Talking of unanswered questions....

... we have never had a satisfactory answer about the funding of Made In God's Image. The CES has issued contradictory statements, but failed to explain the contradiction.

Not surprisingly, rumours persist that the CES accepted money from Stonewall.

That, of course, is one of the inevitable results of the policy of silence: people will fill in the gaps, and not always in the way one would wish.

That is one of the practical reasons the Nolan principles are so important. There are ethical considerations, too, of course, but perhaps we shouldn't set our sights so high...

And in practice, it means that when (as is inevitable) dribs and drabs of information seep out, and pesky people like me start to comment on them, energy and attention are focussed on seeking whom to blame and excoriating people for the leaks, rather than focussing on the real questions, such as: have we actually got this wrong? What should we do to put it right?

If those questions had been addressed earlier, we might not now be in a situation where backtracking risks a real loss of face, and, (far worse) where some schools reading the cues that Stonewall et al are the authorities on these issues, have developed and imposed immensely harmful policies of trans affirmation.

And still the rumours about funding persist: did Stonewall fund the distribution of Made in God's Image? If not, who did? And if nobody did, why did the CES proudly announce that they had "received funding to cover the printing and distribution of a hard copy for each school"?