Successful barrister Allison Bailey is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant single mother. An outspoken lesbian, she’s spent her life campaigning for social justice.
With so many ticks on her political correctness bingo card, you’d think she’d be a darling of the Left. But in a court case that’s shattered the progressive consensus, Bailey is suing Britain’s leading LGBT+ lobby group for trying to suppress her freedom of speech.
The heart of the issue is Stonewall’s decision six years ago to shift from exclusive focus on lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) rights to include transgender people in its remit.
Founded in 1989, the lobby group had achieved its last major LGB equality goal when gay marriage passed into UK law in 2014.
After that, Stonewall shifted its attention to the concerns of ‘trans’ people – individuals who feel their bodies don’t match their inner sense of ‘gender identity’ – adopting the slogan ‘Acceptance without exception’.
Allison Bailey is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant single mother and has spent her life campaigning for social justice
‘Trans’ can mean being born male but wishing to live as a woman, or vice versa. It can also involve rejecting male and female identities altogether for a ‘non-binary’ one, as the American singer Demi Lovato did last week.
Stonewall works to institutionalise the principle that people should be treated as the ‘gender’ they say they are. For example, by teaching businesses’ Human Resources departments to enforce the principle.
With its ‘Stonewall Diversity Champions’ scheme, the lobby group charges organisations thousands of pounds a year for accreditation as ‘LGBT inclusive’.
According to its most recent financial statement, Stonewall gets more than £3 million a year from the scheme. Among those signed up are Government departments, local authorities, corporations, media companies, universities, police forces and even the British Army.
But some campaigners, including Allison Bailey, claim the slogan ‘Acceptance without exception’ undermines Stonewall’s founding remit: lesbian, gay and bisexual rights. These dissenters argue that by embracing ‘gender identity’, Stonewall has shifted from defending the freedom to live openly in same-sex couples, to claiming that sexual orientation has nothing to do with biology.
For Stonewall insists that everyone should be accepted as the ‘gender’ they say they are, ‘without exception’. But that comes into conflict with same-sex attraction. ‘Acceptance without exception’ means that anyone who has a female ‘gender identity’ and who is attracted to women is a lesbian. Even if they have male genitals.
But in old money, that’s a heterosexual relationship. Worse, trans activists sometimes imply it’s bigotry for a gay or lesbian person to reject an opposite-sex trans partner, and not simply sexual orientation.
But those LGB people looking to Stonewall to defend their right to same-sex sexual orientation, like it did in the old days, will find only ‘Acceptance without exception’ – including for trans ‘lesbians’ and ‘gay men’.
For many LGB people, the sense of betrayal is profound.
In 2019, veteran LGB campaigners, including Allison Bailey, launched an alternative lobby group to challenge Stonewall.
With supporters including Simon Fanshawe, a former presenter of BBC TV’s That’s Life! and one of Stonewall’s original co-founders, the LGB Alliance seeks to defend LGB rights on the basis of biological sex. Despite her record as a rights campaigner, Bailey’s vocal views incurred the wrath of her employer, the progressive Garden Court Chambers. They also angered Stonewall.
Bailey claims that after she helped launch LGB Alliance, Stonewall threatened to withdraw Garden Court Chambers’ membership of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, unless her employer took action against her. She states that as a result of this pressure, she suffered numerous detriments, including lost work opportunities.
Bailey has since crowdfunded £150,000 to take Stonewall to court. Her aim, as she puts it, is ‘to stop them policing free speech’ via the Diversity Champions scheme.
In February, Stonewall’s attempt to get Bailey’s case struck out failed. The hearing was scheduled for next month but has now been postponed: Bailey’s opponents have not yet provided documentation her team requested for disclosure.
Now, the Stonewall-led trans lobby’s aggressive approach to free speech has drawn the gaze of Britain’s equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
In 2019, tax expert Maya Forstater took her employer to an employment tribunal after she was sacked for stating humans cannot change sex. The tribunal upheld the employer’s case; but recently Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the EHRC’s new chairman, stood up for Forstater. Falkner stated that women must have the ‘freedom of belief’ to be able to criticise ‘gender identity’.
And as the MoS reports today, the watchdog has now cut ties with Stonewall, ending its own Stonewall Diversity Champions membership. Also, the journalist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris, who was one of Stonewall’s founders, wrote yesterday in The Times about how the organisation has ‘lost its way’.
Is this the beginning of the end for Stonewall? Time will tell.
The aim of any campaign should be such total victory that the campaign is able to dissolve. But well-funded, well-organised bodies – especially those with paid employees – have a habit of clinging stubbornly to life long past this point.
The Royal Society for Public Health is an older example. It was founded in 1876, at a time when urban living conditions were often squalid and workplaces dangerous and insanitary. The society achieved significant improvements in public health legislation and workplace safety: so much so that, today, many believe ‘health and safety’ has gone too far.
For instance, in our institutionalised ‘health and safety’ culture, the flying of kites was banned on Yorkshire beaches. Picturesque cobbled streets have been ripped up as ‘slip hazards’ by safety-conscious local authorities.
But far from bowing out with mission accomplished, the Royal Society for Public Health soldiers on, with 40,000 people completing its health and safety courses every year.
When gay marriage became law seven years ago, it should have been ‘mission accomplished’ for Stonewall. And yet, it, too, is still going – a campaign in search of a cause. But whereas the venerable public safety campaigners’ efforts are confined to propagating bureaucratic safetyism, Stonewall’s activities pose an active threat to its original constituency.
Once, Stonewall campaigned to end the unjust stigma on gay and lesbian relationships, to strike down the cruel Section 28 (which banned councils from using taxpayers’ money to fund material to ‘promote’ homosexuality) and for recognition of same-sex unions in law. We should be very grateful for what was achieved in securing equality through such activism.
But today, Stonewall seeks to tap new funding streams by asserting that ‘gender identity’ takes precedence over biology.
And, as Allison Bailey has warned, the ‘international, all-powerful, wealthy and totally out-of-control trans lobby’ is undermining gay and lesbian rights. Indeed, there are reports of young lesbians under huge social pressure from LGBT groups to consider male-bodied ‘trans lesbian’ partners.
Few would dispute the hard-won freedom of gay, lesbian and bisexual people to live, love and marry without stigma or discrimination. But as the LGB Alliance’s rising membership shows, plenty of LGB people themselves don’t agree that this should mean having to pretend someone with a penis and testicles can ever be a ‘lesbian’.
And when an organisation set up to end homophobia is using a corporate ‘diversity’ scheme to censor a black lesbian for defending same-sex attraction, something has gone seriously wrong.
No court date has yet been set for Bailey’s hearing. But all of us, gay or straight, need to understand what’s at stake.
This isn’t just about the freedom of lesbians or gay men to form same-sex couples without stigma. It’s not just about the mad irony of someone with Allison Bailey’s progressive credentials being persecuted for wrongthink by the charity that should be her staunchest ally. It’s also about the sinister power of a multi-million-pound lobbying giant, with tentacles that reach deep into hundreds of public and private organisations, to use that power to silence anyone that deviates from woke orthodoxy.
Do our Government and public bodies still care about the freedom of ordinary citizens to dissent from progressive dogma?
Or does Stonewall have such a stranglehold on our institutions that even an impeccably Left-wing black lesbian barrister will find herself ‘stonewalled’ for voicing heretical views?
The outcome of Allison Bailey’s case should concern us all.
- Mary Harrington is a columnist for UnHerd
