Today’s Guardian has an article about a new resource produced by Stonewall for prospective university students. As thousands of young people make final decisions about where to spend the next few years of their lives, many will be asking, “which institution will allow them to feel comfortable about who they are?” The article goes on to say:

It is a question the lobby group Stonewall aims to help answer for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students through a new guide to “gay-friendly” universities.

Two Stonewall spokesmen (Luke Tryl and Gary Nunn) are quoted in the piece. Both apparently use the LGBT acronym when talking to the Guardian reporter, Harriet Swain. And yet, if you click through to the document in question it states: “Stonewall’s University Guide is for all lesbian, gay and bisexual students; and all those in-between.”

What exactly does that mean? Well one thing it very clearly means is “NOT T”, because if you read through the document there’s very little mention of that additional letter. For example:

University description: A bit about the University, its unique selling points, the student LGBT society and the local gay scene.

Checklist: An at-a-glance indicator of how gay-friendly a university is by showing what provision they offer to LGB students.

In other words, the university may have an organization that caters for LGB and T students, but the Stonewall guide is only interested in what that organization does for LGB students.

You don’t write something like that by accident. Stonewall has had a long standing policy of not being in the slightest interested in trans people unless they happen to be LGB as well. But why is the Guardian article so misleading? Why, in particular, has the newspaper added a T to LGB everywhere in the list of criteria by which universities have been judged, when the Stonewall document very clearly does not use that T?

All sorts of reasons are possible. It could have been an enthusiastic sub-editor. It could be Ms. Swain’s mistake. It could have been the Stonewall people misleading the newspaper. But whatever the reason is, it is quite wrong for The Guardian to suggest that Stonewall cares about trans people. It doesn’t.

In view of this it is quite telling that the government has started to talk about “LGB and T” rather than “LGBT” (example here). It is a clever political move. On the one hand it makes clear to trans people that they are not just an afterthought, and acknowledges that the issues they face may be very different. On the other it mollifies the people in Stonewall who wouldn’t be seen dead advocating for trans rights.

Anyway, Southampton scored 8 out of 10, and no university did better than 9, so I’m quite pleased with the old place. With I knew how it did on T issues though.

Update: There’s a comment on the Guardian article from someone who claims to be on the executive committee of Warwick Pride (and I have no reason to doubt this claim, but equally no proof it is true). According to this person, one of the criteria by which Stonewall judges a university is whether or not the local LGBTetc. group has signed up to Stonewall’s “diversity” program. A number of universities have allegedly refused to do so because of Stonewall’s lack of inclusivity. If this is true, Stonewall is actually marking universities down for being more inclusive than they like. I’d try to check this, but the Stonewall site linked to above appears to have vanished. Whether this is because it has been hacked, has died under the weight of interest, or been withdrawn in embarrassment I have no idea.