Out
Press Release from Sex Matters:
Equality and Human Rights Commission cuts ties with Stonewall
Now there is a headline.
In a letter to the campaigning group “Sex Matters”, the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Kishwer Falkner has disclosed that the equalities watchdog has quit the Stonewall Diversity Champions Scheme.
Yes yes YES.
Falkner was writing in response to an open letter sent by Sex Matters calling on the EHRC to quit the scheme.
Sex Matters campaigns for clarity about sex in law and policy. It argues that membership of the Stonewall Scheme conflicts with public service independence and in particular with the EHRC’s mandate to protect everybody’s rights.
Organisations that join the scheme pay Stonewall an annual fee and allow it to vet their internal policies, such as about who can use toilets and changing facilities, and what language to use when talking about men and women. Scheme members are encouraged to promote “gender self – identification”, to train all staff to be “allies”, and to take steps such as encouraging people to announce their pronouns in meetings, and to wear rainbow lanyards.
Encourage to promote “gender self-identification” – not just accept it or warn against persecuting it but promote it.
The news of EHRC leaving the Stonewall scheme comes in the same week as Essex University released the “Reindorf Review” investigation into the no-platforming of two feminist academics.
Barrister Akua Reindorf found the university had adopted policies which reflect “the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”, and created a “culture of fear”. A spokeswoman from Stonewall defended their policies as being “based on guidance provided by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.”
Well let’s just go around that circle forever, shall we? Stonewall says the EHRC says it’s ok and the EHRC says Stonewall says it’s ok repeat repeat repeat forever. Be sure never to do any actual thinking.
But the EHRC has ditched them and that is the best news.
I know I’m hijacking the thread, but I kinda want to share this in a sympathetic space. I was spending time with a friend, and then we went over to her place because we were worried it was going to rain. Her flatmate was there with a friend, and another friend showed up, and we all hung out together, and this was nice. Then yet another friend showed up, very abrasive, and she was all woke leftist politics, all the time. And, for the first time in my life, I heard in “real life” someone talk about “fucking TERFs”. (The context was about some transwoman activist had done far more for feminism than any of the fucking TERFS; the longer context wasn’t specifically about trans issues, but a long rant about everything and anyting.) I’ve seen it on the internet, of course, but hearing it in real life was … a milestone? Not a big deal; I just needed to get this out.
This sounds like a potentially important turning point.
I know what you mean, GW. It really is strange to watch proper, honest-to-goodness meat people talk like that. I’ve lost online friends over this and watched people I’ve known online and off be captured wholesale by this ideology, when they were previously as anti-ideology as I am. Cynic though I am, I wasn’t prepared for that. I still find it deeply strange and jarring.
maddog1129: I think it could be a turning point. I haven’t looked at the TA backlash yet (I try to have an occasional Sunday morning with my blood pressure not in the Hulk zone) but I can guess how they’ll spin it as transphobic or insignificant and they might well pull it off. But I’ve seen a lot of praise, relief and murmured approval, even among people who have not stepped up to this fight. This includes both the cowards and the nice-but-dims.
It’s encouraging that non-combatants are expressing relief that some adults* are finally being sensible and responsible.
* I don’t count us as adults.
She then concluded the evening by saying something incredibly hurtful to me, right before she left. No, I hadn’t expressed any Gender Critical viewpoints, nor many viewpoints at all, because I had kept mostly silent during her long, long rant. And no, she doesn’t otherwise know me. In my sample set of 1, I see that people that use the word “TERF” seem to be unpleasant on other fronts, as well. (And yes, OK, cut her some slack, she’s currently in the process of going through a [presumably painful] divorce.)
I look forward to the likely apoplexy from bloggers sillier than this one.