Helen Pitt

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?

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?

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.

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?

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 naughty 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 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 um

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?

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.

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.

You know, 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.