Get the violins out - Stonewall is "in crisis"

[IwantToRetire]

Our biggest LGBT charity is in crisis. Are we just going to let it collapse? LGBT people need armour; an organisation like Stonewall to act as a first line of defence

Stonewall, Britain’s largest LGBT organisation, is in crisis. It’s plummeting financially, with rounds of redundancies as funding cuts hit. And its credibility and influence is plunging amid a national and global backlash against LGBT rights.

This matters. If someone asked you to name the first LGBT organisation that comes to mind, I would bet my cat you’d say Stonewall. Since it was founded more than 35 years ago, the charity has become entwined in our country’s psyche, Parliament, schools, sporting and business sectors. But for how much longer?

However you feel about Stonewall, we need a conversation about the state of the biggest charity defending LGBT people. And we need to ask ourselves a question as the opponents of all kinds of human rights lie in wait: are we just going to let it die?
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To highlight one recent example of Stonewall’s seemingly waning influence, I asked the Government several times recently whether it has consulted with Stonewall over a proposed ban on conversion therapy since taking office. A spokesperson from the Cabinet Office declined to confirm whether it has even had any meetings with the charity about it, instead offering vaguely: “We will engage further with a broad range of stakeholders.” I asked Stonewall three times, but they did not provide a response.

Perhaps both sides are being coy or don’t want the public to know that they’ve met. But either way, this is as bizarre as it is concerning. Stonewall was once the charity that lobbied every MP in the country to help pass the same-sex marriage law in 2013. Now, it is unclear whether they’ve even had a meeting with the new Government over the psychological torture of LGBT people
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Should it die, many will dance on Stonewall’s grave. But then many would happily see the rights of LGBT people revoked too – thereby exposing how much a strong, influential organisation for this community is still needed.

If you think it should return to only representing lesbian, bisexual and gay people, then you’re ignoring not only the plight of trans people but also how intertwined all these rights are and how many government’s incarcerate people for laws that oppress every letter in the acronym – or pass laws like the Equality Act that protect everyone (until that is chipped away).
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Complete article at https://inews.co.uk/opinion/biggest-lgbt-charity-crisis-stonewall-3645337
Can also be read in full at https://archive.is/yGTYs

(If LGB people can set up their own Alliance, why cant trans people do the same?)

That's soooo booooring! Who's going to be able to go on a March and deface statues and abuse women by putting out a boring old travel guide to stop gay people being humiliated on holiday or ask David Beckham about his views on sportswashing and Gay rights?

i sent my local (Tory) councillor the sex matters email and guidance. Our Liv Dem council have made headlines/you tube reaction videos over their treatment of people asking for single sex spaces. Hes written back saying he fully supports the SC decision and will be making sure it is implemented across council services and men and women have safe spaces. Hurray!! Hopefully the Sex Matters guidance will help in His work

I sometimes think people confuse Stonewall with a gay rights charity - is there such a charity, one that spends its donations/income championing say lesbian rights rather than attacking same sex attracted women, one that perhaps has a similar name which is causing the confusion?

Perhaps the reason I’m so very angry with them is that I did some volunteering for them when they were a gay rights charity. I remember Section 28 Stonewall.

I miss the days when the Indie used to be a proper newspaper.

Stonewall disingenuously represented itself as a quasi governmental organisation and (mis)interpreter of the law for years, growing fat off taxpayer funds and corporate sponsorships. As such it acted way outside its remit and should have been investigated by the charity commission years ago.

It's comprehensively let down lesbians for the past decade and as such, now only really represents gay men and straight (AGP) men, ie the two groups in British society with the most cultural capital, wealth and privilege.

It's deeply corrupt, misguided and needs to be disbanded. It is the very definition of doing more harm than good.

Enjoy your erasure, guys.

I disagree: Del Boy, when you look beyond the petty crime and self-aggrandisement, is fundamentally a good-hearted character who cares deeply about his friends and family, and won't hesitate to put them first when the chips are down.

Stonewall on the other hand has become a cruel, disingenuous, wasteful behemoth squatting on public life, hiding its cynicism behind a facade of sweetness and light.

A better fictional character to compare Stonewall to would be Delores Umbridge.

They threw lesbians to the wolves and for that reason alone (though there are many others) they need disbanded, like, yesterday.

given how they grossly misrepresented U.K. law, who would trust such a guide now?
Such a shame they’ve destroyed their own credibility.

I disagree strongly that Stonewall is 'loveable'. They traded for a very long time on the mask of the reputation built by others with very different values in the days before they declared homosexuals to be 'sexual racists', especially women refusing to play along with male people wanting to be provided with straight sex while the woman pretended otherwise for them.... I mean think about that, it's become so normal that the absolute horror of it has been wallpapered over with rainbows.

A gay woman should abandon her sexuality. Her desires. Her wishes. Her consent even. No 'authenticity' or 'love is love' or 'freetobeme' or other pretentious and hyberbolic twonk for her.

Her job is to 'learn to cope' and accept that the most she can expect or should look for in a sexual relationship is to be able to physically tolerate what the man requires from her. She's a walking sexual resource with a birthright duty that somehow he lacks despite that he is absolutely a 'woman'.

Anyone remember Riley Dennis explaining that if a woman was a bit traumatised then she had a little while to get over this (so generous) before she had to crack on with getting her body out for a man's use.

It is essentially a demand for free sex work. With shaming, exclusion coercion, barbed wire baseball bats and blood stained t shirts - take a look at terfisaslur.com for how pathologically disturbed the men were who were demanding this.

Stonewall were right behind this. I helped fundraise for them in the dark ages when they were the one light on for LGB people. Straight people may see them as all cuddly snuggly. I see the rainbow now and I honestly internally want to get the fuck away, it is the mark of attitudes and behaviours that I don't want to be anywhere near.

@TheOtherRaven, your visceral reaction to the rainbow flag is mine too. To the extent that I have passed on buying some lovely items of clothing because they were vaguely rainbow striped.

Yes, the LGB alliance

Of course the confusion isn’t the fault of the LGBA, it’s down to Stonewall originally having been a gay rights charity for LGB people but they’ve not had the honesty to drop even the L when they changed their remit to prioritise trans people over lesbians.

It is absolutely amazing how thoroughly and successfully they have managed to completely appropriate the rainbow. Sometimes I'll remind even religiously-literate people of its original (and very recent) significance in the Noah's Ark story. You can see the look of horror when they realise the campaigns have worked in wiping their cultural memory too.

The rainbow has now, for me, taken on a sinister aspect - to me the pride flag now stands for suppression of dissenting viewpoints, hounding of women, and the inappropriate sexualisation of children.

Genuinely how I feel when I see it. It's no longer a sign of hope, of God's covenant with humankind (I'm Eastern Orthodox Christian) or acceptance and gay equality (which is important to me as my DS1 is gay). It's something much darker to me now.

I'm sure there's a PhD thesis on the symbology of it all, hopefully someone will write it at some point.

Same for me. The rainbow flag used to be something warm & accepting & now it’s a homophobic threat.

Anyone remember Riley Dennis explaining that if a woman was a bit traumatised then she had a little while to get over this (so generous) before she had to crack on with getting her body out for a man's use.

Yes - he helped peak me quickish, though I was near the peak from the beginning...

(Can we say peak now? Guess I'll find out. I don't think we used to be able to.)

It’s an age old method, the adoption of existing symbols and repurposing - symbolism often works on a subconscious level (there are various explanations why). The most well known example is the swastika or fylfot cross found across multiple cultures, often linked to peace and balance -of course it now carries different connotations - again, so much so it’s lost much of its original meanings, even when used for its original purposes it now brings controversy. Less well known examples include the Celtic cross, other equal arms crosses. The cross of humility, now largely associated with Satanism, the pentagram - for many years associated with Christ (the 5 wounds) now has more dark occult symbolism in people’s minds.

People don’t pick symbols accidentally-the religious significance of the rainbow will not have been accidental- although might have been subconscious

symbolism often works on a subconscious level (there are various explanations why).

Yes, I've read my Jung & Campbell :-)

I agree with you about these choices often being made on a subconscious imperative.

The Nazis flipped the swastika around, and I sometimes wonder if there was a subconscious awareness that they were planning the opposite of peace and balance (well, they knew they were, so to that extent it wasn't subconscious). (The esoterica/arcana/occult side of Nazi philosophy isn't studied so much these days which is a dereliction of an important academic avenue, imho. It wasn't that important to Hitler but it was to the early founders of the movement and I think places important context on the philosophy underpinning some of their later actions.)

With the rainbow, I don't actually know who picked it for Pride. I do sometimes find myself wondering if it was a subconscious desire to minimise the core aspect of homosexuality (which is ultimately about sex), de-sex gay rights and therefore help make gay rights more palatable to 'normies'.

I do absolutely think that the trans colours - baby blue, light pink - were chosen to appeal to children and families.

Really clever parasites alter how their hosts behave to maximise the chance of the parasite surviving and reproducing. Cat tapeworms have a lifecycle that also involves mice. An infected mouse stops avoiding cat urine, maximising the chance of the cat eating the mouse. Phasmarhabditis californica make their hosts (gastropod land molluscs) bury themselves under the soil so that they don't get eaten by birds and hedgehogs.

The trans extremists who parasitised Stonewall did the same with their "no debate" and "most marginalised" rhetoric, and most of all with TWAW and "cis", the first of which allowed a straight man to claim to be a lesbian, and the second to position himself as more oppressed than actual lesbians.

Time to revisit this classic

Put the fucking lotion in the basket!

So if Stonewall does go down the toilet who could this ideology possibly latch onto next? I agree I can't see them having anywhere near the same success as a stand alone of which there are already a handful.

We’re totally on the same page then ;-).

I actually think the study of esoteric and occult concepts is much understudied in relation to many historical eras and is actually a very important strand in understanding the full picture - it’s always been around, in the west but has been kept hidden by Christianity.

Interestingly, many of the various esoteric and occult communities today have quite a high membership of trans and trans supporters.

As you probably know Thelema and the OTO - Aleister Crowley’s “religion/philosophy” had a major issue a few years ago with the trans community when stating who could and could not be Priest and Priestess. Many people left. Mary Greer, who most famously wrote about the Women of the Golden Dawn- women who were pioneers of feminism, involved in suffrage and the germ of the Labour Party is a very staunch supporter of trans rights. I would say the two are pretty interlinked at this point.

I know it sounds like a side track but I think we need to be very aware of some of the uses of symbols in this community, given their very powerful effect on people’s subconscious - yes I agree the baby blue/baby pink is undoubtedly meant to trigger a “oh so innocent, looks very child like and unthreatening” subconscious response.

Del Boy took a beating on behalf of Rodney, who he was mistaken for. As you say, he wasn't honest with the world but he prioritised his family to the point of enduring physical battery to protect them.

ask David Beckham about his views on sportswashing and Gay rights?

Also, can you imagine how well a call to boycott the World Cup if it's hosted in a homophobic country would go down? That would involve men en masse giving up something they value to take a stand, and we know that that's never going to happen in a patriarchy.

So much easier just to shit on women instead.

Of course the Dianic Wiccans were one of the first groups the TRAs came for, because of their insistence on being a woman only (old definition) group.

I think a lot of the esoteric groups are dominated by people rebelling against their conservative Christian upbringing, and that matters to them more than the actual thing they're supposed to believe in.

I have a theory, based on Wiccans I've known, that I can tell which of them are ex-Catholic and which are ex-Protestant. There are women from Catholic backgrounds who are really into the art and symbolism of ritual, and who you can imagine that if the Catholic Church ordained women, that would have been their vocation. And then there are the ex-evangelicals who are very anti-Christian and buy into a lot of the pseudohistory.

They've got quite a high proportion of trans and trans supporters, which is a bit weird to me because in theological terms they're a fertility religion based in the polarity of the sexes, but I suppose they have quite a 'be kind' ethos so reimagining sexual polarity as a spectrum of gendered souls would work for them.

I'm not close to the OTO, but based on the members I've met I can imagine them being more old school.