14th October 'Nolan Investigates' podcast - Stonewall?

[Helleofabore]

This sounds interesting.

A special ‘Nolan Investigates’ podcast drops tomorrow afternoon on @BBCSounds. An 18 month investigation into the influence of a lobby group on public bodies throughout the UK. More details in the morning

It seems to be about Stonewall.

Anyone know more about it?

There is some chatter about it on Twitter.

twitter.com/stephennolan/status/1448052827088109568?s=21

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1448205588253618176?s=21

(Tweet from JCJ says:

Okay, at last, here it is.

The BBC Ulster documentary on the influence of Stonewall on public life in the UK.

Many GC women have been interviewed for this.

Let's take the lid off this thing shall we?

Just finished & it was so great. I wish they'd had a bit with Glinner as well as more on schools.

Sadly I think there's more impact when men discuss these issues. David Bell was great. I never thought I'd find myself defending Nolan but here we are! I've send positive feedback to the bbc & thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing!

Thanks for the prompt Alektopteryx, I've now submitted positive feedback to the BBC about this programme, for example:

It's programmes like this that represent the BBC operating in line with the Royal Charter and upholding the founding principles of the corporation. It is a credit to the corporation.

I too wish they would do an episode about schools. Or a series of them about schools and children.

They spent 18 months investigating stonewall's reach in places like the BBC and Ofcom. Stonewall and subsidiary training organisations who teach our children not just about gender identity, but general sex education need a thorough investigation.

Children are coming home believing that they can genuinely change sex. And some of the material in schools, about how fun pornography is coupled with the forcing of mixed sex facilities on girls. Not to mention the sex games recommend being played in class like the dice game.

I too wish they would do an episode about schools. Or a series of them about schools and children.

Maybe we could do with this gaining momentum with other journalists in specialist areas? Education journalists covering this for schools; health journalists looking at single-sex facilities and the nuts and bolts beyond gender identity clinics; legal correspondents like Joshua Rozenberg commenting on the law and the various implications…

The critique needs to be widespread and involve many people who are new to the fray.

It's unlikely that people who've been in this fight for some time, will be retrospectively vindicated or invited to do this work. I wrote up some of this previously but it's known as being a premature anti-[X] (best known examples are premature anti-fascist or premature anti-Nazi ).

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4366709-Abigail-Shrier-Marci-Bowers-critical-of-puberty-blockers?msgid=111375587#111375587

Episode 8... Debbie and the wee Mayor.

Intersex... arggggggggg
Mayor doesn’t know their chromosomes...eh?
Gender is more important than sex...ugh

I suspect the mayor is pretending not to insert and sex vs gender. It’s not difficult.

‘C**’ people can be creepy and perverted, but you can always complain if a person of the opposite sex does something they shouldn’t in a changing room. So... like the recent (covered up) school rape case in America?

@KittenKong

‘C**’ people can be creepy and perverted, but you can always complain if a person of the opposite sex does something they shouldn’t in a changing room. So... like the recent (covered up) school rape case in America?

Or the huge amount of shit that woman got originally for reporting the flasher at WiSpa?

Maybe I'm missing something, but why are these organisations so desperate to do well on the equality index? What do they get from it, other than being a "preferred" employer? Other than trans people thinking they would be a good organisation to work for.
They behave as though they will find the gold at the end of the rainbow. (pun intended!).

I think part of it is the circles in which the senior people in the organisations move. They are networked with similar people in similar organisations and their ability to increase their status and to move to a better job and climb further up the ladder depends to some degree on being perceived to have made their organisation even more progressive.

Still listening. I think I can actually see the inside of the back of my skull...

Then there's the Scottish government getting a gold star for progressiveness in order to secure the bulk of the young voters (ie those motivated to actually go and vote, not all of them) while having zero cost from a bunch of disagreeable women voters.

I think part of it is the circles in which the senior people in the organisations move.

Absolutely this. You see a similar effect in media - journalists and opinion writers writing stuff for their peers rather than their audience. Not so bad in the UK, but really bad in the US.

Another point is systems simply like metrics. I read somewhere (maybe it was regarding an episode of the Nolan podcast I haven't reached yet?) about someone having their company achieving a certain rank in the index as part of their personal performance target for their bonus...

I just think back to when I was in a job long long ago.

We had a ‘special projects’ person (mate with the Big Boss) who had worked herself up the organisation, with no particular specialities or skill sets. Anyway, she got the plumb role of managing the corporate logo redesign of the organisation (a million £ project).

As soon as the agencies started to roll on, she started to wear ‘power suits’ in lime green and orange (hey it was the 90s) and strut around like she was ‘a special creative’. She was ‘one of the agency guys’ now, and just seemed to go along with whatever they said (nice lunches on our account too, no doubt).

I did actually work on the creative dept at the time and voiced concerns about the practicality of the designs being presented (the colours wouldn’t work on our literature, the logo was too fiddly for the types of things we produced, the acronym was just dumb...) but hey, I only specialised in that area.

Needless to say, not long after all our items had been reprinted, engraving done, staff materials circulated... it all reverted back to the old logo - which was perfectly fine and remained until the organisation went kaput (merged/taken over,
nothing to do with the logo).

So when I worked my way up the greasy pole and had to manage external suppliers... I made sure I never was blinded by their bull...

But that’s what this all reminds me of. You can say no and query. You can contract an agency or external group (especially when you are paying them).

mobile.twitter.com/StephenNolan/status/1450215538278506496

[quote AlecTrevelyan006]mobile.twitter.com/StephenNolan/status/1450215538278506496[/quote]
That's great to see. Hope it gives the BBC aa a whole a bit of a boot up the bum.

Here's my suggestion. If you're going to contact the BBC over their coverage of gender identity ideology, always make sure you state whether you are praising impartiality or criticising partiality. Discussions in the BBC recently, particularly involving Tim Davie, make clear this is a very hot topic. The reason why it's such a hot topic is because of an alignment of two things: the current negotiation between the BBC and the government over the future level of TV the licence fee combined with that government showing a strong interest in freedom of speech, an important part of which involves the BBC being impartial.

Thank you. Have just contacted the bbc, thanking them for such an impartial broadcast.

@JurassickJay

I think part of it is the circles in which the senior people in the organisations move.

The junior people aren't much better:

www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/19/bbc-radio-1-newsbeat-staff-decline-relocate-birmingham

If it's not on the tube map, it's here be dragones...

Or dinosaurs.

If anyone wants to join in the action, there are ComeOutOfStonewall protests going on over the UK this Friday and there are plenty of armchair actions you can take too.

I dragged my 41 year old arse to my first Standing For Women meeting on my own this year and I've been to the dinosaur protest since.

I can confirm as a pretty shy person, who just feels very strongly about this and had never joined any kind of a movement before that there is no cliquey atmosphere, it's super easy to turn up and join these groups even if you never have before, there are just peaked people and those who have been fighting this for years. The age range is wide you won't be the oldest or the youngest.

locations here

@Datun

I too wish they would do an episode about schools. Or a series of them about schools and children.

They spent 18 months investigating stonewall's reach in places like the BBC and Ofcom. Stonewall and subsidiary training organisations who teach our children not just about gender identity, but general sex education need a thorough investigation.

Children are coming home believing that they can genuinely change sex. And some of the material in schools, about how fun pornography is coupled with the forcing of mixed sex facilities on girls. Not to mention the sex games recommend being played in class like the dice game.

Children are coming home believing that they can genuinely change sex because they are being told that they can by adults who genuinely believe that obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate does that.

I have come to understand now that whereby we used to be able to divide the population of earth into being either male (man), or female (woman), we can now only divide the population into either those who believe that sex is binary (TERF), and those who do not.

I am so grateful for this series of podcasts to publicly open the lid on these issues and allowing discussion and dialogue to take place. That’s the only thing that I feel was missing in the series, to have an actual open dialogue with trans people or allies that believe TWAW/TMAM about the impact on single sex spaces, on the rights of women and girls, and on female sport.

I think on the whole, there are a lot more people on #TeamTERF than Stonewall would have us believe.

Sarah Ditum in the Times:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bec8f37c-3111-11ec-afd6-aa3ee2eb8a34?shareToken=b9f03dca73809fa4993bbd16c6acc001

Excellent article there thanks for the share @Igneococcus

Thank you Igneo for the link.
Thank goodness. That’s the perfect hard-hitting article, completely factual, evidence-based and even handed. It is appealing both to people who’ve never thought about this before as well as those of us who have been following it for years. Thank you Sarah Ditum.
She says:
The issue is the introduction of gender identity in law; the lobby group is Stonewall, the LGBT rights group; and the consequence has been one of the worst ever interludes for public debate in this country.

YES.

register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/3992465/governing-document
From what I can see, Stonewall doesn’t reference lesbian, gay and bisexual people in its legal documents - it’s an ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ charity now, it must have decided to remove its original remit.
I’m glad that the LGB Alliance now exists as a charity dedicated to support and campaign for LGB people’s rights.

Apologies, I missed this, which comes quite far down the list after the global human rights aims:

TO PROMOTE EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND IN PARTICULAR THE ELIMINATION OF DISCRIMINATION ON THE GROUND OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE PUBLIC

That’s all great then. But it seems to show some major fails at Stonewall Trustee level, in interpreting the charity’s remit and directing the staff’s efforts and time proportionally, and not conflicting with their own legal core aims as a charity. Because what has gender identity got to do with sexual orientation? Nothing. Stonewall’s own definition is:

Gender identity
A person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else (see non-binary below), which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.

www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/faqs-and-glossary/glossary-terms

Also ‘innate’ is such a wrongheaded, sexist concept to include here. Gender is foisted on us by culture to create a biological sex hierarchy with men holding the power at the top. It’s hardly innate…