Bev Jackson
Activist, writer and LGB Alliance co-founder
Bev Jackson has been on the front lines of British LGBT politics for more than half a century. As a co-founder of both the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and LGB Alliance in 2019, she brings a rare long view to debates about gender and sexuality — and in conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, she uses every year of it.
Bev Jackson occupies a position almost nobody else can claim: she was there at the very beginning of modern British gay liberation, and she is still fighting — loudly, publicly, without apology — more than fifty years later. In 1970 she co-founded the UK Gay Liberation Front, one of the country's first organised movements for homosexual rights, at a moment when being openly gay carried serious social and legal risk. The movement she helped build would shape British culture for decades.
What makes Jackson's story so striking — and so central to the conversation on Beyond Gender — is what happened next. By 2019, she had come to believe that the movement she helped create had been quietly captured by an ideology she considers fundamentally at odds with the interests of lesbians and gay men. That year she co-founded LGB Alliance, a UK charity that advocates for same-sex attracted people separately from questions of gender identity, and has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since.
In From Gay Liberation Pioneer to Gender Critical Warrior: Bev Jackson's 50-Year Fight (episode 29), Jackson sits down with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman for a wide-ranging conversation that spans the full arc of her activism. She traces precisely how she believes the gay rights movement was transformed, why she regards that transformation as a betrayal of lesbians and gay men, and what she intends to do about it. The episode works simultaneously as a history lesson, a political argument and a portrait of someone who has never quite learned to stop.
Few guests bring this kind of longitudinal perspective to the gender debate — the ability to compare what the fight looked like in 1970 with what it looks like today. Jackson is sharp, historically grounded and willing to say plainly what others hedge around, which makes for exactly the kind of conversation Beyond Gender was built for.
