The answer was surprising. Bridget Phillipson, who identifies as the Women and Equalities minister, evidently believes that some people are more equal than others. When asked whether trans women should use men’s toilets, she replied that access to such services should be based on biology. In other words, yes. I’d be fascinated to know whether she, therefore, thinks trans men should use women’s toilets.
The whole situation is spiralling. The Tories jumped on the judgement as an opportunity to kick Labour. At Prime Minister’s Questions, leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch asked Keir Starmer: “Does the Prime Minister now accept that when he said that it was the law that trans women were women, he was wrong?”
This is a human rights grab, in line with Donald Trump’s policies. And it’s a reminder if you need one, of a cold fact of history: all rights can be ripped away. So what now? Who will defend the safety and dignity of transgender people? Protests against the judgement at the weekend served as a reminder of another context in which this is taking place.
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?
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Read MoreViolence against this community isn’t going away. A major study of 30 European countries found it rising between 2019 and 2023. Bullying in playgrounds, workplaces and online is going nowhere. Policies in Western countries like Hungary, Italy, and the US are going backwards. We cannot just assume the same won’t happen here.
In the UK, corporations and public organisations from the BBC to the Cabinet Office to the Royal College of Psychiatrists have also pulled out of its workplace equality and diversity champions schemes. Several Stonewall projects have been scaled back over recent years, and major research that once provided groundbreaking insights into the plight of LGBT people has been stopped.
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.
I don’t say any of this lightly. I’ve worked journalistically with Stonewall for over 15 years. In that time, I’ve liaised with successive CEOs, been given an award by the charity in 2010, and seen first-hand the impact it’s had on parliament and on individuals and communities across the country.
But whatever has been reported in the last few months, the recent conversations I’ve had with people involved in the charity, past and present, have alarmed me further. In recent weeks, they said, Stonewall’s founders were so worried that they met to discuss the situation, determined to save it.
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.
You’re forgetting, too, that gay people can also be trans and vice versa. You’re disregarding history – gender nonconformity has always been enmeshed in sexual diversity, from butch lesbians to drag queens, from 18th-century molly houses to the 1980s ballroom scene. And you’re blind to the future – the global trends against trans people, particularly in the US, are affecting gay people too. Drag queens and trans people alike are “groomers”, according to Maga-style rhetoric. In Qatar, as I reported last year, gay men are now deported for wearing tinted moisturiser.
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If, however, you ask, “How about a charity that’s much more grassroots and doesn’t rely on corporate funding?” then I sympathise. But who is waiting in the wings to establish one? And if no one has heard of it, how effective can it be?
Part of that complacency is understandable; people have come to expect equality and liberation. That’s a victory – until it becomes denial. Remember what happened in Berlin in the 1930s, how queer cabaret clubs were closed, how gay and gender non-conforming people were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps.
The US is now banning LGBT books; some politicians are even burning them. UK librarians are being lobbied to remove LGBT books. History repeats. When I spent a week at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, in 2013, that warning of repetition rang out over everything. It still rings in my ears.
To prevent blood in the water from becoming blood in the streets, we can’t assume anything. We have to fund ourselves, organise ourselves – and fight for our very existence.
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