Society was also changing. To shun trans people would have been disastrous, she says. “Stonewall could fail to speak to a generation who were speaking very differently about identity.” There was another reason, too. “The person who abuses the trans woman and the trans man will abuse me tomorrow and you the next day.” She inhales sharply, something she repeats whenever anxiety hits.

The decision to embrace trans rights led to her and Stonewall being engulfed in hostility. Regular deluges on social media. Weekly, sometimes daily, criticism in the media. High-profile lesbians and gay men criticising her and her charity, withdrawing personal donations, signing petitions in protest — moves all eagerly published by right-wing newspapers. (It hasn’t worked overall, though: donations are up 11%.) Some celebrated when her forthcoming departure was announced.

All of which was despite the fact that incorporating trans rights is in line with similar lesbian and gay organisations across the rest of the world. But in Britain, a conservative howl grows: keep the T away from the LGB, keep trans women away from cisgender women, fortify divides, preserve a binary notion of sex, and certainly don’t make legal transition easier.

Hate crimes against transgender people rose by 81% in the 12 months prior to April 2019, an increase the Home Office attributes to better reporting, but still a clear snapshot of Britain today.

Some of those who have attacked Hunt most vociferously describe themselves as radical feminists, but is there anything radical about fighting to keep people in the sex to which they were assigned? “No, I don’t think so,” says Hunt. “I’m pro trans because I’m a feminist, not despite it.” Such opponents have always been thus, she adds.

“I remember radical feminists complaining about [same-sex] marriage and complaining about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act that granted more rights to lesbians to have babies, so this idea that the radical feminists loved Stonewall until we brought in trans [rights] is laughable.”

Hunt admits, however, to previously having “mixed feelings” herself about trans inclusion; that as a student in the late 1990s at St Hilda’s, then a women-only college at Oxford, she read feminist theory, and in particular the pioneering work of Germaine Greer, who in 1997 quit as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, after opposing the college’s job offer to a trans physicist. “Why not listen to Germaine Greer?” Hunt says, invoking her mindset at the time. “As a woman at an all-women’s college where they were having these discussions, it was quite complicated.”

But in addition to reading Greer, Hunt studied Judith Butler, the celebrated feminist theorist who critiqued the idea that sex is a simple biological binary and the strict boundaries placed on what constitutes a woman. More importantly still, however, were Hunt’s experiences. “As a 19-year-old, I started to meet trans people, and that changed my journey. Thank God.”



The theoretical debates have not abated, however. Increasingly, feminists who oppose trans inclusion self-identify as “gender critical”, believing that gender is simply a patriarchal social construct, and therefore to move from one to the other colludes with a system designed to benefit men, to the detriment of women.

But for Hunt, such ideology has increased hostility not only to trans people but also to anyone who doesn’t conform to gender norms.

“It gets me chucked out of toilets,” she says, referring to the furore surrounding trans women’s use of women’s lavatories that has resulted in many butch lesbians being hounded out of public bathrooms, in the UK and the US. “It happens all the time.” Especially, she says, when she’s with her partner, Caroline.