Maeve Halligan's Cambridge Union Speech: This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community
My proposition speech at the Cambridge Union during the debate on Thursday 14.05.26
Full speech above (part of full debate video)
Transcript of the full speech:
I’m the founding president of the Cambridge University Society of Women; that’s a big part of how I decided to spend my time here. Thank you very much for the previous speeches.
I’d like to open by saying that somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.
I am not here to tell you that the original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was misguided. It wasn’t. I am not here to tell you that progress hasn’t been made. Happily, it absolutely has. I am here to tell you, though, that the activist movement that was built to protect gay and lesbian people has, in significant and measurable ways—and as my friend and cofounder [Serena Worley] just elucidated—abandoned lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.
After founding the society, I have been shouted at in the street. Dubbed a fascist. Spat at. Insulted for how I look. Contacted online with rape and death threats. You talk about hatred? I can tell you all about it: a woman trying to assert her sex-based rights and those of her peers gets abused for doing so. This is one of the many horrific logical impacts [and] conclusions of LGBTQ+ activism—a movement that has ‘lost its way’ at best.
Here’s something that shouldn’t be controversial: The Equality Act says sexual orientation means attraction to the same sex, the opposite sex, or both. The UK Supreme Court ruled last April that sex means biological sex. That is the law. It also happens to be the science. As my fellow speaker [Buck Angel] said earlier, same-sex attraction is about the reality that our bodies come in two types—whether you like it or not—male and female. And modern LGBTQ+ activism has spent the better part of a decade now, let’s be honest, trying to erase that fact—because if sex is real and is immutable, a whole lot of what they’ve been doing falls apart. Inconvenient, isn’t it?
[[Andrew Boff raises his hand to make a Point of Information. Maeve replies, “I’m going to make some progress first, thank you.]]
The focus and the funding within LGBTQ+ organisations have been shifting rapidly, and with very little democratic mandate from the communities they claim to represent. This shift is often away from gay and lesbian concerns and towards the nebulous TQ+. The whole point of having LGB lobby groups is to address the fact that gay people have specific needs or issues that are sometimes different from those of wider society. When you move the focus, you ignore those issues. As you [Alphonso David] mentioned rightly earlier, there are over 60 countries, most in the Global South, where homosexuality is still illegal. The parochial LGBTQ lobby here cares much more about pronouns and adding 57 letters to an acronym we’re all already stumbling over.
Andrew Boff: “we don’t want to [unintelligible]. Why would you make that assertion?”
Maeve: I’m not making an assertion about everybody; I’m saying that this is what’s happening more generally. If you’ll let me finish, please.
[[someone in the crowd says something unintelligible]]
Union president Jack Peters: No intervention without the speaker accepting.
To what you said earlier, Frannie [first floor speaker for the abstention], it is hyper-introspective. It is frustrating. There are bigger, real issues.
Even organising generally is being attacked—what you think would be quite a neutral thing to do. The registered charity LGB Alliance was founded by two lesbian women, both long-time, left-wing activists in this country. This is a group whose stated aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. And a murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organisations took them to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organising on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.
And that case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion—LGB Alliance in the UK, equivalent groups across Europe, South America, Australia, and beyond. When a community starts building these get-outs, ask what they’re escaping from.
So, what have the institutions been doing while their supposed beneficiaries were forming breakaway groups in protest? Let us take Stonewall: it was set up to advocate for LGBs, and added the T in 2015. Since then, it has done nothing but make outrageous demands based on its trans agenda. As my friend [Serena Worley] mentioned, it has literally run workshops for lesbians to unlearn their objection to male genitalia. In activist spaces, as she said, this is called breaking through the cotton ceiling. By analogy, just to make clear, with the glass ceiling: something to be smashed through. The organisation that marched for gay liberation is now running seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. I will let you decide what word you want to use for that. I’ll ask you directly: does ‘progressive’ come to mind?
Over 80% of males, by the way, let’s be clear: over 80% of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. And the movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced. When you ask how modern activism—modern activism—fails its community, you could start right there.
And let’s briefly talk about children. The Cass Review was published in 2024. It’s the first authoritative independent review of paediatric gender medicine ever conducted in the world and accepted as such by every medical organisation in this country. Its findings were depressingly and entirely predictable—if you had been paying attention.
The Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS) at the Tavistock—for years the flagship institution of gender-affirming care for young people in the UK— has been closed down. It was closed because it was harming children. Not metaphorically. Physically, psychologically, and irreversibly. Between 60 and 80 percent of the young people referred to GIDS were same-sex attracted. Sixty to eighty percent. A cohort of children who, in an earlier era before this “modern activism”, would very likely have grown up to be gay or lesbian. But they were instead placed on a medical pathway involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and—in some cases—surgeries. This was because they didn’t necessarily conform to archaic, empty, sex-based stereotypes, like how they dressed or wore their hair, toys they played with, friends they made.
And clinicians who raised concerns—by the way, who tried to do their jobs—they were marginalised. Whistleblowers reported a culture in which questioning a child’s self-identified gender was treated as a safeguarding failure rather than a safeguarding duty. They had a very, very dark joke that one of the whistle blowers reported: at the rate referrals were going, “there would be no gay people left.” And that’s not some kind of conspiracy theory. This is testimony from clinicians working inside the institution that was then closed down.
**Addressing the disrupting opposition** I know that’s inconvenient for you to hear. And if you still doubt what I’m saying, google ‘Kira Bell’ and read her story, and the stories of many detransitioners like her, and then insult them by pretending that the regret rate is low.
Before the availability and normalisation of puberty blockers, by the way, the vast majority of kids—in every single study, no matter how large or small showed this—the vast majority of kids with gender dysphoria grew out of it well before adulthood.
And what was the ideological infrastructure sustaining all of this? Well, Stonewall crops up again, and its school guidance was enforcing the idea that “transwomen are women; trans men are men” and presents it to children as established fact—lying to them and compelling them to repeat it, or face accusations of transphobic bullying. The Education Act 1996 explicitly prohibits the political indoctrination of children in schools. Stonewall’s guidance, on any honest reading, crosses that line.
And school libraries: materials recommended by these same organisations—sitting on shelves in British schools right now—instructing children how to use adult hookup applications. How to bind their breasts without telling their parents. How to source and self-administer cross-sex hormones in secret, without medical supervision, alone. Children’s education becomes a delivery mechanism for guidance on making irreversible changes to their bodies — behind closed doors, away from the adults who love them. And don’t—don’t you dare object. When parents raise safeguarding objections, they are routinely characterised by “activist” organisations as “homophobes” or “transphobes”. And it’s a remarkable manoeuvre, maybe even wily: make the protection of children synonymous with bigotry, and watch very reasonable people go quiet.
In Canada, therapists are already legally prohibited from questioning a child’s gender self-ID; they may only affirm. We heard this week that the UK may follow. Think about what that means, just for a sec. A clinician who pauses—who asks whether a child might simply be gay, might simply need time—is now being framed as a “conversion therapist”. The child’s perceived transness trumps medical judgment and parental consent. It trumps the child’s own safety.
And who profits from all of this? Well, there is an entire industry here of NGOs and charities that are making money on HR advice and EDI. And also, the people who prescribe. One person who profits is in this room: Helen Webberley.
She has a private medical practice that’s no longer registered in this country but moved first to Spain and then to Singapore. Gender GP, as it’s called, has been named in several court cases for providing substandard and inappropriate care. In my opinion, that makes her a completely untrustworthy source on this topic.
**Audience member Demitri Rodriguez requests a Point of Information. Maeve accepts.
“I’ve worked with Helen Webberley, on a personal level as well, and I will say that woman is nothing but a grifter who is overcharging a lot of trans people in this country for trans healthcare.” Helen Webberley, a speaker for the opposition, tries to interrupt. Rodriguez continues, “I will say this to categorize—please let me finish. To get to the point: I will say this as a whole, as a trans person who is [sitting] here, she is why this motion is in place, because activism has failed us—”
Maeve replies, “Thanks.”
Rodriguez continues, “—and people in position of power like her act like they’re more important than us.”
Jack Peters, President of the Union, clarifies, “If the speaker has shut down the Point of Information [it’s] back to the speaker.”**
Look, I’ll finish: What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.
I want to say something to the many of you who I expect will probably disagree with me. I do not think you are bad people; of course I don’t. I think you’ve been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line— and it’s a line in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalise gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is, in fact, a girl.
There’s no serious activism happening in these institutions, as I’ve unpacked. There’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, regressive demands dressed up as “virtue”. And there are children—very likely to grow up same-sex attracted, questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.
It’s not bigotry to notice; I don’t care what you say to me. It’s not cruelty to object to it. It’s not backwards to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.
Be brave. Let yourself question the narrative you’re being fed. Don’t tell me to “be kind” if being kind involves lying to and medicalising kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard fought-for rights, and hurling threats at those who object. Again, hatred, you talk about it—try being a woman who knows what one of those are. I’ll tell you about hatred.
No, I don’t subscribe to this ‘kindness’ and I’ll tell the truth instead. I propose this motion. Be brave and support it as well. Thank you.
Many thanks to Audrey Stephen for this transcription.