Ruth Hunt: Very Queer Indeed.

Stonewall's ex-CEO championed the myth of gender identity so it's ironic the story she tells about herself is full of fabrications. It also skates over some rather curious financial transactions.

“Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried.”

Ruth 1:16–17

The Ruth of the Bible is an emblem of loyalty. I had to remind myself of that last week as I watched two lesbians called Ruth compete to sell out their gay brothers and sisters along with women in general….and children.

The only loyalty on offer seemed to be that between the two lesbians.

Ruth Hunt and Ruth Davidson were speaking at my alma mater: the University of Glasgow. The occasion? The tenth anniversary of Equal Marriage. I had never seen either woman in person and went to the event to try to solve two mysteries. The first was about Davidson, former leader of the Scottish Conservatives.

She’s the jowly one.

As opposed to the tweedy one.

It has always baffled me Davidson said not a word, to my knowledge, about Gender Recognition Reform, the issue that dominated Scottish politics for years. I wrote to her in early 2020 and got no reply. Many others say the same. The campaign group For Women Scotland tried many times to have a meeting with her apparently. None was forthcoming.

From the personal chemistry that fairly bubbled between the two Ruths on the evening I think I now know why. As they lavished praise on each other, between in-jokes and affectionate asides, I would not have been surprised if someone told me they were an item. Or had once been. What a lovely couple they would have made.

Jowly-dum and Tweedle-dee.

I digress.

It wasn’t just that the two Ruths behaved like cats who had got each other’s cream (so to speak) that suggested they agreed with each other on trans ideology. Davidson’s reply to a question I asked at the end of the evening confirmed she really is up to her whiskers in the idiocy of our time. More of that later.

As for Ruth Hunt the mystery I wanted to solve about her was, to be blunt, how on earth she lives with herself. The CEO of Stonewall between 2014 and 2019 has left a trail of destruction and broken lives behind her. Under her watch Stonewall embraced the trans agenda and thereby lent its ridiculous demands a veneer of respectability.

This and Hunt’s own explicit advocacy of puberty blockers, as well as the notion children can be born in the wrong body, helped funnel hundreds of girls and boys towards unnecessary and damaging medicalisation. She helped then, as much as anyone else, to turn the effective sterilisation of children into a social justice cause.

And my God was she willing to lie to do that.

In 2019 Hunt claimed 50% of young people who are not given the puberty blockers they want….“commit suicide.”

It hardly needs saying this is garbage. Even Chase Strangio, one of America’s most prominent and lunatic trans activists, acknowledged in the US Supreme Court last week that suicide among young people is extremely rare. The idea 50% of trans identified young people have suicidal thoughts is dismissed by experts never mind the notion half actually commit suicide, as Hunt claimed. She has never issued a correction though. Nor an apology.

As my friend Dennis Kavanagh has pointed out the Tavistock scandal could have been halted overnight if Stonewall had backed the Clinic’s critics.

Earlier this year in an interview in the Times, Hunt gave the nearest thing to a defence of her behaviour she’s offered so far. It does not pass the smell test.

Hunt claimed, for example, that Stonewall had always supported an evidence-based approach to medicine.

“I trusted the experts….and I think we all did that. And that is something we regret,” she argued. In fact she ignored any experts who did not sing from the trans lobby’s approved song sheet.

She also claimed she didn’t support ‘No Debate’ even though that was the slogan Stonewall adopted under her leadership. It was also viciously enforced. In 2018 when Hunt was CEO the organisation denounced a schools pamphlet published by Transgender Trend warning about the dangers of blockers and cross-sex hormones.

“There is no research into the long-term effects of these treatments on children”, said the pamphlet. Claims which were substantiated in buckets by the Cass Review.

In response Stonewall’s Twitter/X account declared,

“We, in the strongest possible terms, denounce and condemn this publication. If it lands on your desk, do the right thing: shred it.”

An official statement by the charity was equally unequivocal:

“One thing we want every educator to be clear on is that they must have nothing to do with this deeply damaging publication.”

How very evidence-based. How unlike…. ‘No Debate’.

And while Hunt now affects to be a voice of moderation, she certainly was not at the time. When lesbians protested at being erased at Pride in 2018 Hunt called them transphobic. She also condemned Pride for not acting firmly enough, despite the fact the organisers had called the Police.

All this is to say Hunt has recently attempted to ‘curate’ the story of her time at Stonewall. Or misrepresent it more like. I had assumed one reason Hunt was doing this was to avoid the psychological trauma of having to admit to herself her culpability in a terrible medical scandal. I fear I was too forgiving.

As I watched her on Wednesday a much more shocking realisation formed in my mind.

Hunt can’t stop lying. Indeed she may not be able to stop lying. Even if she wanted to.

Almost every time Hunt opened her mouth she told a story that didn’t add up. Or just could not be true. As the night wore on these tall tales became more and more ludicrous.

I decided to check her claims and while I was at it to take a closer look at Hunt’s life story more generally. What a tangle I found. It turns out it may not only be the trans agenda Ruth Hunt has been telling porkies about. She appears to have told porkies a lot. And about almost everything. Including and perhaps most especially herself.

If this is the case it may give a fresh slant to a curious story that has, surprisingly, failed to get the attention it deserves.

It involves a rather substantial payment Stonewall made when Hunt was its CEO. The payment was made to Hunt’s romantic partner. What makes that unlikely financial transaction feel even more signficant is Hunt’s partner just happens to be the woman who organised the huge consultation exercise that initiated Stonewall’s pivot towards the trans agenda.

It was already deplorable that Hunt and her tiny circle at Stonewall wreaked havoc with their adoption of the trans agenda. If it was now to turn out that Hunt’s partner benefited financially from that havoc that would turn deplorable into scandalous. It would also expose the last vestiges of this project’s social justice pretensions for what they really were: fake and in the case of Hunt…self-serving.

Let’s start our investigation with a question: what is Ruth Hunt up to now? She’s in business with her partner. That’s right the same woman who received the substantial payment from Stonewall I just mentioned.

Of course she is.