Stonewall boss is fine with comparing gender-skeptical women to antisemites.

The new EHRC chair, Lady Falkner, has said women have the right to question transgender identity without being abused, stigmatised or risking losing their job.

Or threatened. All those “kill a terf” shirts and signs and posters – those are threats.

Ms Kelley said while Stonewall believed in freedom of speech, it was “not without limit”.

“With all beliefs including controversial beliefs there is a right to express those beliefs publicly and where they’re harmful or damaging – whether it’s anti-Semitic beliefs, gender critical beliefs, beliefs about disability – we have legal systems that are put in place for people who are harmed by that.”

That’s nice.

Challenged as to whether it might be considered offensive to compare anti-Semitic beliefs to gender-critical views, she insisted it was appropriate.

“We’re talking about protected groups. We’re talking about people that are protected on the basis of their sexuality, people that are protected on the basis of gender identity, people who are protected on the basis of race and that’s why I think the analogy is apt.”

Are we talking about people who are protected on the basis of sex?

What is this idea of “protected” anyway? Protected how? By having the police arrest women who say a man is a man?

If people are protected on the basis of gender identity but not on the basis of sex – in other words if men who say they are women are protected but women are not protected – what exactly is the reason for that? What’s the reasoning behind it? What’s the thinking? The brute reality is that women need protection from men more than men need protection from women. It’s a perverse world that says that changes the instant a man says he is a woman.

Stonewall’s been criticised for using the term “gender identity” when referring to the Equality Act’s protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.

But Ms Kelley described that as “the difference between natural language and statutory language”.

Uh, no. “Gender identity” is a much bigger, looser, easier to step in and out of bag than “gender reassignment.” Anybody can “identify as” anything, including a man who has just been arrested for assault.