Ronan McCrea
Constitutional law professor and author
Ronan McCrea is Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College London and author of The End of the Gay Rights Revolution. His argument — that the legal foundations of gay rights cannot simply be transplanted to trans activism — carries particular force in Britain, where the Equality Act, conversion therapy legislation, and the aftermath of the Cass Review all hang in the balance.
Ronan McCrea is Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College London's Faculty of Laws, where his research spans the intersection of law, religion, and human rights. His book The End of the Gay Rights Revolution advances a challenge now urgent in British policy circles: that the legal reasoning which secured equality for lesbian and gay people rests on specific principles — around immutability, privacy, and the absence of third-party harm — that do not straightforwardly apply to contemporary trans rights claims.
For British listeners, this is far from abstract. The Equality Act 2010 protects sexual orientation and gender reassignment as separate characteristics, and McCrea's analysis illuminates why courts and tribunals have repeatedly found tension between them — from single-sex service exemptions to employment disputes. His argument also sharpens the conversion therapy debate: banning practices targeting LGB people commands broad political consensus, but extending that ban to cover gender identity raises very different legal and philosophical questions, ones that the Cass Review's insistence on evidence-based care makes harder to sidestep.
McCrea argues that the merger of LGB with TQ+ advocacy may paradoxically weaken the protections that decades of litigation built. The absorption of gay rights organisations into a broader gender-identity movement, he contends, risks trading durable legal reasoning for a less stable politics of identity. For a British audience still processing the closure of the Tavistock clinic and the wholesale reshaping of NHS gender services, that warning is timely.
He joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman for the Beyond Gender episode The End of the Gay Rights Revolution? (5 February 2026), examining what the fracturing of the LGB–TQ+ coalition means for equality law, conversion therapy policy, and rights-based argument in Britain and beyond.
