Stonewall cannot rebuild without admitting its mistakes

Simon Blake, the man tasked with rebuilding Stonewall, displayed a brass neck, cloth ears and all the self-awareness of a teenage gamer in the Guardian this week. In an interview with Gaby Hinsliff, he bemoaned the plight of trans-identified people in Britain, recounting how friends and colleagues feel increasingly pessimistic about the future. Nowhere did Blake acknowledge that the charity he now leads helped create the confusion and distress he laments, or explain why so many lesbian, gay and bisexual people oppose the policies he backs.

Instead, Blake claimed that government guidance had curtailed trans-identified people’s access to public life, healthcare and workplace toilets, and produced the usual shroud-waving statistics about suicide. He recalled an evening out with friends: “They were frightened about going to the toilet — each time that someone went to the toilet, it was a question mark. That’s not the way anybody should be expected to live.” The uncertainty his friends describe is, in large part, the consequence of Stonewall’s own campaigning.

Under chief executives Ruth Hunt and then Nancy Kelley, the charity promoted gender self-identification as best practice for employers. It broadened “trans” to include cross-dressers, championed male “lesbians” such as the bearded psychotherapist Alex Drummond , and redefined “lesbian” and “gay” as same-gender rather than same-sex attraction. Kelley even likened lesbians’ sexual boundaries to “sexual racism”. All the while, Stonewall drew millions in public funding, enjoyed support across government and collected fees from roughly 850 employers.

Blake’s friends may resent being directed to facilities designated for their sex. But the Supreme Court did not invent those sex-based provisions. It clarified that “sex” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, following years in which Stonewall encouraged employers to substitute gender identity for the protected characteristic of sex. As Akua Reindorf KC observed in 2021, Stonewall’s advice had stated the law as it “would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”.

The strategy was to use internal policies to impose social change ahead of legal change. But thanks to the efforts of campaigners, Reform of the Gender Recognition Act never came to pass. That may make some people angry and distressed, but they should direct their anger at the organisation that overpromised and misled them. Blake now says: “we need to be able to have discussion, but we do have to find ways to do that without heat.” He could start by owning the damage his organisation did, and apologising to the people it smeared.

Anyone who has followed these issues closely will know we are long past handwringing. We are beyond the clichés of “less heat, more light” and the nonsensical platitudes about “toxicity from both sides”. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people who refuse to believe in pronouns, and who know that as young people they could easily have found themselves on the medical pathway to a trans identity, will not be placated by another appeal to civility.

We are angry, and we have good reason to be. Over the past decade Stonewall has metastasised into a biology-denying cult with an all-access pass to government, shedding credibility and goodwill along the way. Blake cannot rebuild trust with the people his organisation defamed while it clings to the fiction of the “male-bodied lesbian” and refuses to own the damage it has done. A charity that refuses to admit past mistakes cannot help but fail, though a more charismatic chief might have delayed its decline.

Instead, Blake’s wet appeal for civility will only make his critics cheer louder when Stonewall finally whimpers out. Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy . jo_bartosch