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| Simon Fanshawe: Does it think I'm the wrong sort of gay? Source |
The British have allies in the form of feminists Julie Blindel, Kathleen Stock, and most prominently JK Rowling, who are willing to push back. British mainstream media also haven't succumbed to the fashionable wokeism that has captured American media generally. For the British, The Times, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail are the leaders in maintaining some kind of independence from the ideological thinking that is hardening in its totalitarianism, becoming more antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that had allowed democracy to flourish.
During the past week another voice has been added to those pointing out how transgenderism has set upon a revolutionary course that will only alienate those who support the dismantling of all barriers to enable homosexuals to thrive in their human dignity.
Simon Fanshawe writes in the Daily Mail:
I was one of the six co-founders of Stonewall in the 1980s. Along with the others, I poured all my energy into making the organisation a formidable force for gay and lesbian rights.
All that work is now in danger of being wrecked, Stonewall’s reputation [as a gay rights charity] discredited, and its credibility squandered, by trans activists — not all trans people, I hasten to add — who believe they can dictate what everyone is allowed to say and think.
He was reacting to a statement, given as part of a court case in London, when Stonewall's ‘head of trans inclusion’, Kirrin Medcalf, took the stand and declared: ‘Bodies are not inherently male or female. They are just their bodies.’ Fanshawe tells why he was so dismayed to hear that statement:
People such as Kirrin Medcalf imagine that reality can be reshaped to fit their requirements.
Asked whether there is a difference between biological sex and gender preference, Medcalf denied it.
According to the official Stonewall position — and to disagree is to be regarded as a heretic or, in the current lingo, ‘transphobic’ — people are literally whichever biological sex they choose to be. Medcalf appears unaware of the screaming contradictions in this position.
One barrister asked pointedly about whether there are any circumstances where it would be OK to treat someone according to their biological sex.
The Stonewall employee offered that this would be OK ‘at a cervical screening service’.
So it seems that even in Stonewall’s world, there are still occasions when the reality of sex stubbornly resists the pretence.
But it is Stonewall’s trans activists, apparently, who have the privilege of choosing those occasions.
Other people don’t — and, in particular, the definition of what ‘a woman’ is must never be left up to women themselves.
This trial has become a spectacle of ludicrousness. The barrister Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers, Garden Court in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes.
She says she has been punished for speaking out against Stonewall’s trans policies and arguing that it is undermining the hard-won rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in its determination to promote its trans doctrine.
'A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat'
Fanshawe gives his reasons for believing that the charity he co-founded has completely lost its way:
Medcalf claimed that Stonewall had no choice but to advise people to avoid Garden Court Chambers, for fear of meeting Allison Bailey.
Her statements were supposedly so virulent and hateful that any trans person who encountered her would be ‘at risk of physical harm’.
This is simply nonsense. Allison Bailey has never physically threatened anyone.
She doesn’t believe transwomen are actually women, and this enrages Stonewall, but it’s a world away from physical violence.
Medcalf appears to believe that words are the same as actions, that to say ‘I don’t like you’ is the same as punching you in the face.
A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat. According to Medcalf, any trans person encountering Bailey is at risk of attack. This is a completely imaginary scenario.
Nothing of this kind has happened in real life. Yet Medcalf talks as though saying these things out loud somehow makes them true.
It was former U.S. president Donald Trump who first gave us ‘alternative facts’. When people challenged his version of reality, he used any form of coercion he could to shut them up. But it breaks my heart to see Stonewall adopt the same sort of tactics.
He continues:
Stonewall was born in an era of hostility, and we had to find a way of breaking down prejudice and building alliances with our critics.
The best way to do this, we discovered, was not by screaming abuse or attempting to lay down the law. Instead, we used data and research to construct a wall of credibility.
Further:
We did it so well that the social mood changed completely, enabling gay and lesbian people to enjoy real equality — with same-sex couples eventually being given the right to marry, for example.
The problem is now the reverse of what Stonewall faced three decades ago. Society is so keen to be inclusive and to respect diversity that it is open to manipulation. Everyone is terrified of appearing prejudiced.
The wrath of Stonewall is not a thing to be lightly provoked, as Allison Bailey has found out.
Her lawyers have described this as a protection racket. I wouldn’t go that far, but it highlights a serious problem with Stonewall’s approach.
Most Britons are very happy to see trans people treated fairly and equally, with decency and tolerance. Most trans people welcome that.
'Women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute'
He certainly does not hold back when he states:
But a small minority of activists, including those who have taken over Stonewall, do not want to extend that decency and tolerance to the rest of the population.
Equality, to them, means imposing their views on everyone else, without debate. That should concern anyone who believes freedom of speech is sacrosanct.
It is especially alarming to women who see their safe spaces breached by transwomen with intact male bodies.
Sexual violence against women must never be ignored or belittled, yet Stonewall is saying that no one has the right to question the presence of a naked and obviously male interloper in a female changing room.
Equally, women are told they cannot object to transwomen competing in their sports, despite copious data showing that cyclists, tennis players, swimmers and others with male bodies are at a colossal advantage when competing against females.
Women who do speak out, even those as highly regarded as JK Rowling or Martina Navratilova, are told with vehemence to shut up.
It often feels as though the trans debate has plunged us back into an era before feminism, when women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute to social discourse.
By polarising the debate, and treating their version of trans rights as non-negotiable, Stonewall has opened up divisions.
That makes me deeply frustrated and sad. I’ve spent my life trying to bridge those divides and build coalitions.
Now people such as Kirrin Medcalf are taking a wrecking ball to that work and squandering Stonewall’s hard-won credibility.
I wish trans activists could see they don’t need to force their views on everyone else. Their greatest strength is in diversity.
When we marched in the first Pride demonstrations, we weren’t asking to be straight — we sang that we were ‘Glad to be gay!’
Let’s celebrate our differences, not wipe out our diversity.
'It wants to change other people’s definitions of their lives'
In a podcast interview, Fanshawe stresses how insulting to him the extremist Stonewall position is, and how revolutionary it is for society:
I have actually been told by the previous chair of Stonewall that I had put myself ‘outside Stonewall’, which sounds to me like Stonewall had made a decision that there can be the right kind and wrong kind of gays.
When you’re putting forward legislation or policy, you then have to recognise its implications, and you have to work through those in order to convince other people that your policy would still be a good thing. The gender-ideology campaign doesn’t do that. It seems to want to change other people’s definitions of their lives. It seems to be about telling women that the group they thought they belonged to – adult human females – turns out to be a much bigger group, which has actually got a whole lot of people in it who were originally born men.
If that is the aim, then campaigners need to be pretty clear about it. But I don’t see that as a political demand in the tradition of Stonewall, which was about tackling discrimination. I see that as a revolutionary view. It’s fine to hold a revolutionary view. But it’s also not a view that is shared by the vast range of those lesbians, gays and trans people who were originally involved in Stonewall.
Stonewall has got to make up its mind whether it is the representative group of lesbians, gays and trans people, or whether, actually, it is a much narrower ideological campaign that has other views. One way or another, that decision has to be made.
In truth, the bundle of woke theories being thrust on society are revolutionary, whether on the matter of policies for eradicating racial discrimination, or in the matter of the nature of optimal family life. We are seeing heroes arise in protecting society from the assaults on reason and reality.
Note: A ruling is awaited in the case where lawyer Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes. She says she was punished for speaking out against Stonewall policies when the charity was advising the law firm.
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