From Gay Liberation Pioneer to Gender Critical Warrior: Bev Jackson's 50-Year Fight (#29)
14 August 2025
With Bev Jackson
UK
Bev Jackson co-founded the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and LGB Alliance in 2019. She traces how Stonewall and similar organisations were captured by gender-identity ideology, recounts the Mermaids charity tribunal in which LGB Alliance successfully defended its charitable status, and raises safeguarding concerns about young lesbians and gay men being steered away from same-sex attraction as an organising principle.
Bev Jackson was the only woman present when the UK Gay Liberation Front held its first meeting in 1970 — nineteen gay men and her. Within months she was speaking at GLF's first public march. The movement she helped build rested on a clear principle: same-sex attraction, and the right of gay and lesbian people to live openly without shame or legal penalty. More than fifty years later, Jackson is still fighting for that principle, now as co-founder of LGB Alliance, an organisation she created because the institutions built to protect gay people had, in her view, abandoned them. The shift inside those institutions is the central thread of this episode. Jackson describes the 2019 gathering — seventy people, assembled quietly — that would become LGB Alliance, and her account of how Stonewall changed course is detailed and specific. She names the moment when the organisation's then chief executive Ruth Hunt added the T to Stonewall's remit after, Jackson says, giving explicit assurances she would not. For Jackson, this was not an extension of an existing rights framework but a substitution: an ideology centred on gender identity displacing one centred on same-sex attraction, with concrete consequences for lesbian women. The episode's most legally significant passage concerns the Charity Tribunal case in which Mermaids challenged LGB Alliance's charitable status shortly after LGB Alliance was registered. The tribunal rejected that challenge comprehensively. Jackson describes the proceedings and their outcome as a vindication not only for her organisation but for the broader proposition that gay rights advocacy and a critical stance on gender-identity ideology are not, in themselves, discriminatory or contrary to the public interest — a finding with implications for how regulators and courts interpret the boundaries of charitable purpose. Safeguarding is a recurring concern. Jackson points to lesbian dating platforms where, she argues, a significant proportion of profiles now belong to male-born users who identify as women. She connects this to a wider pattern in which young women experiencing same-sex attraction encounter social and institutional pressure to reframe that attraction in gender-identity terms rather than to identify straightforwardly as lesbian. This echoes one of the documented concerns in the Cass Review, which found that a disproportionate number of young people referred to gender services were same-sex attracted and noted the absence of adequate therapeutic exploration of sexual orientation before clinical pathways were pursued. Jackson's fifty-year vantage point gives the conversation an unusual historical depth. She draws a direct line from the police raids and public hostility that the GLF was founded to resist to the present-day pressure on lesbian and gay people to accept a redefinition of homosexuality itself. Her argument — that describing oneself as same-sex attracted, and treating biological sex as relevant to that attraction, is not prejudice against trans people but the basic expression of a sexual orientation — sits at the centre of legal and political contests the UK is still resolving, from the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling on the meaning of "woman" in the Equality Act to ongoing parliamentary debate about reform of the Gender Recognition Act.
