Calls for ex Stonewall chief to lose peerage over Cass report

CAMPAIGNERS are calling for the former chief executive of Stonewall to be stripped of her peerage following the Cass report.

More than 10,000 people have signed a petition on change.org calling for Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green to be expelled from the House of Lords for her “deeply damaging conduct” in the transgender “scandal”.

The petition, launched on Saturday, said: “Stonewall’s irresponsible, deceitful and self-interested behaviour … has caused untold havoc. We believe its chief executive at the time, Ruth Hunt, should take responsibility for her charity’s deeply damaging conduct, which played a key role in the scandal now unfolding. It is deeply insulting to the families she has harmed that, instead, Hunt was awarded a peerage.”

The petition refers to Stonewall’s decision to oppose a research pack sent to schools warning children identifying as trans how there were possible risks to puberty blockers and untested drugs often being used as a “medical pathway” for transition.

“The packs contained sound advice, and removing them was dangerous,” it said.

The report, by Dr Hilary Cass, a paediatric consultant, warned how treatment with puberty blockers “may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development” but critically did not change a patient’s body dissatisfaction or gender dysphoria. It also called for “unhurried” care of those under-25s who think they may be transgender and found that gender care had been largely based on “remarkably weak evidence”.

Shortly after the review’s publication, JK Rowling criticised Stonewall for promoting the transgender narrative. The author wrote: “In 2018, Stonewall literally told schools to shred a research pack saying there were risks to puberty blockers. In 2022 Stonewall said that ‘research’ suggests two-yearolds can be trans. It advocated for nurseries to start teaching kids that there are more genders than boy and girl.”

Baroness Hunt took over Stonewall in 2014 shortly after the first same-sex marriages took place. She pushed to include transgender campaigns, possibly in response to a feeling that a void had been created by key advances in lesbian and gay equality.

Following a consultation with 700 transgender people, Stonewall accepted a donation to “integrate trans-specific work” into its campaigns.

It promoted the notion of “gender identity” which might not align with sex, including ideas that lesbians can have penises and gay men can have vulvas.

Many lesbians and gay men vehemently opposed that ideology. Baroness Hunt was later accused of running “a militant trans agenda” by the writer Maureen Chadwick, creator of Bad Girls and Footballers’ Wives.

In 2019 Baroness Hunt left Stonewall and accepted her peerage.

She did not respond to a request for a comment.