3 days ago
Thank goodness football has abandoned its slavish devotion to cult of Stonewall
It will never be admitted publicly, but football is finally coming to terms with the fruitlessness of gesture politics. In one fell swoop, the Football Association and the Premier League have ended their acquiescence to Stonewall, ditching the Rainbow Laces campaign, and reduced the rote enactment of taking a knee to just two rounds of fixtures over an entire season.
Just five years ago, both these actions would have been unthinkable. In 2020, trumpeting of the laces was so de rigueur that the Football Association would issue a checklist to ensure blanket compliance, while kneeling was such a core element of the repertoire of piety that ' Black Lives Matter ' replaced players' names on the backs of shirts. Five years on, the pushback against such compelled speech has begun.
Not that the game, addicted for so long to the cosmetic projection of its own virtue, can quite bring itself to go cold turkey just yet. The world's wealthiest league is vowing to launch an in-house inclusion campaign to coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month in February and to persevere with taking the knee on two separate occasions during Black History Month in October, in stark contrast to the Lionesses' decision to abandon the ritual altogether. That still leaves plenty of room for it to mark Pride Month, or Transgender Awareness Week, or International Transgender Day of Visibility, or any of the innumerable dates where performative shows of solidarity somehow acquire greater importance than sincere conviction.
There is relief, though, in the fact that the FA and the Premier League – and even rugby's Premiership – have at last seen fit to jettison Stonewall. For far too long, football has acted meekly at Stonewall's behest, treating the charity's instruction as a form of holy order. When the FA and Stonewall forged a formal partnership in 2018, Stonewall FC, an LGBTQ+ club competing at the lowly level of Middlesex Division One, were invited to play at Wembley. From there, the governing body's status as a Stonewall 'Diversity Champion' ensured its unquestioning adherence to every aspect of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion gospel, where it felt comfortable only nine months ago to release a preachy video about the supposed power of rainbow laces.
'We've seen a real shift from it being something that football should do to being something that football has to do, and so you're getting actual business decisions being predicated on equality, diversity and inclusion,' gushed Liz Ward, a 'women's talent and senior game Equality, Diversity and Inclusion consultant coach developer' at the FA – and also, hardly without coincidence, a former officer at Stonewall.
Note the use of language here: 'something that football has to do', as if the donning of some multi-coloured laces should be an article of faith, to be blindly accepted without scrutiny or dissent. Except many fans bombarded with tokenistic rainbow iconography every November feel no such thing. After the ludicrous charade last year – where football twisted itself in so many knots that Crystal Palace's Marc Guehi was admonished for writing 'I Love Jesus' on his rainbow armband, just as Ipswich's Sam Morsy used his Muslim faith as a legitimate excuse for not wearing one at all – this enforced conformity now invites derision rather than support.
That is why the FA and the Premier League no longer feel the same compulsion to amplify Stonewall's messaging. Why keep parroting the diktats of an organisation that has asked for the word 'mother' to be replaced with 'parent who has given birth', at the same time as arguing that men should be allowed into women's bathrooms simply if they identify as female? For a sense of what Stonewall has become, look at its 2021 document that declares: 'Trans people should be able to choose with the facilities that align with their gender identity.'
In 2025, we inhabit a greatly different world. The pernicious fallacies of radical trans ideology have been upended by the Supreme Court's ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, not chosen gender. And sport, just like every other sphere of society, needs to fall into line. Respecting the immutability of sex is no longer some luxury extra, but the law of the land. As such, sporting institutions are shelving their once slavish devotion to the self-ID cult to protect themselves from legal jeopardy.
Look, for example, at how dramatically the FA has changed tack. In 2015, it felt able to write as official guidance: 'Trans people should have access to the toilets, showers and changing rooms of their self-identified gender. It is good practice to ask a trans person what would work best to accommodate their preferred option.' A decade on, it opted, mercifully, to uphold the rights of half the population above the wishes of a tiny minority, banning biological men from playing women's football at every level of the game.
It is in a similar vein that the separation from Stonewall has happened. It is not so much the rainbow laces that are the problem, but more the extreme belief systems of the people fronting the campaign. You cannot seriously claim to be inclusive while supporting those who think nothing of excluding women from their own sporting category.
A similar naivete has been evident throughout football's agonising over taking the knee. What it believed was a straightforward anti-racism gesture turned instead into a tacit endorsement of the BLM fanatics who advocated defunding the police and dismantling the nuclear family. As the game starts to correct course, it would do well to learn a salutary lesson: be careful of the company you keep.
