At last, some good news: Stonewall, the charity behind so much of the gender insanity that has gripped Britain in recent years, is going broke. Accounts seen by the Daily Telegraph suggest the organisation reported a net deficit of more than £906,000 at the end of the last financial year. A fall of over £2 million in income on the previous year, alongside spending of £5.6 million, means Stonewall now has a meagre £92,000 left in reserve. Unless there’s a dramatic change of fortune, it seems the charity really could be one legal case or redundancy payout away from bankruptcy. 2026 is beginning to look up!
The financial problems Stonewall now faces inadvertently reveal exactly how influential the charity was until just a very few years ago. At the start of this decade, Stonewall held sway across public institutions and multinational corporations alike. Its reach extended into universities, the BBC, schools, branches of the civil service, businesses that were household names and the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. The more powerful Stonewall became, the more the money rolled in.
At the heart of the cash-generating swizz was Stonewall’s workplace equality index. Incredibly, organisations were persuaded to cough up huge sums for the privilege of being assessed, monitored, and hectored by Stonewall in return for a bronze, silver or gold badge and membership of Stonewall’s diversity champions programme. Those that fell short of the charity’s exacting standards, which almost all did, could pay additional money for staff training programmes and – most controversially – ‘advice’ on how to interpret equalities legislation.
Stonewall has been on the wrong side of history since it moved away from defending lesbian and gay rights
As was to become all too clear, this was not the law as specified in Acts of Parliament, but the law as Stonewall wanted it to be. All too often, Stonewall’s employees erroneously presented gender identity – rather than sex – as a legally protected characteristic. This sleight of hand left organisations fearful of having broken the law if they did not follow Stonewall’s advice to ditch references to sex and promote the daft idea that every individual has a special sense of their gender identity. So, out went single-sex toilets, changing rooms, and words like ‘mother’; in came pronoun badges, ‘chest-feeding’ and Pride flags. Year after year, institutions willingly doled out huge sums to be badly advised, all for the misplaced moral certainty that came with a Stonewall badge.
For far too long, Stonewall seemingly had free rein to control debate, shape policy, and determine practice on transgender issues. Organisations like the media regulator Ofcom and the BBC (both of which have now withdrawn from Stonewall’s diversity scheme) produced output, or regulated the output of others, in line with the demands of one powerful lobbying group. Throughout this time, women who insisted on maintaining their sex-based rights risked being written off as bigots.
Yet even when concerns about Stonewall’s over-interpretation of the law and undue influence began to be raised, the organisation refused to drop its controversial claims and divisive rhetoric. Instead, it doubled down. In 2022, Stonewall declared, ‘Research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity. Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender.’ It insisted that, ‘LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the well-being of all young people!’ Young adults set on the path to hormones, surgery and lifelong medical interventions may well disagree.
Stonewall’s grift began to unravel as legal challenges mounted and the angry women of ‘Terf Island’ made their voices heard. Yet such has been the charity’s grip on corporations and institutions that even in 2024, long after concerns were first raised about Stonewall providing incorrect legal advice, it still raised an astonishing £2.4 million from its diversity champions programme. The groups that last year shelled out £1.8million for an award that, in the popular imagination at least, now signals little more than ‘woke gone mad’ clearly have more money than sense.
The real sign that the jig was up surely came last year when Stonewall was threatened with referral to the Charity Commission over its ‘wrong and dangerous’ advice on the effect of the Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman under the Equality Act was based on biological sex. It is surely no coincidence that, in the same twelve months, corporate donations fell from £348,636 to £143,149.
Stonewall has been on the wrong side of history since it moved away from defending lesbian and gay rights and began focusing on gender identity under its previous chief executive, Ruth Hunt. Yet, what’s surprising is that this strategy proved to be so lucrative for so long. Thankfully, no more. Stonewall cut 44 staff between April 2024 and April last year, assumed to be a third of its payroll. Good. The final collapse of this pernicious organisation cannot come soon enough.
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