Opinion – Simon Fanshawe
But today I plead with every business and public body signed up to its Diversity Champions scheme to reconsider
SIMON FANSHAWE – 22 December 2022 – Daily Mail
A few days ago, I was doing some Christmas shopping in a well-known bookstore when I noticed two rainbow flags on the counter.
After asking the assistant what they were there for, I was told that it was to show the store was ‘an LGBTQ+ friendly space’.
As a gay man, I should have found this immensely cheering and, indeed, had this been ten years ago, I would have viewed this little exhibit as a welcome marker of forward thinking.
Not any more. At best, I now see the use of the rainbow colours as little more than flabby virtue signalling which has no real effect on the lives of gay people.
At worst, I see it as the sign of something pretty harmful. Far from actively supporting gay rights, adopting the rainbow flag is now more about the company being seen as liberal and right-on.
Ideology And so, from the colourful lanyards worn by civil servants, to the pronoun badges donned by teachers and the ridiculously expensive advertising campaigns that firms pay for in ‘Pride month’ each year, organisations are falling over themselves to conform in whatever way they can.
And now, it would seem, this even includes the very best of Britain’s private sector.
Over the weekend, it emerged that nearly one in five FTSE 100 companies is being advised on ‘diversity and inclusion’ by the LGBTQ+ campaign charity Stonewall.
Nineteen blue-chip firms pay £5,000 a year for the privilege of being able to say they are included in Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme; among them are Kingfisher, which owns B&Q, housebuilders Taylor Wimpey and the fashion label Burberry.
So what, you might say. Surely promoting ‘inclusion’ can only be for the good?
Well, sadly it is not quite that simple. Far from championing a ‘diversity’ of opinions and beliefs, subscription to Stonewall’s scheme encourages a strict adoption of a narrow political ideology.
Companies, for instance, have been urged to replace references to ‘women’ or ‘mothers’ in internal documentation in favour of terms such as ‘parent who has given birth’, or to ask that employees state their ‘preferred pronouns’ in emails.
Stonewall also scores firms based on an ‘Equality Index’ marking firms down for a failure to parrot the charity’s narrow views on ‘gender identity’ and trans issues.
While Stonewall started out as a well-meaning organisation that championed gay rights, it has, in recent years, morphed into a propaganda machine that preaches extreme and divisive gender ideology under the guise of ‘factual’ information. It is dogma that is far from universally accepted seeing your sex at birth not as an immutable fact but as open to personal choice.
And it is one that is fast eroding women’s rights and their protection in female-only spaces, as well as posing a potential risk to children, who might be led to believe that irreversible medical intervention is the solution to common adolescent insecurities about identity.
Of course, gender dysphoria (when somebody feels at odds with their biological sex) is a genuine and profound psychological issue for some people. But Stonewall’s obsession with reframing the entire narrative around gender to placate a very small minority of individuals is dangerously disproportionate.
And the problem is, Stonewall’s influence is not insignificant. From government departments to media organisations, schools and the NHS, the charity’s reach has grown rapidly in recent years, offering highly contested ‘advice’ to public bodies with almost unquestioned authority.
As the Mail revealed only last week, Stonewall has published a wide-ranging reading list aimed at ‘schools, colleges, parents and carers’, including books on ‘trans inclusion’ for children as young as two, with titles such as Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl?.
That blue-chip companies are adding legitimacy, possibly unwittingly, to Stonewall’s agenda by subscribing to its ‘diversity’ scheme is deeply worrying.
Things could have been so different. More than 30 years ago, in 1989, I helped to bring Stonewall into being, alongside co-founders who, like me, were passionate in their determination to fight against the discrimination that many gay and bisexual people experienced on a daily basis.
The cultural landscape was radically different then. Homophobia was widespread. Gay partners had almost no rights at all. Before the Civil Partnership Act 2004, even if your partner was dying the doctor couldn’t talk to you because you weren’t ‘family’.
The workplace was also a key battleground in the fight for equality; and Stonewall encouraged employers to extend to gay employees the same rights that straight (often married) workers took for granted. That meant maternity and paternity leave, as well as access to benefits such as family healthcare schemes and pensions.
Critical In 2001, Stonewall set up the Diversity Champions Programme to act as a stamp of approval that indicated a company properly supported gay employees.
Then things changed; and Stonewall’s focus moved away from a genuine desire to help gay people to enforcing its own theories about gender identity.
In 2015, the then chief executive made this new priority clear, adding the ‘T’ (for transgender) to the charity’s ‘LGB’ (lesbian, gay and bisexual) masthead, and it soon became apparent that anyone who disagreed with the new status quo was not welcome. The ‘T’ now trumped the ‘LGB’.
Since then, I have distanced myself from Stonewall and, more recently, have been publicly critical watching with despair as its newfound and extreme views have gone from strength to strength. Meanwhile, those who disagree, however respectfully, have come under attack and been increasingly vilified, as many former supporters and even high-profile individuals such as J K Rowling can testify.
When I first raised concerns and anxieties privately with the charity about its new approach, I was told that I ‘had put myself outside Stonewall’. I had become the wrong kind of gay.
Indeed, the message from Stonewall is now clear: you’re either with us or against us…