The extraordinary willingness of many organisations to pay through the nose to be lectured and condescended to

=”padding-left: 40px”>Advice to those applying – more than 500 in the last year – includes ditching all gendered language outlawing single sex toilets and changing rooms.

Employers are urged to add gender pronouns to all email signatures, and even run a “rainbow laces campaign”. Whitehall is already under pressure to quit the charity’s Diversity Champions scheme, with equalities minister Liz Truss telling departments that they should not be paying the £2,500 membership fee.

The scheme provides guidance and training on how to be inclusive and offers perks including a free review of all HR policies by Stonewall. But legal experts have warned the 850 employers who have signed up, including around 250 Government departments and public bodies, that the charity is “misrepresenting” equality law.

Correspondence released under FOI laws shows that the charity informed Historic England that it is a “legal right” for an individual to “use the facility that corresponds with their gender identity”.

But that ain't so.

The 2010 Equality Act says single-sex facilities and services are allowed, if shown to be “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”, such as privacy in women’s changing rooms and refuges.

Naomi Cunningham, a barrister specialising in discrimination, warned: “They are misrepresenting the contents of the Equality Act… But public authorities are believing it and because of that they're finding themselves in breach of the law. So it's a real trap.

“The obsessive focus on this tiny, tiny proportion of any given workforce is unbalancing, and it does mean that there is a strong likelihood that as employers sign up to Stonewall programmes, there will be equality impacts for other protected groups, particularly women but also religious groups.”

Stonewall have, in fact, pulled off one of the most extraordinary cons of recent times, by piggy-backing on the feel-good progressive vibes generated by the success of gay liberation, and all that powerful Pride rainbow-coloured emotion, to advance an absurd irrational and misogynistic ideology:

Amanda Jones, a barrister at Great Street Chambers specialising in equality laws, said that its training was “misleading”, particularly around the law on the provision of single-sex spaces. Stonewall is currently lobbying for the removal of the single-sex exemption from the law.

“What stands out in general is the extraordinary willingness of many organisations to pay through the nose to be lectured and condescended to. Paying people to lobby you is a new and impressive development,” Ms Jones told The Telegraph.