Libby Brooks
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Apr
Libby Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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 and
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.
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 organisations we have in the country, BBC, EHRC, all government departments pulling out of that because of that concern.
Well, for the BBC, it was a concern around impartiality.
But as you say, a concern that there was a particular, I suppose, group think 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.
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.
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,
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