Stonewall chair Jan Gooding dismisses comments instead reiterating the charity’s commitment to trans communities
BY DANIELLE MUSTARDE
Maureen Chadwick, creator of hit TV series Bad Girls, Footballer’s Wives and Waterloo Road has withdrawn her support from the UK’s leading LGBT charity, Stonewall – along with partner Katherine Gotts – amid claims that the charity are supporting a “militant ‘trans’ agenda.”
The pair broke the news in a statement to The Sunday Times in which they claim they didn’t know, “how completely the militant ‘trans’ agenda would overwhelm Stonewall with its confusion of sex and gender and its blindness to all the complex rights issues resulting from that.”
Chadwick, who along with her partner donated £38,000 to Stonewall from 2009 to 2015, also told The Times they believed Stonewall’s current CEO Ruth Hunt had, “called it wrong” and that Stonewall was “no longer a worthy champion of our rights.”
Hunt, who announced she’d be stepping down as CEO of the charity just days earlier, has dismissed any “conspiracy theories” about her departure, adding “I know it’s hard to believe, in this day and age, but sometimes things are exactly as described.”
Chairwoman of Stonewall’s board of trustees, Jan Gooding, commented that the board’s “commitment to integrate trans communities into our work has been and will continue to be a core part of our development as an organisation”.
Sources contacted by The Times also stated that Hunt continued to have their full backing.
Other “significant” unnamed figures, however, had reportedly “stepped away in dismay” though it’s not clear who this claim refers to.
Since the news broke, many in the LGBT community have spoken out to support both Stonewall and Hunt, including Stonewall co-founder, Michael Cashman, who said he is “proud of the work Stonewall is doing to support the rights and dignity of trans people.”
Stonewall founder, Lisa Power, also added her support “as a lesbian and a feminist” adding, “there is no hierachy in LGBT.”
Anthony Watson, lead advisor to the UK Labour party, board member of GLAAD and a patron to the LGBT charity Diversity Role Models, tweeted that he would “donate 50k this calender year to Stonewall to support their trans programmes” following the publication of the piece.
This most recent article from The Times isn’t the first time the newspaper have published an article on the subject.
The paper recently objected to a Big Lottery Fund grant going to trans children’s charity Mermaids and also had one of their articles called out as “inaccurate” by Stonewall after they reported that the charity shouldn’t have received a £500,000 donation “to sway public opinion” on trans rights.
The same article included a comment from the Big Lottery Fund which stated that: “National lottery funding is for everyone” and that LGBT groups had been given only “2% of [the lottery’s] £500m funding” in the last year.
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