On 20 July, Stonewall Chair, Iain Anderson, was interviewed by Beth Rigby on Sky News. The interview was supposed to be an opportunity to talk about 10 years of marriage equality, LGBTQ+ veterans, and Rainbow Laces 10 – all remarkable moments that deserved recognition and celebration.
We took part in the interview because Stonewall has always been engaged in difficult conversations on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. The interview largely focused on highly detailed elements of trans policy issues and Stonewall’s position on these remains unchanged. = people who self describe as a member of the opposite sex or no sex have been our only priority since 2015 and that’s still the case.
The world-leading Equality Act protects many communities – including LGBTQ+ people – it took years to draft and is a finely-honed, balanced, and complex piece of legislation that Stonewall believes works effectively. So effectively that we have been misrepresenting it for years and campaigning for the PC of ‘sex’ to be reinterpreted as ‘gender’. More modern, like.
Sport should be open to everyone, provided they’re male or females who behave themselves and don’t object to losing to males including trans people, and this includes elite sport. Out of hundreds of thousands of elite athletes, a small handful are trans. We believe including trans people & players in policy development that is both evidence and research-based. Well, now that it’s clear that we’ve lost that argument, we do.
Stonewall believes trans people’s rights should be fully respected and it is past time that conversations around the trans people’s lives should be used as a political tool. unless it’s us doing it, that is, it’s fine for us to politicise people’s workplaces with our lobbying Instead, we’re calling for political leaders to develop a meaningful strategy for trans equality that ensures trans people are properly supported, included and able to participate fully in society. because apparently the complex, finely honed and effective legislation which we definitely haven’t spent years trying to remould to our version of reality doesn’t already achieve that, but it’s very effective and we don’t want to change it anymore
Stonewall’s Chair, Iain Anderson said: “We remain at the forefront of campaigning for trans people’s rights, and I’m sorry if yesterday’s interview caused concern amongst the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. My priority is fighting for trans people & securing a trans equality strategy that will support the trans community” So you same sex oriented lesbians can either shut up or go and join the LGB Alliance cos you sure ain’t a priority for me personally or for Stonewall.
Editor’s notes:Stonewall’s current positions on key elements of yesterday’s discussion are set out below.
Equality ActThe Equality Act is a world-class piece of legislation that’s been operating well for 13 years. And we are confident that no one in the media will have the motivation or research skills to dig out the various documents showing us campaigning for parts of it to be changed or reinterpreted.
Since the Equality Act 2010 came into force it has provided an effective defence against discrimination in employment and in the provision of goods and services for people who hold one or more ‘protected characteristics’. This is legislation that works well, if you can crowdfund the hundreds of thousands of pounds you’ll need after Stonewall has whispered in your employer’s ear and of which Britain can be proud.
We do not think the Equality Act should be reviewed, but we do think the Statutory Code of Practice could clearly include intersex people, asexual people and non-binary people. We will accuse our opponents of using people who self describe as a member of the opposite sex as a political tool but we will shamelessly use people with a DSD as a political tool whenever we consider it expedient and we certainly won’t do them the courtesy of using more the modern language they prefer as it doesn’t suit our political campaign goals
It works well because it understands that people can experience discrimination on multiple grounds and it treats all of those grounds equally. We do not believe that people’s rights are in competition. We’ve stopped saying that there is no clash of rights as people might point out that clearly there is and that saying there isn’t makes us liars. But we’ve recently had to familiarise ourselves with the concept of respecting beliefs and think that if we say “we believe” we’ll be able to force people to “respect” that by shutting up and not answering back. It’s not that we don’t believe it there’s a clash. It’s that we only care about one of those protected characteristics. And if we keep asserting our belief there’s no clash they might fail to spot that removing the right to single-sex female-only spaces from women is in fact a clash of rights.
Single-sex exemptionsThe Equality Act 2010 already supports the operation of single-sex services, where this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. It also permits the exclusion of trans people from those single-sex services where this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This means that trans inclusion is the universal practice in day–to–day single-sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms, but trans inclusion is not a universal practice in single-sex specialist services. You see, under Stonewall law, female humans have no right to the privacy and dignity afforded by single-sex female-only spaces on a “day to day” basis, only on a special occasion, special case exemption, presidential-approval-from-the boss-class basis. We’ll never be truthful and state baldly that by “trans inclusion” we mean male inclusion in spaces where women are in a state of undress. Oh no, that might prompt people to say, hang on a minute there fella.
As Beth Rigby pointed out, in 2015, we recommended for the removal of these clauses in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry based on consultation with trans people at the time. We weren’t expecting a journalist to have done research. Whatever next!
It is really important to say that we do not advocate for the removal of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act. At the moment. For the time being. When the Equality Act was first introduced, Stonewall did. That was because we were worried that they would be applied in a blanket way and would be used to wholesale exclude trans women from many single-sex spaces. We know that that has not been the case. Because we’ve been using our Stonewall award scheme to demand that women’s rights to single-sex female-only spaces are removed from them entirely and have placed entryists into every organisation of influence, particularly political parties, to accuse women who object to the removal of single-sex female-only spaces of bigotry and then get them sacked. We’ve seen some push back and then unfortunately that has led to what we’ve been up to behind the scenes being exposed, but I recently changed political parties in anticipation of making sure any further resistance isn’t eliminated via the introduction of hate speech and conversion therapy legislation.
The bar set in the Equality Act, which is that trans women and trans men—although it is mostly used around trans women—access to women’s spaces should only be restricted as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, is very high. In fact we’ve successfully convinced the whole of civil society that it’s so high that it wholly fails to protect female prison inmates from convicted rapists or female children using supermarket toilets from male repeat offender violent pedophiles. There has to be a very specific set of reasons to exclude trans women from single-sex spaces. Although we dearly wish that no single-sex spaces wished to exclude trans women, trans men or non-binary people, we also recognise that, for the minority of spaces that want to, it is probably not a particularly safe service for those trans people to access. I mean, you wouldn’t expect us to care about services and facilities for female humans, now would you?
Trans people in elite sportWe believe that trans people should be able to thrive and flourish in everything they do, and that includes sport. Not females though, they shouldn’t be able to flourish in female competitions if a mediocre male wants to take a prize from the elite female competitors whose prize it actually is. There has been a huge amount of focus on a literal handful of trans women who are competing at an elite level. I mean let’s face it, it wouldn’t be worth it for them if more than three competed per event - after all there’s only three medals available for transfer from elite female athletes to mediocre male ‘competitors’.
The Equality Act rightly presumes the inclusion of trans people as its starting point, and this includes in sport. The Act does allow sporting organisations to discriminate on the grounds of sex if it is a ’gender-affected activity’ or in order to secure ‘fair competition’ or ‘the safety of competitors’, but they must be able to justify it with evidence as proportionate.
We believe that decisions on guidelines should be informed by robust evidence and developed in consultation with players and athletes with direct experience. No two sports are the same. The physical and tactical skills and attributes needed for different sports are highly varied, as is the profile of players competing across grassroots and elite levels. It’s vital that when they make decisions on inclusion, sports use data that is high quality and specific to both the sport and the level at which the game is being played. Given that trans people take part in every sport, it’s also vital that sport bodies consider the experience of trans inclusion in their sports to date.
While sport-specific evidence bases are developing, we urge sport governing bodies not to exclude the tiny number of trans people competing an elite level. The sense of entitlement of a tiny number of males is so much more important than fairness for an entire sex.
Working with anti-trans groups We will continue to slander and misrepresent anyone who attempts to stand up for the rights of female humans or same sex orientation, reality, facts or the truth. Stonewall has always, and will always, sit down with anyone who has a respectful position towards the LGBTQ+ community and wants to advance our progress and build alliances to do so. Stonewall’s ethos was and remains the organisation that is ‘in the room’.
That said, we have never used our precious resources on dialogue with people who are vehemently against LGBTQ+ communities, Obviously we don’t consider lesbians who say lesbians don’t have a penis to be part of this defined-by-us-not-by-them so-called ‘community’ and that will remain true. Our focus is on working with politicians and decision-makers, business and societal leaders who can make a difference to LGBTQ+ people’s lives. Our very successful strategy and tactics went awry of late but we’ve sacked Nancy Kelley are we are taking remedial action in the run up to the election.