We must never forget the treachery of Stonewall

In the future, if someone asks me how mad Britain went during the trans hysteria, I’ll tell them the story of Stonewall. I’ll tell them about this charity that was founded to fight for gay rights but which ended up doing the bidding of homophobia. I’ll tell them how these ‘LGBT’ activists became cheerleaders for the brutish medical conversion of young lesbians. I’ll tell them how these bourgeois gays ended up demanding that lesbians let blokes into their clubs and associations. I’ll tell them how truly disastrous the woke era was for gay liberation.

Stonewall is in trouble. It’s losing funding. Good. It deserves to collapse for its treachery towards the homosexual cause. Its funding fell from £6.9million in 2024 to £4.7million in the last financial year. Apparently, it had just £91,811 in reserve in March 2025 – a massive fall from the £998,173 it had in its coffers 12 months earlier. Both big business and the public sector seem to be cooling on the ‘controversial LGBT charity’, as the Daily Mail now refers to Stonewall. Corporate donations fell from £348,636 in 2024 to £143,149 last year. Government grants fell from £618,757 to £454,645.

It’s not quite a case of ‘Go woke, go broke’ (yet). But it’s undeniable that Stonewall is suffering for its feverish embrace of gender ideology. Stonewall was founded in 1989 to advance the rights of gay men and lesbians. It helped to score some striking victories, like civil partnerships and the lifting of the ban on gays in the military. But then it went mad. It guzzled on the Kool-Aid of trans, that lethal, post-truth folly that insists sex is changeable. Almost overnight, it went from fighting for gay rights to undermining them.

Its financial travails follow numerous media exposés of its cultish bowing to the trans ideology. Through its Diversity Champions scheme, Stonewall played a key role in spreading that truthless creed. Businesses and schools handed over handsome amounts of money to secure the coveted insignia of ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’. Stonewall would instruct them to avoid ‘discrimination’ on the basis of ‘gender identity’. Let people in your workplaces and schools use the bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their ‘gender identity’, it said.

Shorter version: Let men into women’s bathrooms. Let that big bloke who says he’s a lesbian attend your away-day for gay members of staff. Stonewall called for an Orwellian overhaul of language, too. It advised workplaces to replace the word ‘mother’ with gender-neutral alternatives, like ‘parent who has given birth’. Its advice was especially noxious in schools. You must let ‘trans children’ use ‘the toilets and changing rooms that match their gender’, it said. Screw the dignity of teenage girls – they’ll just have to put up with that hulking boy undressing next to them.

Stonewall’s language-policing, sex-denying crusade helped to open eyes to the madness of trans. Government departments, businesses and the BBC withdrew from its schemes. Reasoned voices informed Stonewall that it was flat-out wrong about the law. The Equality Act does not allow for men who think they’re women to enter women’s spaces, said Sex Matters. And it was ‘inaccurate, intrusive and sexist’ for Stonewall to say otherwise.

That Stonewall’s trans propaganda helped to pummel the sex-based rights of women at work and girls at school is not surprising. The lesson of the past 10 years is that the activist class seems content to burn women’s liberty at the altar of men’s feelings. They couldn’t give a toss about women’s hard-won freedom of association if it crashes against the emotional wellbeing of some tit in a dress. But Stonewall’s betrayal of homosexuals? That was shocking. Future historians will surely study the social delirium that led a gay-rights group to abandon gay rights.

In bowing to the god of gender, Stonewall jettisoned the truth of sex. The warping effect this had was extraordinary. Its moral priority was no longer same-sex attracted people but gender cultists who think attraction on the basis of sex is bigoted. Literally. They think it’s ‘transphobic’ for a lesbian to refuse to sleep with a ‘transwoman’ – ie, a man. Stonewall warmed to this despicable position. It said it is ‘analogous’ to ‘sexual racism’ when the media covers lesbians’ concerns about feeling pressured to sleep with ‘transwomen’. Yeah, why won’t those lesbians pipe down?

The idea that lesbians should share their spaces and even their beds with men is insane. It represents the undoing of six decades of gay liberation. Young lesbians report being branded ‘genital fetishists’ and even ‘perverts’ for refusing to sleep with men who claim to be women. Instead of defending these lesbians, Stonewall yapped about the ‘sexual racism’ of ‘demonising transwomen’. The bigots of old said lesbians just needed a good seeing-to. The bigots of today say the same. Just lie down with a man, you perverts.

Stonewall also supported the provision of puberty blockers to ‘trans kids’. Anyone who has followed this issue knows the majority of these teens are gay. Drugging the young in order to convert them from lesbians into ‘men’ or from gay boys into ‘women’ – did Stonewall ever imagine in 1989 that it would end up supporting such sadistic meddling with the supposedly problematic bodies of young homosexuals?

Stonewall’s spectacular moral disarray was brought home by its reaction to the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological men and women, not gender fantasists. Stonewall expressed ‘deep concern’ over the ruling and the impact it would have on the ‘trans community’. This is a ruling that brilliantly asserted the rights of lesbians. It spoke of ‘autonomy and dignity for lesbians’ and the right of lesbians to institute ‘clubs and associations’ free of the presence of men. To see the madness of our times, just take this in: a court of law struck a blow for the rights of homosexuals, and a homosexual-rights group was fuming about it.

If that doesn’t convince you of the lunacy and cruelty of woke, nothing will. Stonewall’s fall is more than a story of hubris. It’s more than a morality tale about the dangers of the sexist, unscientific ideology of ‘trans’. More deeply it speaks to the susceptibility of the elites to irrational thinking. That the luxury belief of genderfluidity could spread with such pox-like ease through activist circles, institutions and even the political class should alarm us all. Restoring reason, women’s freedom and gay liberation is one of the great tasks amid the rubble of the woke era. It’s a task Stonewall will have no role in.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.