From Gay Liberation Pioneer to Gender Critical Warrior: Bev Jackson's 50-Year Fight (#29)
Bev Jackson, who helped found the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and co-founded LGB Alliance in 2019, joins the podcast to trace how organisations built to protect gay and lesbian people came to undermine them. For Irish listeners, her testimony carries particular weight: Ireland was the first country in the world to enshrine same-sex marriage by popular vote, yet its LGBTQ+ institutions have followed the same ideological drift Jackson describes in Britain. Stella O'Malley, as an Irish psychotherapist who has watched this shift unfold close to home, brings a sharp local perspective to the conversation.
Bev Jackson was the only woman present at the first meeting of the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 — a room of nineteen gay men and her. Over the half-century that followed she lived and organised across Britain and the Netherlands, fighting for causes that seemed, at the time, to belong to the political left. Then, in 2019, she found herself secretly gathering seventy people in a room to discuss something she could barely say aloud in public: that the organisations built to protect gay and lesbian people had been quietly colonised by an ideology she did not recognise. The result was the LGB Alliance, which Jackson co-founded with Kate Harris after what she describes as a betrayal by Stonewall's leadership — a promise broken when the T was added to the acronym without, she says, the consent of lesbian and gay members. The episode traces that journey in detail, including the organisation's landmark legal victory when Mermaids, the children's gender charity, sought to have LGB Alliance stripped of its charitable status and failed spectacularly in court. Jackson argues that groups originally formed to shield young gay people from harm have, in some cases, become the very institutions placing them at risk. For Irish audiences, this carries a particular resonance. Ireland was the first country in the world to vote for same-sex marriage by popular referendum — a watershed moment in 2015 that Bev Jackson's generation of activists could barely have imagined. That same year, Ireland also introduced one of Europe's most permissive gender self-identification laws. The organisations that helped win those victories have since moved in a direction that many of the people who built the gay rights movement find troubling. Stella O'Malley, as an Irish psychotherapist with decades of clinical experience, is well placed to examine what that drift means for Irish clients, Irish families and Irish schools. Jackson's concern about young lesbians is one that will be familiar to anyone working with adolescent mental health in Ireland. She describes dating apps on which twenty, thirty, sometimes forty per cent of profiles presenting as women are, in fact, male — a shift she sees as an erasure of same-sex attraction dressed up as inclusion. This is not a fringe anxiety: it touches directly on how Irish secondary-school students understand identity, consent and the boundaries of their own sexuality. The episode also revisits a formative moment in Jackson's childhood: at eleven years old, she stood up as the only Jewish pupil in a classroom where antisemitism had gone unchallenged. That instinct — to name what others stay quiet about — has defined five decades of activism. It is the quality that Stella and her co-hosts find most worth examining here, because the willingness to speak clearly in the face of institutional pressure is exactly what this debate demands, in Ireland as much as anywhere else.
