Bev Jackson
LGB Alliance co-founder and campaigner
Bev Jackson was in the room when Britain's Gay Liberation Front was founded in 1970. Nearly fifty years later she co-founded the LGB Alliance — then fought a landmark charity tribunal to defend it. Her fifty-year arc illuminates how the UK's gay rights movement was built, and how she believes it was captured by an ideology that now reaches into the NHS, schools and the courts.
In 1970, Bev Jackson was among the founders of Britain's Gay Liberation Front — the grassroots movement that laid the foundations of UK LGBT rights. Nearly five decades later, convinced the movement had been redirected away from its founding purpose, she co-founded the LGB Alliance in 2019, an organisation focused explicitly on same-sex attraction and the legal status of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in Britain.
The new charity faced an immediate legal challenge when Mermaids, the transgender youth charity, mounted a tribunal case seeking to block LGB Alliance from gaining charitable status. Jackson helped steer the organisation through that landmark battle, which LGB Alliance won — a significant moment in the contest over which views can legitimately be represented in British civil society. In From Gay Liberation Pioneer to Gender Critical Warrior: Bev Jackson's 50-Year Fight, she traces this arc with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, examining Stonewall's transformation and the legal protection of gender-critical belief under the Equality Act 2010.
Her perspective carries particular weight in the post-Cass moment. The Cass Review's findings on paediatric gender medicine, the closure of the Tavistock GIDS clinic, and the continuing debate over single-sex spaces and school policies all form the backdrop against which her long historical view becomes legible. Jackson argues that conflating gender identity with sexual orientation has harmed the very communities the gay liberation movement was built to protect.
An activist with five decades of public engagement, she brings historical depth to a debate too often conducted without it — offering British listeners a genealogy of the present controversy that stretches far beyond the culture-war framing dominating much media coverage.
