning.

@MrsWooster

I will never see why SW sacrificed their well deserved reputation by trying to remove* women’s existing legal rights and redefining same-sex attraction, instead of turning their formidable power to ensuring that trans people have discrete, bespoke facilities to allow them to exist comfortably within society. * i do see it really; it’s because women, be they lesbian or straight, don’t matter

I don't think quite a lot of Stonewall's people understood it either. In around 2009 I asked for help from one of my regional Stonewall representatives because of a situation where an aggressive transwoman with a mission to get into women's orgs and services had succeeded in forcing his way into a small local organisation offering women-only DV services. The women who'd founded the DV organisation fell out over it and the service had folded.

I went to my Stonewall committee chair (a lesbian and a woman who'd worked for women and children's rights) and she didn't know what to say to me. She was unable to make eye contact and really didn't want to discuss it. I attended a couple of committee meetings and brought this up as a lesbian issue, because a lot of these services were started by and maintained by lesbian women and the fall-out was being felt particularly badly in the lesbian community. There was a person who I now know to be a transwoman and a Queer straight white man on the committee and it was clear that my appeal for advice and help were a huge embarrassment. I and one of the lesbians on the committee were talked down to and effectively told we were suffering from wrongthink. Stonewall may have officially adopted the T in 2015, but gender ideology had infiltrated it much earlier.

Stonewall has never been a kind, fuzzy, supportive ground-level charity. It offers a helpline service that as far as I know directs people to Stonewall-approved and trained community services, but I've never known anyone in the lesbian community who has used it.

I can remember years ago holding a fund-raiser for one of its campaigns and sending the cheque to the local Stonewall rep/ contact. In the accompanying letter I made the point that events like club nights and activities were really important to the lesbian community and that it would be good to see Stonewall actively involved instead of just constantly calling for cash. She phoned me with complete contempt in her voice to let me know in no uncertain terms that Stonewall didn't and never would dirty its hands with mere social events. Even back then it was staffed by people who seemed irritated by and contemptuous of ordinary LGB people.