But the barrister and lesbian Allison Bailey may have put a stop to this. Yesterday’s ruling in her case Bailey v Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers found that she had been victimised and discriminated against by her employer for expressing gender critical beliefs. Such was the oppressiveness of Garden Court’s actions against her, she was awarded aggravated damages: £22,000. These are only granted where a discriminator’s actions are particularly unnecessary, high-handed or oppressive.

Bailey also sued Stonewall for inducing, instructing or causing some of GCC’s actions — she had accused the charity of “trans-extremism” — but she didn’t win that aspect of the case. As a result, Stonewall and its supporters, including Owen Jones and Pink News, are celebrating. In their blinkered view, she has lost. However, this is to disregard the consequences of interrogating the extreme ideology and methods perpetuated by Stonewall. Bailey’s tribunal has tracked the ideological trajectory of what was once the foremost activist for gay rights, and put the absurdity of its activism under the spotlight.

Back in 2018, Bailey complained to her chambers when they signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme (DCP), which gives training and guidance on how to be “inclusive employers”. At the height of its power, more than 950 organisations were signed up to what Bailey and many others have called the “protection racket“. But she, along with many other lesbians and gay men, objected to the charity’s stance on trans issues, which included its uncritical promotion of self-ID. Such was Bailey’s disenchantment, she helped set up the LGB alliance which advocated for the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. This, in turn, was labelled a “hate group” by trans activists.

There can be no doubt that Stonewall, in its aggressive and uncompromising support for extreme transgender ideology and a refusal to discuss or debate alternative viewpoints, helped fuelled the fire already raging against Bailey for her gender critical views and support for the LGB Alliance. In 2019, Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall’s Head of Trans Inclusion, emailed the heads of GCC accusing Bailey of “making and retweeting multiple transphobic statements online”. Examples included “liking and writing posts referring to trans women as men”, and “writing tweets calling for trans people to lose their current legal rights”. The latter was because Bailey was protesting the fact that male-bodied sex offenders were being placed in women’s prisons.

According to Medcalf, “her actions… threatened the positive relationship that Stonewall and GCC have built with the trans community”. He accused Bailey of making trans people feel “unsafe” if they were to even catch a glimpse of her while visiting GCC. Medcalf stated: “For Garden Court Chambers to continue associating with a barrister who is actively campaigning for a reduction in trans rights and equality, while also specifically targeting members of our staff with transphobic views on a public platform, puts us in a difficult position with yourselves: the safety of our staff and community will always be Stonewall’s first priority. I trust that you will do what is right and stand in solidarity with trans people.”

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According to Bailey, the charity appeared to be threatening to distance itself from GCC if GCC did not make the decision to cut ties with her. During the six-week hearing, at which 30 witnesses in total were cross examined, Bailey claimed that some GCC barristers were invested in trans ideology, and that if the relationship with Stonewall were to become fractious it would be difficult for chambers to take on potentially lucrative trans rights cases.

As a result of Stonewall’s complaints, Bailey was asked by heads of chambers to remove the reference to chambers on her Twitter bio, which she did. However, without her knowledge, GCC then tweeted that the criminal barrister was under investigation by her chambers, which implied she had done something wrong.

An investigation into the complaints about Bailey, including those by Stonewall, was ordered by GCC management and carried out by Maya Sikand QC. Seeking advice from Cathryn McGahey QC, Vice Chair of the Bar Council’s ethics committee, she was informed that two of Bailey’s tweets were “probably over the borderline of acceptable conduct”.

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One concerned a trans activist named Morgan Page, who had recently been hired by Stonewall. In 2012, Page ran a workshop entitled “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”. The “cotton” is a reference to women’s underwear, and a number of lesbians had taken serious offence at the notion that male bodied transwomen had attended workshops in order to overcome difficulties in accessing sex with lesbians.

Bailey, on discovering that Page was working with Stonewall, tweeted that Page is “a male-bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can ‘coerce’ young lesbians into having sex with them”. At the tribunal, Stonewall attempted to deny that Page’s actions had anything to do with coercing lesbians into sex; in evidence, though, Bailey was convincing in her arguments that it was precisely that. Stonewall’s Chief Executive, Nancy Kelley, was revealed, in a leaked email to the BBC, to have described those women who resisted cotton-ceiling indoctrination as “sexual racists” because expressing preference in sexual partners was “discriminatory”.

In giving evidence in the tribunal, McGahey defended the concept of overcoming the “cotton ceiling” and compared it with initiatives to promote racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa. McGahey, at the conclusion of the 2019 investigation, decided that Bailey’s use of the word “coerce” was unfounded and directed that Bailey should delete her tweet. Bailey refused.

Complaints about two separate tweets were upheld — the cotton ceiling tweet, and also one in which Bailey wrote, following a report in The Sunday Times about the investigation she was subject to, “I and many other women are grateful to The Times for fairly and accurately reporting on the appalling levels of intimidation, fear and coercion that are driving the Stonewall UK trans self ID agenda.”

Both tweets were castigated even though they were true.

Although GCC claimed that the language used by Bailey went beyond the belief that sex rather than gender is fundamentally important, the tribunal found that all of Bailey’s pleaded beliefs, not just the belief that “woman is sex not gender”, are protected (this protection was established by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the case brought by Maya Forstater).

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That’s why it was found that GCC discriminated against Bailey when it published its statement on Twitter that she was under investigation. It was also found that in upholding Stonewall’s complaint against her, GCC victimised Bailey. Vitally, the tribunal held that Bailey’s protected gender critical beliefs also include the belief that “Gender identity theory as proselytised by Stonewall is severely detrimental to women and to lesbians” and is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

The fact that a chamber full of experts in human rights law did not adhere to the Equality Law 2010 is staggering; it’s a stark example of how workplaces and other institutions can be influenced by the definition of “transphobia” exhorted by Stonewall.

It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes. This is one reason why it is difficult to take Stonewall seriously when it claims: “The case heard by the Employment Tribunal did not accurately reflect our intentions and our influence on organisations.”

Bailey spent all of her adult life fighting sexism and homophobia and was horrified when she first pushed back against the Stonewall dictats to find that women questioning the new orthodoxy were being labelled Terfs, bigots and fascists. She, too, found herself on the receiving end of death threats; it cost her enormously to stand up and fight. Regardless, Bailey, with Maya Forstater and other courageous truth tellers, has lifted the lid on institutions and individuals who should have known better.

Upon hearing the Tribunal decision Bailey said: “I did not win everything, but I won the most important thing: I have brought Stonewall’s methods into the public eye, and I have shown them for what they now are.”

Stonewall had become as impenetrable and unaccountable as its namesake. But Bailey made sure it was finally held to account and will no longer be able to act with impunity when it comes to peddling its trans ideology and misinterpretation of the law. Organisations that put “Stonewall Law” before Equality Law will now be aware that they could now be acting unlawfully. In removing Stonewall’s right to silence she exposed them for the immoral parasites they have become.

Jackson hadn’t been asked to explain how blood is deoxygenated, or to offer an intricate overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is regulated in cells. The question “what is a woman?” is hardly the riddle of the sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate answer.

Increasingly, the question has become seen as a “gotcha”, but it is a useful gauge of the extent to which figures in authority have been ideologically captured. How can we possibly trust politicians if they cannot acknowledge the most basic realities of human biology? While most voters have a limited understanding of various key political issues, we can all see that a failure to define “woman” is either delusional or dishonest, neither of which are qualities we seek in our elected representatives.

For a long time, most people have been unwilling to express what they know to be true for fear of being monstered as a “transphobe” or, even more absurdly, as a “fascist”. But we appear to have reached a turning point. Today, the term “peaked” is used to describe the moment when an individual realises that he or she has been blindly following the dogma of trans activism at the expense of the truth. To reach this point is an inevitability for the intellectually curious, given that gender identity ideology will always dissolve upon scrutiny.

This has been most aptly demonstrated in the recent tribunal of Maya Forstater, a tax expert who is taking legal action against the Center for Global Development (CGD) for wrongful dismissal. Her erstwhile employer’s case rests on the view that Forstater’s belief that sex is immutable is a sackable offence, and it has been fascinating to read the live tweets of the tribunal in which Ben Cooper QC, counsel for Forstater, has been able to interrogate representatives of the CGD. The typical strategies of gender ideologues — to cry “hate” or “transphobia”, or to proclaim that there must be “no debate” — simply cannot be deployed in the context of a tribunal. As a result, perhaps for the first time, we are seeing what happens when the high priests are forced to defend their creed.

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So when Luke Easley, the CGD’s Vice President of HR and Operations, claims that “identity is reality — without identity there’s just a corpse”, the religiosity of this movement is on full display. He is reiterating the view among gender ideologues that we each have a kind of soul that determines our identity, what trans activist Julia Serano has described as a “subconscious sex”. Forstater’s crime was to deny this essential doctrine, or to refuse to pay it the necessary lip-service. Like heretics throughout history, she was willing to exclaim that the emperor has no clothes.

Virtually all of us support equal rights for transgender individuals, and so it is understandable that we would sympathise with those whose happiness depends on presenting as the opposite sex. I am convinced that in most cases the intonation of the mantras “trans women are women” and “trans men are men” comes from a place of empathy.

The recent case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas, however, has prompted many to reconsider the uttering of falsehoods even for compassionate purposes. Thomas ranked 554th in the college league tables when competing among men, but soared to the top of the rankings in the women’s category. The biological advantages of being a man in a woman’s competition became obvious when a photograph was widely circulated of the winners in the 500-yard freestyle in Atlanta: Thomas towers over the other athletes on the podium.

Even those who are determined to hold fast to the view that “trans women are women” will find it difficult to look at the image of Thomas mounting the victor’s podium without sensing a collision with the brick wall of reality. As William Hazlitt put it: “Facts, concrete existences, are stubborn things, and are not so soon tampered with or turned about to any point we please, as mere names and abstractions.”

Yet this hasn’t prevented certain media outlets from disregarding the significance of biological sex, even when reporting on male violence. Only last week, an article appeared on the BBC website that outlined the vicious crimes of an 83-year-old woman in New York who had dismembered another elderly woman she had met online, having already spent 50 years in prison for murdering two female friends. Those new to the story would be forgiven for feeling that something is amiss in the reporting. After all, there are very few female serial killers, and even fewer who target other women. It is only towards the end of the article that the writer acknowledges that the killer had “recently identified as a woman”. This detail is presented as an aside, as though it is an inconsequential aspect of the case.

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But perhaps the revelation most likely to “peak” members of the public came last week when Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne spoke in the House of Lords about a woman who had allegedly been raped on a hospital ward. Apparently, when police contacted the hospital they were told that there were no men on the single-sex ward, and “therefore the rape could not have happened”. The attentive reader will have already filled in the gaps.

This kind of gaslighting is part of a policy known as “Annex B”. The NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: “Views of family members may not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s view takes priority”.

In the same NHS document, it is asserted that sex is “assigned” at birth. Everyone knows that sex is observed and recorded, often before birth, and so it is surprising to see the holy writ of this new religion find its way into an official report. For medical practitioners it is particularly important that there are records of our sex, which is why we each have a unique NHS number to store this information. Yet patients are currently able to change this number on request so that it reflects personal identity rather than biological reality.

Even more worryingly, a 2010 document from the NHS Information Standards Board entitled “Mixed-Sex Accommodation Specification” explicitly states that the public must be misled on these matters in order to avoid general confusion: “The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex, but to ensure a better public understanding it is referred to as Mixed-Sex Accommodation (MSA)”. In other words, although the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had announced that NHS wards must be segregated by sex, behind the scenes it was understood that gender was to be the determining factor. It seems that the plebeians cannot be trusted with the truth.

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Today, the public are seeing for themselves the impact of gender policies in the real world: male athletes are competing in women’s sports, the media is reporting on male serial killers but using female pronouns, and a rape victim is told that the assault she experienced must have been a figment of her imagination. Incidents of this kind, now occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations, have led us into what Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, a general loss of confidence in institutional authority.

This is why it is crucial that we find a way to restore the primacy of truth in our public discourse. It isn’t a “gotcha” to ask a politician to define terms such as “man” and “woman” — it is a means by which we can assess the honesty of the ruling class. Their white lies might be compassionate in nature, but they clearly have damaging effects and the public is losing its patience. For all the false accusations of “hate”, “bigotry” and “transphobia” that stifle open conversation about these important issues, the tipping point is undoubtedly near.