From Gay Liberation Pioneer to Gender Critical Warrior: Bev Jackson's 50-Year Fight (#29)
14 August 2025
With Bev Jackson
institutions
Bev Jackson helped found the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and, nearly fifty years later, co-founded LGB Alliance in response to the capture of gay rights organisations by gender-identity ideology. Her story is a case study in how institutions drift, how founding values are overwritten, and why the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity carries real consequences — especially for lesbians, young people, and the coherence of sex-based rights frameworks.
Bev Jackson was there at the beginning. In 1970, as the only woman in a room of nineteen gay men, she was present at the founding meeting of the UK Gay Liberation Front. She spoke at the movement's first march and spent the following decades committed to the causes of equality, freedom, and the rights of gay men and lesbians. By 2019, she found herself in a very different kind of meeting — gathering seventy people in secret — not to launch something new but to recover something lost. The organisation she helped to build, and the broader apparatus of gay rights advocacy, had been, in her word, captured. The capture did not happen overnight, and it did not happen through conspiracy. It happened through the gradual redefinition of what organisations were for. Stonewall, once a watchdog for gay and lesbian rights, added the T to its remit after its then-chief executive Ruth Hunt reportedly promised not to — a decision Jackson describes as a betrayal of lesbians in particular. What followed, she argues, was a systematic displacement of same-sex attraction as the organising principle of gay rights, replaced by an ideology in which self-identified gender takes precedence over biological sex. For Jackson, this is not a progression of rights but a reversal of their logic. Transphobia and homophobia, she contends, are not analogous: one concerns identity, the other concerns fixed biological reality. Collapsing the distinction has consequences. Those consequences are most visible for young lesbians. Jackson points to data from dating apps where substantial proportions of profiles identifying as women are men who identify as trans women. For a lesbian — someone attracted to women as a matter of biological sex — this is not a cosmetic problem. It is a direct challenge to the coherence of same-sex attraction as a meaningful category, and to the spaces and institutions built around it. The founding of LGB Alliance in 2019 represents one institutional response: an attempt to create a new organisation that holds to the original definition. But the episode is also about what happens when institutions fight back. The charity Mermaids, which advocates for gender-transition in young people, brought a legal challenge aimed at stripping LGB Alliance of its charitable status. The challenge failed, as Jackson describes it — a courtroom outcome that matters not just as a legal result but as a signal about where the burden of proof now lies in these disputes. What Jackson's fifty-year arc illuminates is a recurring pattern: the way movements can be hollowed out from within, their founding purposes replaced by ideologies that would have been unrecognisable to their founders. The question she forces is not merely historical but structural. If organisations formed to protect gay youth became, in her words, their biggest danger, that is a failure of institutional accountability — and a lesson about how ideology, when left unchallenged, rewrites what institutions claim to stand for.
