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lliance, a pressure group that campaigns for lower taxes and public spending, said that the Department for Education provided the largest total grant, giving Stonewall £934,424 between 2015-16 and 2018-19. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Welsh government were the second and third largest public sector sources for grants, giving £660,028 and £552,326 respectively.

The charity is losing supporters after it was found to have provided inaccurate legal advice on transgender people.

That's not the main reason they're losing support. They're losing support because they're being seen for what they are: not so much a progressive force for good but a bunch of campaigners pushing a radical trans ideology.

Opponents claim, however, that by advising partners to write their internal policies on the law as Stonewall proposes, rather than the law as it is, leaves organisations at risk of legal challenges. “Stonewall is charging people to put in practice Stonewall law, rather than UK law,” Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, said.

The Mail on Sunday reported that a mother claimed to have been horrified to find that her daughter’s school had paid £1,700 to join Stonewall’s diversity scheme but could not afford enough lavatory paper. “There is no requirement for a primary school, or any school, to teach their children about gender identity ideology,” Davies-Arai said. “Cash-strapped schools are spending a lot of money on a group that makes up a tiny proportion of students, which means they are neglecting other groups.”

John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “The public purse should not be paying out to pressure groups who in turn are using that cash to push for policy changes.”

Business as usual at the pro-Palestine rally in London yesterday. From the JC:

A placard depicting Benjamin Netanyahu as Hitler and calling Israel a ‘Nazi state (sic)’, was among the controversial images and slogans on display on the streets of London during a large pro-Palestine rally yesterday.

A man covered in fake blood and clutching a mutilated and bloodstained doll was seen in the crowd as those around him denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

One controversial banner proclaimed: “You can’t be racist unless you’re a Zionist”, while a homemade poster asked: “What is antisemitic in saying that all Jews support violence and imperialism?”

Speakers made repeated claims that Hamas was a legitimate resistance force rather than a terror group, and made furious calls for the British government to boycott Israel and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDC) movement.

Loud chanting recorded by the JC included the refrain, “five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terror state”.

And, of course, the main speaker…

The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, now sitting as an independent MP after the Labour whip was removed, addressed the rally….

A spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Another weekend, another antisemitism-infested demonstration on the streets of Britain’s capital.

“Heavy policing ensured the safety of the Jewish community as another convoy was permitted to pass through London.

“Nevertheless, it is extraordinary that, unlike with any other minority, week after week open displays of anti-Jewish racism in the nation’s capital are deemed acceptable.

“If the authorities will not bring antisemitic criminals to justice, we intend to use all legal and regulatory avenues to defend our community and force the authorities to act.”

The spokesman added that “less remarkable” was “the ubiquity of Jeremy Corbyn at these rallies.

rmer rector of Edinburgh University, told how she feared for her safety on campus after students falsely accused her of transphobia.

It's the worst sin of all…

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A family putting away its tent after having camped in the mountains just outside Parand
[Photos © Hashem Shakeri]

said, in a recent BBC interview, that people sharing my belief in reality are akin to anti-semites, and what we say is 'hate speech'. They have never acknowledged, let alone condemned the aggression, threats and violence enacted on women from transactivists they have whipped up."

"I am a lesbian, and where the rainbow used to mean that i would be safe and accepted, it now makes me take a deep breath and wait for the onslaught of bluehairs telling me why I am evil."

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deas they disagree with are ‘dangerous’ or ‘harmful’. They are told that even discussing these issues is, according to slogans regularly deployed by activists, ‘literal violence'. Those who distinguish between sex and gender are even ‘erasing trans existence’. Such phrases circulate on social media and are used to blacklist and no-platform women like us. They have moved from peaceful protests to demanding that universities provide ‘safe spaces’ in which no ideas can challenge their worldviews.

Of course, these ideas do not only come from the students — their lecturers and professors are also implicated. Today’s students have been told that something terrible will happen to them if they ask questions about gender identity. They are studying in a culture of fear. Teachers should lead by example, yet students look to academics bullying their peers into silence and feel legitimised to do the same.

Academics like us know that standing up to the bullies will mean further harassment and that our careers are forever tainted. We know this culture of fear better than most, and we know that the blame lies with our colleagues and our students. It was not Stonewall that stopped our right to free speech. It was not Stonewall that prevented one of us from doing our job. It was the staff and students at Essex that sent emails ‘alerting’ others to the fact that ‘well known transphobes’ were due to speak; that used official university meetings to politically vet one of us; and that trawled our social media for evidence that we were witches who needed to be burnt at the stake. Stonewall did not produce that threatening poster. It was the staff and students who tweeted defamatory and hateful things about us.

Nor of course is the University of Essex alone. This kind of behaviour is widespread throughout universities across the country.

It might be easy to think that this story has nothing to do with trans rights and the unlawful behaviour of the bullies at Essex, but this would be wrong. It has everything to do with it. Like Galileo, we are being told that what we are saying is correct but that we should stay silent because powerful lobby groups don’t like the truth we are telling.

UK universities have a legal duty to protect academic freedom but academics also have a professional duty. Academics are not employed to promote the policies of lobbying organisations or to shut down other academics who question those policies. We are employed to teach students to learn how to analyse, debate and grapple with complex issues.

The bullies fail to understand the difference between politicking and research. They have failed in their professional duties by insisting that some types of questions cannot be asked. We are fighting for intellectual freedom, professionalism and the ‘right’ simply to do our jobs as academics. We won’t stop doing so — there is too much at stake.

s important. And then similarly women’s refuges, women’s prisons, they are sex segregated for a reason, and usually that reason protects women.

On the “Stonewall Stasi”

The LGBTQ+ allies group, who vet internal policies and make complaints about people and do reverse mentoring of senior managers…They do the thought policing within the organisation. That’s now very strongly embedded. I hear from lots of people inside organisations that have these policies, they talked about the ‘Stonewall stasi’ in their organisation.

It's been an astonishing tale, the success of Stonewall and their pervasive influence across UK organisations. Finally it looks like it's coming to an end.

workers, unions seem more concerned to act as a provisional wing of Stonewall.

That explains how you end up with Jo Grady of the University and College Union dismissing women’s concerns. “Treating the lives of trans people as a philosophical debate dehumanises trans people,” she tweeted, effectively delegitimising any discussion of what gender means and how it relates to sex. For someone supposedly promoting the interests of academics, this is not an encouraging attitude to free inquiry.

In their negligence on the trans issue, unions are only acting in line with the broader labour movement. This week Sir Keir Starmer inexplicably reaffirmed Labour’s commitment to reforming the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to self-identify their gender, despite the manifold problems apparent when it comes to single-sex services such as prisons.

It’s tempting to say that Starmer is so far from becoming prime minister it hardly matters what he says. Yet it’s all part of the depressing betrayal of women in the workplace. Forstater’s victory counts, but it’s qualified. Until unions can be trusted to protect all the workers they represent, not just lobby for trans rights, women may well wonder why they should pay their subs.

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[Camo © Thandiwe Muriu]

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