Ruth Dudley Edwards: Stephen Nolan is being seen as a hero in Great Britain for his investigative reports into Stonewall

This is because they are scrutinising the role of the Scottish and Welsh governments, OfCom, the media regulator, and the BBC, their own employer, in the new great scandal of our time.

So far, because of its focus on the big, old quarrel, Northern Ireland has been less troubled by the Woke, led by crazed social justice extremists and their credulous followers, than has Great Britain, and this newspaper is one of the only media covering the issue, but the rot is setting in.

In Great Britain, what Messrs Nolan and Thompson have done for the Truth and Common Sense Army of the silent majority is being hailed by many of the worried.

“Astonishing”, said the Daily Telegraph’s Charlotte Runcie of the podcast ‘Nolan Investigates: Stonewall’, which reveals the frightening power that uncompromising lobby for trans rights has acquired within public bodies.

Intent on replacing a truth the human race has accepted as blindingly obvious since its inception (that there are two sexes, male and female, determined at birth by their biology) by the evidence-free ideology that we are born with an assigned “gender identity” which we can switch as the fancy takes us, Stonewall is brilliantly persuading the gullible and the cowed to change laws, rules and language to reflect these preposterous ideas.

Recently, for instance, the Scottish government began the process of excising words like “mother” from health-related legislation.

Along with the destructive critical race theory also peddled by Woke activists that teaches that all the wrongs of history are caused by white supremacy, this pernicious ideology has captured a generation of students.

The leftwing humanities graduates who dominate education and cultural institutions have captured many parts of the establishment, including the Human Resources departments and hence the training courses, in key public services like the civil service and the police.

One section of a BBC programme (Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities) aimed at 9 to 12-year-olds showed a pupil asking: “How many gender identities are there?”, to which the ‘Relationship and Sex Education’ teacher explained: “There are so many gender identities. So we know we have got male and female, but there are over 100 if not more gender identities now.”

Of course that nonsense is catnip for teenagers.

Forget wondering if you are gay or lesbian. Are you gender neutral, gender queer, gender fluid, two-spirit (even the chap Nolan interviewed from Pink News couldn’t remember what that meant) and so on.

Anyone who challenges such nonsense on social media, will be abused as transphobic. In universities, staff have been threatened, silenced and driven out for saying sex was determined by biology, and many others have been punished for anti-Woke heresies by being no-platformed or banned.

Nolan and Thompson are old-fashioned investigate journalists who want to find out what’s actually happening.

The podcast tells a dramatic, sometimes comic, story of how they came to take this on, their arguments, their frustrations, and their growing disbelief at what emerged.

I listened to every one of the ten compelling episodes, which included fascinating debates from all sides about sex, gender and trans issues, shocking stories about what happened in the Tavistock, the leading gender clinic and the revelation of how lobbyists colonised and dictated policy in organisations like the sacred BBC.

“Fascinating”, said The Times’s James Marriott and “jaw-dropping”’ said the Dr Who scriptwriter Gareth Roberts, in the heavyweight on-line Unherd. Despite “its current woke progressive agenda”, the BBC “still has some excellent journalists who are not afraid to question and do some actual journalism,” said a relieved columnist in Christian Today. “One of these is Stephen Nolan from Northern Ireland”.

I find all this very sad. Black Lives Matter has had a wholly negative effect on race relations, as Stonewall is having on trans rights.

Most people have come to accept gays and lesbians and to be accept trans people living in whichever sex they like, but self-identification without any formal process is a step too far. It is not bigoted to believe that safe spaces for women like refuges and prisons should not be vulnerable to predatory men self-identifying as women.

The ideology is creeping west. At Stormont, in draft measures to provide free period products for all, Pat Catney of the SDLP leaped on the bandwagon with “boys have periods too”.

No they don’t, Mr Catney. They don’t have the requisite sexual equipment. Though certainly a few girls who have decided for now to identify themselves as boys, do. But they aren’t boys.

Shocked by a message from his own university, Queen’s, that it was now in partnership with Stonewall, Professor Liam Kennedy listened for enlightenment to the whole podcast and gave fervent thanks in the Belfast Telegraph for “the investigative journalism of the BBC’s Stephen Nolan and his brilliant research team”.

In fairness to the BBC, it had the guts to publish the podcast and make it available on BBC Sounds. Anyone with susceptible children should listen to it with them.

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• Ruth Dudley Edwards Oct 26: Nasty article gloated over Sinn Fein centenary snub

• Other columns by Ruth click here

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