Perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

The chief executive of the campaign group Stonewall, Ruth Hunt, has resigned after a growing protest by leading gay and lesbian supporters against her stance on promoting transgender rights.

Two of the charity’s former ambassadors and donors revealed this weekend they had withdrawn their support in protest because “Ruth Hunt called it wrong and Stonewall is no longer a worthy champion of our rights”.

Maureen Chadwick, creator of hit television programmes including Bad Girls, Footballers’ Wives and Waterloo Road, said that she and her partner, Kath Gotts, quit after Stonewall embraced what they called “the ‘trans’ cause”.

They were big donors until Stonewall went all trans all the time.

This weekend she said they had no idea “how completely the militant ‘trans’ agenda would overwhelm Stonewall with its confusion of sex and gender and its blindness to all the complex rights issues resulting from that.

“Many other longstanding supporters of Stonewall, including transsexuals, share our concerns and dismay that the very organisation we helped to fund and turn into the ‘go to’ LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] authority, advising political parties and corporates, is now telling schoolchildren that a bearded man with a penis can be a lesbian and any girls and boys deviating from 1950s gender norms are in the wrong body.”

Stonewall however says it’s not changing a thing.

Figures who have played a significant role in the 30-year history of Stonewall said they had stepped away in dismay.

One said: “We want people to be nice to trans people, just as we want people to be nice to [gay people], but that is not the argument. The argument is not whether people can be trans or are trans; the argument is what happens when you shift identity in opposition to biology.”

And impose your idea of yourself on everyone else.