The UK’s national LGBTQ+ charity, Stonewall, has recently been accused of advocating for trans rights. Six years ago, there was another “Stonewall question”, but the issue wasn’t whether the organisation should be advocating for trans rights, but instead why it wasn’t. For those of us who remember these fights, it’s discombobulating to witness a reframing of Stonewall as a sinister organisation that sneaked trans rights on to its agenda when nobody was looking. The very opposite was the case: it was hard won. Many petitions were circulated, letters written and debates had. The inclusion of trans men, trans women and all transgender people eventually followed in 2015. Stonewall public campaigns, training, policy, work with employers and sports organisations, for example, included trans and transgender people. They could seek advice if they faced discrimination at work, in housing or health provision. For many people, this was an obvious broadening out of the title, to reflect the solidarity and diversity that already had long existed in LGBTQ+ communities, clubs, organisations and social groups. This unity was no more obvious than at the famous uprising in the US in 1969, from which Stonewall takes its name. This protest included people from all identities – Black and white, drag queens, drag kings, transmasculine queers, trans men and women, butch lesbians, gay men, homeless young people and people working in prostitution – all of whom, in all their diversity, shared experiences of being excluded and seen as deviant by mainstream society. They forged a solidarity in that experience. Tired of being harassed, assaulted and raped by police raiding the gay bars that provided a home and an all too rare supportive social network, the people eventually fought back; and the resistance at the gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, became legend. In the same year as Stonewall in the UK was finally broadening its title, the reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner was on the cover of Vanity Fair, and in Westminster the women and equalities committee inquiry on UK transgender equality produced a report recommending reforms to modernise the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Suggestions included reducing the fee payable for a gender recognition certificate (GRC), streamlining the process so it is quicker and easier, and removing the need for any medical diagnosis. In 2017, the then prime minister Theresa May promised that these reforms would be carried out, and at a Pink News awards event assured the audience that the Conservative government did not see being trans as a mental illness, and the process of acquiring a GRC would be simplified. This is where concerns over what became called self-ID, or self-certification, perhaps first arose; and, due to misunderstandings of what these proposals would mean in practice, these concerns grew. Then in 2018 the government announced its LGBT equality action plan and began a public consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act. Around this consultation, and the similar one launched by the Scottish government, many groups mobilised in favour, and just as many mobilised against. Opponents, such as the LGB Alliance, called this a “green light” for “predators” and some people felt it would mean that men intent on abuse could change all their sex markers on their official identification online one evening, access spaces for girls or vulnerable women the next day, then just change back again online. This was never what was suggested or offered in the consultation document though. The so-called gender wars have raged ever since. Now even a mainstream workplace equality, diversity and inclusion programme in universities, called Athena Swan, is being singled out for promoting trans rights by stealth. Far from radical, the scheme operates firmly within the current system, and is concerned with promoting equality across all the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, which includes trans and transgender people. Those of us who may consider ourselves activists are now forced to passionately defend the most basic, the most liberal, the most assimilated and bureaucratic tools within the system. The current gender wars are not a fight against the binary roles that constrict our society, instead this particular manifestation of the culture wars is a battle against trans women in particular. Most of the debate concerns what services trans women should or should not be allowed to access, from public toilets to public services. Perhaps all of this was to be expected, and perhaps it is just part of a larger backlash against the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ rights over the decades. Yet society still remains deeply sex- and gender-conservative, and, at times of economic and political uncertainty, those stances become more entrenched as people try to find some certainty in a mythic ideal of complementary gender roles. It seems as if the Conservative government has purposely fuelled and exacerbated the gender wars in order to consolidate its base. We’ve seen Liz Truss bleating about centralised control of public toilets to keep out trans women, and the government has ditched most changes to the Gender Recognition Act, despite the majority of more than 100,000 respondents to the consultation supporting modernising reforms. At the same time, the government has stalled on its promise to end conversion practices. For Truss, free speech must be protected, and this means an assumed right for those who are LGBTQ+ to consent to anti-LGBTQ+ conversion practices. This debate may remain contentious for some time, but any lesbian, gay or bisexual person, in particular, supporting the current war on trans people, should remember that while T is near the end of our acronym, the other letters are just further back in the queue. Any talk of the movement going too far, or the community getting too broad is just a shameless display of exclusion, pointing at someone else you think is weirder than you and saying they are the real problem. But tomorrow’s weirdo could be you. We have already seen rising hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, increasing year on year since 2015. This month witnesses at an inquest, pushed for by relatives of four murdered gay men, claimed that the Met police displayed homophobia when investigating their deaths. Assistant commissioner Helen Ball, the head of the Met’s professional standards, said she did not accept that the Met was “institutionally homophobic”. If organisations like Stonewall are brought down, who will be there to defend us or our families from such basic withdrawal of service responses, flawed as they are? Who will step up if raids start, or when our marriage certificates aren’t recognised, when our children are taken away from us, or when we don’t have the right identification to apply for work or welfare? It is when attacks come to the doors of the most liberal, and surely the most inoffensive human rights groups, that all radicals should be worried. Finn Mackay is the author of Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars and is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol