Last week, University of Cambridge student Maeve Halligan delivered a speech at the Cambridge Union in support of the motion, “This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community.” According to Maeve, a movement built to protect gay and lesbian people has not only abandoned them by shifting its focus toward trans ideology, but is now actively harming vulnerable children by pushing them toward irreversible medical procedures.
The subject is one of the most fraught of our time—and it is one we’ve covered extensively in our pages, from Jonni Skinner’s firsthand account of the permanent damage done to him by youth gender transition to Jamie Reed’s whistleblower account from inside a pediatric gender clinic. After years in which many institutions treated skepticism of gender medicine as heresy, more voices have gradually begun challenging that consensus. Maeve’s is one of them. Below is an edited version of her remarks. —The Editors
Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.
The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.
After founding the Cambridge University Society of Women—the only single-sex women’s organization at Cambridge, advocating women’s sex-based rights—I have been shouted at in the street, dubbed a fascist, spat at, insulted for my appearance, and contacted online with rape and death threats. You want to talk about hatred? I can tell you all about it: A woman trying to assert her sex-based rights gets abused for doing so. This is one of the many predictable consequences of LGBTQ+ activism—a movement that has lost its way.
