I watched the Cambridge Union debate from May 14th, 2026 on the theme:
‘This House Believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community’.
An introduction to me: I read history at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1983-6, coming out of the closet half way through my final year – and still somehow managing to graduate despite spending much time in the Burleigh Arms gay pub in town from there on. I moved to London after graduating and have been part of the London LGBTQ+ community here for 40 years – enjoying the diversity of the London scene -drag, leather, discos, art, activism and the sexual underworld, participating in Pride parades, anti-Section 28 marches, equal age of consent protests etc.
I was diagnosed HIV+ in 1990 and lived with full blown AIDS from 1995-8, a period in which my body became sick and weak but my spirit came alive. I had been atheist since the age of 12 (and my study of history had affirmed me in that stance as so much conflict has arisen due to religion), but as I prepared myself to die I applied my historian mind to the subject of humanity’s wisdom traditions, and, as I discovered the deeper mystery that the modern world keeps us blind to, I surrendered myself to the spiritual path – a path I had really known nothing about despite my ‘high class’ education. I dropped my atheistic materialist mindset and entered into the paradigm of consciousness, appreciating now that humanity is on a spiritual evolution, one that is severely held back by the wool that has been well and truly pulled tight over most people’s eyes, especially I would say in academic circles.
It took a few years to rebuild strength post AIDS, during that time I went to nature for healing – met queer pagans and found the global tribe of Radical Faeries, a group that has been exploring the deeper spiritual nature of queerness since the 1970s. Since 2005 I have also been adding to the cauldron of LGBTQ+ community activities in the form of hosting queer spiritual and radical faerie events – gatherings, retreats, a monthly full moon meetup in London for drumming and dancing (the Queer Spirit Circle, in Vauxhall) and as one of the organisers of Queer Spirit Festival, a 5 day camping festival where hundreds gather to celebrate the spirituality and creativity of LGBTQ+ people from all the world’s cultures.
I watched the Cambridge Union debate with fascination, captivated from the start by the fact that the first speaker was Buck Angel, whom I remember rising to fame as a ground-breaking trans porn performer in the 1990s – the Man with a Pussy. 63 now, Buck rocked up in Cambridge Union dinner suit drag with black bow tie, slightly portly and totally fatherly in his demeanour. Despite his pioneering role, Buck has detractors in the transgender community because of his view that a trans person does not actually ‘change’ their sex – he agrees with the biological determinist view that sex is fixed, but gender is subjective, variable. So he disagrees with the proclamation that ‘Trans Women are Women’, upsetting those who feel this is important to emphasise. LOOK HOW LANGUAGE IS DIVIDING US – where is the understanding that all labels are superficial and limited in their usefulness?
Buck celebrated the achievements of the community over the decades but lays into modern LGBTQ+ activism, mocking our ever expanding alphabet and claiming we are losing what we gained because mainstream people do not like having transness thrust into their world. He feels that that young people questioning their gender are all too easily swept up in a medical process, when many of them are more going through a psychological journey. He speaks of the medical establishment making money from encouraging gender transition, but I think that does not apply in the UK as it might in the USA, if it’s real at all. So he agrees with the ban on puberty blockers for young people, but did not address the suicides of those trans or questioning teenagers who have been denied them.
I think Buck’s transition to male patriarch is complete. He has become the angry old man shouting at the kids for doing it wrong. Instead of grasping the deeper message of diversity and inclusivity, of exploration and discovery, that the queer alphabet represents he just mocks it. I wonder how the Two Spirits (native American shamanic queers), whose 2S is now often added in America to the list, feel about that. The expanding alphabet has made room for this spiritual aspect of queer nature to enter the picture, but this aspect has not yet made it to the Cambridge Union. Despite declaring that gay men have supported him over the years more than other trans people, Buck wants the LGB (sexual orientation) to be separated from the TQ+ (which he says are about identity), forgetting that the reason we have always been together (eg at Stonewall Inn) is because the hetero-patriarchy has long been excluding, persecuting, dominating us all. We are more visible now and finding more ways to define ourselves, why object to this? I embrace it. I would argue our movement is not really about sexuality or gender – our movement is about all people being free to live and love in the ways they feel natural to them. The Witches Creed – And it Harm None, Do What Thou Wilt – could be the motto of our movement, and it would be appropriate if it was as, unknown I think to the academics of Cambridge, in pre-Christian cultures across the world queer people were seen as having spiritual gifts – whether same sex inclined or gender-variant it was their inner androgyny that set the queer apart and even gave them special status.
The nearest sign of the core spirituality of our nature during the debate came from the floor when a self-defined NON-BINARY student spoke up about their personal experience of gender transition as a young person. Born in a female body, they did not seem traumatised by their time living as a male – in fact they seemed glad to have tried it and discovered ‘I made a terrible man’ – and how seemed happy to identify as NB, ie androgynous as cultures have called such people since ancient times. Where is the understanding that all living things are a blend of masculine and feminine energies – that’s how it works – as reflected in the Yin-Yang symbol and declared in the Tao Te Ching of China, in Shiva-Shakti principle of Hinduism and in ancient European philosophies too, eg the Hermetic Texts include this fundamental ‘law of gender’. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”—The Kybalion. I will return to this.
Back to the speakers:
Those supporting the motion that ‘modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community’ included Alphonso David, an American civil rights attorney and President and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. He pointed out that homosexuality is still criminalised in 60 countries around the world, countries that receive plenty of inward investment from western companies, highlighted the deaths of trans people around the world and the high rate of HIV among black gay Americans – and from these facts declared that modern LGBTQ+ activism is not serving its community. I agree with him. LGBTQ+ people are arguing amongst ourselves about who should be in the community, about flags and pronouns and failing completely to stand together as a force for continuing liberation around the world. I would love to see this change.
However I did not resonate at all with the third principle contributor supporting the theme. Maeve Halligan, founding president of the Cambridge Uni Society of Women. “Somewhere along the way, recently, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem,” was her opening gambit. Claiming the activist movement has ‘abandoned’ gay people Maeve presented a biological determinist view of sex and gender, criticising the LGBTQ movement for trying to convince people that biology is not real. She gets upset about workshops offered to lesbians interested in learning about male genitalia (at Queer Spirit we have had the same, and also workshops about the cunt aimed at gay men and these have been popular – plus nobody is forcing anyone to do a workshop!), and believes most who transition male to female are actually heterosexual men who are seeking sex with lesbians – plus she feels that telling children about the existence of trans people damages gay and lesbian children. Watching her was quite exhausting.
Speaking against the motion, Andrew Boff, a 67 year old London Assembly Member and Patron of LGBT+ Conservatives, applauded the achievements of LGBTQ+ activism and celebrated the diversity of our community, calling on all parts to work together and seeing discord in the community not as a sign of failure but as an indication of how much freer to express ourselves we are now, compared to the dark times he grew up in. Andrew argued that we must work together because the cause of our rights can go backwards as well as forwards.
Sammy McDonald, a history student and previous Union president, spoke against the motion from the same perspective – highlighting the many transphobic headlines in the press and their similarity to homophobic reports of the 1980s. Sammy is a gay man who knows he is lucky to live in a time when he is not condemned as a pervert and feels it is important to stand in solidarity with trans people because of the many forces lined up against them (such as Trump’s election campaign spending $220million on transphobic advertising). “ If you endorse this motion you endorse the view a backward notion that those who are victims of this rising hatred are the ones responsible.”
Dr Helen Webberley was the third speaker opposing the motion. Dr Webberley works with people going through gender transition. It was a relief to hear her speak about internal gender identity out of alignment with the physical body being a natural thing, not a disorder or illness. Also that she explained that biology is not as simple as xx chromosomes = female identification and xy = male, nature is more variable than that, and spoke of the massive harm being suffered by people who are attacked for not fitting the expected mould. However, while agreeing that one’s sex cannot fundamentally be changed she is at the same time arguing for trans women to be accepted as women. Again here I believe language and labels are dividing and damaging the cause.
This Cambridge Union debate affirmed what I already knew – that the intellgentsia of the western world are stuck in a blind alley of their own making, created by the arrogance of previous generations and maintained by a system that is threatened by its dissolution. The university system supports the continuation of our spiritually bereft, materialist culture by educating the future leaders of the land before they are mature enough to grasp the bigger, spiritual, picture (which I think for most comes in their late 20s with the Saturn return), and then locking them into a system that keeps them working and bringing up children, so with no time to grow into the soul’s awareness. My gayness – and my working class critique of the pampered middle and upper classes and the system they maintain – saved me from the trap. HIV gave me cause to question the purpose of my life and the stories I’d been told about life’s meaning, or lack thereof. It moved me to explore my inner self – through to the root of my consciousness – and who did I meet there? The divine feminine aspect of my soul.
Back in the 1950s, psychologist Blanche M Baker, was quoted in the pioneering queer publication, ONE magazine in the USA: “It is regrettable that all too many people think of sex in terms of an absolute dichotomy: men are male and women are female. Only a very little observation reveals that all of us are varying mixtures of maleness and femaleness both physically and psychologically.”
“…all of us are bisexual in both our physical and mental constitution. When this bi-sexuality is highly developed, at least on the psychic plane, you have the makings of a mystic,” wrote gay witch and activist Leo Martello, writing in the early 1970s and using bisexuality to mean both male and female, bi-gendered. The Witch of Gay Liberation – rainbow messenger
In fact this is a basic principle that has long been honoured around the world and is known in European esoteric traditions also: The Hermetic Principle teaches that on the physical plane each person has a male or female physical body, however on the spirit and mind planes each person is androgynous with male and female qualities. “What, you say that God has both sexes, Trismegistus?” “Yes, Asclepius, and not God alone but all beings animate and vegetable.”
It is from this principle that our discussions around gender should begin.
In Buddhism, anatta is the teaching of no self; it states that nothing conditional can be pointed to as being who or what you are. It accepts that no aspect of being can be identified with in any kind of continuous, independent sense, so gender itself is a veil through which our deeper nature manifests.
Hindu sages have long taught that the soul is genderless, that everything in creation results from the interplay of masculine and feminine energies, and everything material is in fact a manifestation of shakti, the feminine power of the universe, including gender itself. Hinduism views the mind and body as the energy of Prakriti, the female spirit, and the soul as Purusha, the male aspect. Deep inside, we are all seen to be the same indivisible, indistinguishable, imperishable and eternal Brahman, who is extolled in the Vedas as the One without a second. Hindu teachings recognise that gender is not permanent, that we all incarnate over time as male, female or transgender due to karmic and cosmic reasons.
One of India’s most prominent gurus, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, the ‘hugging mother,’ teaches “Whether woman or man, one’s real humanity comes to light only when the feminine and masculine qualities within one are balanced.”
In fact the very first book of the Old Testament tells us that God created humans ‘male and female in his image’ – this is generally taken to mean two separate sexes, whereas it is actually a reference of the Principle of Gender, that all things contain both male and female energy, that is how creation works.
Science has tried to make Creation fit into neat, tidy, boundaried boxes. But life is more fluid and flexible than that. Science seeks understanding by examination of the material. Spirituality teaches us how to examine the inner world, the immaterial – how to explore our own consciousness. Resulting from the mix of religious and scientific prejudice over such a long time, there is now a ‘war’ underway over gender definition, but this war is a false war, keeping firmly in place the paradigm of separation and division, whereas the explosion in trans exposure, confidence and awareness happening in the world is really a sign that we as a species are ready to move on, to grow in understanding, as well as in acceptance and celebration of the magnificent diversity of the human race. At the root of the matter we are all the emanation of blissful, creative, divine consciousness. The goal, as Hinduism puts it, is not enlightenment or salvation, but Self-realisation – discovering, uncovering, making real the divinity within. THE SPIRITUAL VIEW OF GENDER – rainbow messenger
This is what LGBTQ+ activism should address in my opinion – the fact that we are all human, all equal at the core, all deserving of love, all here to live freely as the fullness of our unique individuality within the whole. This is what LGBTQ+ people teach the world.
I am an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival, where lesbians, gay men, bi and trans people, and our friends and allies, gather to recognise nature, divinity, love, spirit in each other, in nature, in all beings.
LGBTQ+ — our opportunity is to recognise the validity, the beauty, the creativity, the divinity within each other. In this we teach the world how to celebrate difference, revel in diversity and create a more harmonious world. But there is a danger we will fall into the trap of divide and conquer, a consciousness programme that has been playing out on this planet for a very long time. We are the ones who can break that pattern. Queer people are born in every race, culture, class – we are born to be mediators, healers, community builders, barrier breakers. We are bearers of subject:SUBJECT consciousness – subject:SUBJECT – rainbow messenger
There is a fundamental error in the western mindset – the belief in division and separateness. This is the paradigm that is destroying the world. Queer people, with our global interconnected web of community, have the potential to change the world, if we realise the bigger picture we can shift the paradigm. Historically queer people have often been spiritual functionaries for their communities – it is time for us to reclaim these roles and discover what they can mean for us in the world today. It starts simply with respecting, honouring, listening to, learning from, recognising our commonalities – with each other.
rainbow messenger 