Stonewall’s new chair on trans rights, JK Rowling and the future of the LGBTQ+ movement

0:00Kezia Dugdale:This is The Guardian.

0:09Kezia Dugdale:Today, a year after the Supreme Court judgment on trans rights, does Stonewall have a future?

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0:55Kezia Dugdale:If you know anything about the fight for gay rights in the UK, you will have heard of Stonewall. From its founding in 1988, it had one clear purpose, to overturn Margaret Thatcher's ban on teaching children about homosexuality. Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.

1:18Libby Brooks:All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. Yes, cheated.

1:25Kezia Dugdale:Section 28 banned teachers from promoting the idea that it was OK to be gay, or what the law called pretend family relationships. After 12 years of relentless campaigning by Stonewall, the legislation was repealed in Scotland in the year 2000, followed by England and Wales two years later. And that's not all Stonewall has achieved. MPs will vote at around 10 o 'clock tonight on whether to lower the gay age of consent. It pushed to equalise the age of consent, to lift the ban on gay people in the military, and to give gay and lesbian people the right to get married.

1:58Libby Brooks:Britain's lower house of parliament has voted to back a law legalising same-sex marriage.

2:02Kezia Dugdale:Without equal marriage, it was still looked at in some way as different, as less valid or less important, and that simply doesn't reflect life in this country anymore. But 38 years after it was formed, Stonewall's future is uncertain. Its income is halved, dozens of staff have been made redundant, and hundreds of organisations have severed ties with the charity. Now, his critics would say that these are the consequences of Stonewall's uncompromising position on trans rights. But this is also a story about the challenges of operating in a world where diversity and inclusion have become increasingly dirty words.

2:36Kezia Dugdale:And our country will be woke no longer.

2:46Kezia Dugdale:Now, Stonewall has a new chair. Kezia Dugdale, former leader of Labour in Scotland. But can she steady the ship and stop the charity heading into terminal decline? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. What is Stonewall for in 2026?

3:08Kezia Dugdale:Kezia Dugdale, welcome to Today in Focus. Thank you, delighted to be here. So it's nice to see you. We are sitting in Stonewall's humble Scottish headquarters in Leith in Edinburgh. So you are about to take up this new role as chair of Stonewall. And it's a job that some people would see as a bit of a poison chalice for reasons that we're going to go on to discuss. But set out why did you want to take this quite public role?

3:31Libby Brooks:So I thought about it long and hard, as you would expect me to do. The first thing to say is I'm quite scared just now as an openly gay person in this country, looking at what's happening elsewhere in the world, in other countries. I feel myself just getting slightly more nervous about holding my wife's hand or being affectionate in public or wondering what other people's reaction to us is going to be. And I don't like that feeling. And I think we have to be really careful to think that all progress that we've made in recent times is cemented and absolute and that all we'll ever get is progress.

4:05Libby Brooks:It's completely possible in this country that things could go backwards. and there are now a lot of political actors that want to take us backwards. So a bit of my motivation comes from a place of fear and a bit of it comes from a place of hope, knowing that these battles can be won. And when you look at organisations that have won those battles and made the case and been in those positions of power and influence, Stonewall's right at the front of that. I mean, the fact that I have the right to marry is down to many people in Stonewall and many other LGBT organisations. so much good work over the past two or three decades has been driven by people who've played an active role in LGBT charities and campaigning organisations and I feel like I owe them a bit of my time and energy to make sure the next generation of young LGBT people have every possible opportunity and every chance of an equal and fair life.

4:55Kezia Dugdale:And you were first elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2011 when you must have only been not even 30 I think 29 a baby and then you served as the leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2015 to 2017 and it was during that time as leader that you were outed as a lesbian by a magazine. Can you tell me a bit about that?

5:15Libby Brooks:So it's always written up as being outed. That's maybe like an extreme one-word summation of what happened. It kind of stumbled out in an interview that I did with the Fabians and it was a funny time in my life because I was living with a female partner. Everybody that I knew and worked with knew that I was gay but I wasn't like openly gay and this was the moment this was the big dramatic moment and it was done in the heat in the spotlight of an election campaign and I didn't feel in control of it so I think when you're not in control of your own story that leads you to the language of saying that you've been outed against your will and all the rest of it so there was some sudden need to confront that and be very public about that and in the end I'm you know I delighted that I did it I should say though it never stopped me being an advocate for LGBT people or an ally or campaigning on those issues that mattered.

6:02Libby Brooks:Ruth Davidson was openly gay leader of the Scottish Conservatives at the time and it used to frustrate me that pretty much every sentence in the media there would start with lesbian kickboxer Ruth Davidson and I just thought it was really unfair that she was being constantly defined by her sexuality and I wanted to live in a world where that didn't matter because everybody was free and equal and able to live their life. So it wasn't that you were ashamed of your sexuality? Oh god no, I still had to have conversations with family members that were hard and I think find me a gay person in the country that hasn't had that experience but there was no shame in it for me.

6:41Kezia Dugdale:Libby Brooks you're a reporter at The Guardian who has followed Stonewall's fortunes very closely over the past few years and you've also been The Guardian's Scotland correspondent for more than a decade which meant that you had a front row seat for Kezia's earlier career in frontline politics at Holyrood. Can you just start by telling us a bit about her and why you think Stonewall has picked her for what is potentially quite a tricky role? She is a former Holyrood politician who rose to be leader of the Scottish Labour Party between 2015 and 2017 whilst the electorate had I think it's fair to say completely fallen out of love with Scottish Labour.

7:19Kezia Dugdale:It was a really, really tough time to be in charge of the Labour Party in Scotland. If you can imagine how difficult it is to navigate the constitutional debate in Scotland, you know, particularly at that time. And yes, I'll be interested to see how she builds on those skills of care and negotiation and balancing competing viewpoints in this next rule because it's in some ways very similar. Kezia's taking the reins after what has been a really difficult period for the organisation. And that difficult period, you could argue, began in 2015 when Stonewall decided to broaden its scope and start campaigning for transgender people as well as LGB people.

8:08Kezia Dugdale:Can you remind us why they did that and what was going on in sort of wider culture, wider society at the moment that prompted them to broaden their approach. This pivot to the position on transgender rights happened under their former chief executive, Ruth Hunt. Every other LGBT movement internationally is an LGBT movement. Stoneman was late to the game. You know, we were very late to the party on this and the opposition we received for not doing trans was as loud, as vicious, as upset, as angry. My understanding is it happened after a significant consultation which was to move Stonewall to become trans-inclusive for the first time and at the time she actually said in an interview with The Guardian that Stonewall had a moral responsibility to become trans-inclusive and it's worth pointing out that that was not a wildly out there position to take at the time only two years later in 2017 you had Theresa May, the then Conservative Prime Minister, pledging to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow individuals to change their gender through self-declaration.

9:17Kezia Dugdale:We've set out plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, streamlining and demedicalising the process for changing gender, because being trans is not an illness and it shouldn't be treated as such. So as I say, it wasn't a sort of unusual position to take at that time. But I think it's also fair to say that it was already at a point where this territory was becoming highly contested. And already, you know, around 2015, a few years later, you had critics accusing Hunt of promoting a militant trans ideology. I think it probably wasn't assisted by the fact that at the time Stonewall had some fairly, shall we say, no nonsense campaigning lines around this in terms of trans rights, human rights, no debate.

10:14Kezia Dugdale:And trans women are women, get over it. And I think at a point when there was a lot of concern from those people who were worried that in some way increasing transgender rights would operate to diminish women's rights, there was concern about freedom of speech, about there not being the opportunity to have open conversations about this. And whilst I can completely see why in the sort of marketing execs room, no debate is a brilliant slogan, I think in that context, it landed much less well. Yeah, and this idea of there being no debate, as you said, came in for a lot of criticism. The criticism was that Stonewall was not willing to talk about some of the really knotty issues that involve transgender people, whether that's transgender women being put into female prisons, whether that's trans women in professional sports, single sex wards, children transitioning.

11:17Kezia Dugdale:there was a feeling in some quarters wasn't there that Stonewall was just shutting down the debate and just saying a trans woman is a woman end of story and therefore they should always in all circumstances be treated exactly the same. Yeah exactly and the criticism wasn't just coming from outside it wasn't just coming from people you might think of as sort of traditionally conservative or opposed to LGBT rights, but it was coming from some of our most established lesbian and gay voices. You had people like Simon Fanshawe, one of the co-founders of Stonewall, accusing them of, as you say, neglecting women's protections.

11:58Kezia Dugdale:If Stonewall wants to campaign on trans rights, it seems to me what Stonewall wants to campaign on is what Stonewall wants to campaign on. I have an issue with the way in which it chose to campaign. You had Matthew Paddis, again, somebody who had been involved in the very early days of the organisation, saying that it was taking an extremist stance. And I think it's clear that that sense of betrayal runs very deep and it's very personal. And I think that that informs a lot of the ongoing criticism of Stonewall to this day. And I think that a lot of people felt at the time that if they dared to raise some of these thorny questions, they were dismissed as transphobes, as TERFs, so trans exclusionary radical feminists, which sort of became a slur, didn't it?

12:43Kezia Dugdale:And the suggestion that if you had a question about a trans woman being put in a female prison, for example, that you were transphobic, that you didn't care about trans people. Yeah, absolutely. And perhaps one of the best examples of that was the controversy that surrounded their Diversity Champions programme, which was founded just at the turn of the millennium and under which, you know, hundreds of organisations became paying members and Stonewall would give them advice and assessments on how to create the most inclusive workplaces. and by the end of 2020 you had some of the sort of biggest organizations we have in the country BBC, EHRC, all government departments pulling out of that because of that concern.

13:31Kezia Dugdale:Well for the BBC was a concern around impartiality but as you say a concern that there was a particular I suppose groupthink that was being pushed and that women who did have questions about the interaction of their rights with transgender people's rights were not being allowed to speak up. And how did Stonewall justify its position at the time? I mean, presumably they were making the argument that trans people face an incredible amount of discrimination in society, a very vulnerable group, and that all that they were doing was trying to advocate to keep them safe and allow them to lead happy, healthy lives.

14:10Kezia Dugdale:Yes, absolutely. And Stonewall would consistently point out the daily discriminations, unfairnesses, even violence faced by transgender people as they go about their business in Britain and were simply, as far as they were concerned, advocating for another community within the LGBT umbrella.

14:42Kezia Dugdale:You mentioned already that under Theresa May in 2017, she was advocating for making it much easier for trans people to transition, this sort of idea of self-ID. But the tide did start to turn, didn't it? When she lost power, Boris Johnson came in and things started to change. That's right. And you saw Liz Truss, who was Boris Johnson's Equalities Minister, completely scrapping Theresa May's plans for reform of gender recognition. But perhaps one of the biggest hits that Stonewall has taken over the years is the fact that, particularly with so many organisations pulling out of that Diversity Champions programme, it has taken a huge financial hit to the point that earlier this year, the accounts that they submitted showed that its corporate donations had halved in the last financial year.

15:40Kezia Dugdale:And as a result of that drop off in funding, we've also seen about a third of staff losing their jobs. I think it is really important, though, at this point to point out that, you know, it's not just all about some concerted response to Stonewall's bad behaviour. This is also about a global issue with Trump's executive orders. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. You know, scrapping not just diversity, equality and inclusion programmes at US government level, but also his freeze on foreign aid for LGBT programmes, which has really affected fundraising efforts across the LGBT charitable sector.

16:34Kezia Dugdale:You know, Stonewall is not remotely an outlier in this. But I think perhaps where you could say Stonewall has contributed is that a lot of corporate firms have become increasingly nervous about their funding choices in this political environment where showing support for trans causes is now viewed by some people as controversial.

17:06Kezia Dugdale:I think you would agree that Stonewall has been through some pretty tough years and quite a lot of that can be traced back to its pretty uncompromising position on trans rights and I just wondered do you think it was a mistake of Stonewall to not make any exceptions when it came to trans inclusion?

17:24Libby Brooks:Look I think anyone that's ever been associated with any organisation will put their hands up and say we've made mistakes at certain times given the chance to do things again we might do things differently but I also think it's right to say if we're going to have difficult conversations about difficult issues where a lot of people are feeling their way through messy issues people need to feel safe they need to believe that those conversations are in a safe environment where everybody's accepted for who they are to work their way through these difficult and challenging conversations and if you don't feel safe then those conversations you have the right to walk away or ask for them to be done differently.

17:59Libby Brooks:But I don't think there's ever been a no debate rule. And we want to be in the position of persuading people. We're not dogmatic and sitting in silos. We want to be in the messy grey bit in the area because that's where progress

18:10Kezia Dugdale:and consensus is found. But do you think that previously Stonewall was really engaging publicly in that messy grey area? I'm really talking about 2015 onwards, after Stonewall decided to add the to the LGB, there was a feeling that Stonewall wasn't engaging in these really knotty, difficult questions. Would you agree?

18:29Libby Brooks:I certainly understand that and I think that's a fair position and I think the organisation understands that too now, which is why when you look at our renewed strategy it is about navigating this turbulence, it's about listening, it's about engaging. And do you think

18:42Kezia Dugdale:that in the past too much of Stonewall's time was taken up with trans issues and forgetting the L,

18:49Libby Brooks:the g and the b i don't think anyone was forgotten in that process i think the whole country's spent an awful lot of time on these issues in quite a divisive and damaging way i personally very sorry that you know a lot of the women that i've campaigned alongside for for decades in the labour movement and i sit on a different side of the conversation about gender that's hard and some of the the fractures in those relationship i've contributed to with the language that I might have used in the past. So what I'm talking about is I think there's a process of healing for all of us who've gone through this really difficult debate in recent times where we have to recognise now that the nature of the conversation that we've had might actually be damaging to LGBT rights in the round and that we might not always agree with each other but we do need to live side by side with each other in this movement and actually linking arms and stepping forward together and focusing on things like the ban on conversion therapy, financial equality, getting justice for military veterans, all these live issues which deserve some airspace now is a really good way for us to come back together as a movement and focus on the future.

19:56Kezia Dugdale:Let's talk just about the kind of tone of the debate. And we're sitting now in Edinburgh, the city where arguably the world's most famous and vociferous gender critical feminist lives, JK Rowling. What do you make of the way that she's shared her concerns about transgender people?

20:12Libby Brooks:so I have a huge respect for JK Rowland I've had the pleasure of meeting her before I think her story and how she came to be this like prolific incredible children's writer in the city as a single mum writing in a cafe is phenomenal and an inspiration and to so many women across the country I think she's been a really powerful political advocate about improving the lot of single mums, making a case for tackling poverty and inequality in all its forms. And there is absolutely a place for her in public life to share her experiences and tell her story and make a difference.

20:52Kezia Dugdale:But trans people I know say that the way that she has voiced her opinions on this issue has become cruel and dehumanising. The way she behaves on social media, sort of deliberately misgendering people, has really, they feel, contributed to them feeling unwelcome and unaccepted in society.

21:12Libby Brooks:I understand that. And I have also heard J.K. Rowling and other people who hold a different position on these issues to me describe with a similar rawness how they've experienced being opposed for their views. And I just think, you know, the days of these culture wars about sitting in polar extremes from each other should be behind us now you know a bit of kindness a bit generosity of spirit a willingness to get into the grey area to talk about these things calmly try and find common ground is is the only path through this and it's one that I'm committed to