Ending Child Sacrifice

Contempt for Child Safeguarding: The 1970s and Today

Two recent events set me thinking about the months leading up to the formation of LGB Alliance. First, in January I received a brief, not unfriendly, message from someone with whom I’d had no contact since the summer of 2019, and who regretted that we had fallen out over “the trans issue.” The message out of the blue astonished me, not only because of the many years of estrangement, but also because it reflected such a profound misunderstanding of how and why we had “fallen out.”

Second, like many other people, I have been listening to the BBC Radio 4 series on the Paedophile Information Exchange (“In Dark Corners”) presented by Alex Renton. Having acquired the old list of names on PIE’s membership list from over 50 years ago, Renton focuses on some of their crimes and on the failure of the police to investigate them.

The following story contains an implicit warning: beware those who refer to “the trans issue.” It is almost invariably the wrong framing and disguises the real issues, which are primarily about child safeguarding, women’s rights, and LGB rights. And beware especially people who advocate for what they call the “bodily autonomy” of children. Today’s gender identity cult contains alarming echoes from the past. My own main concern is how to stop the past being repeated in circles that regard themselves as “progressive.” In order to do that, we need to look unflinchingly at that past.

Let’s start by revisiting 2019.

In April 2019 I was contacted by the late Andrew Lumsden, another veteran from the UK Gay Liberation Front. He told me a public-facing event was planned at LSE to mark the 49th anniversary of the founding of GLF. The panellists would include Stuart Feather, author of Blowing the Lid, a book on the history of GLF, and Eric Thompson, partner of the late Anthony Grey, one of the leading early gay rights campaigners in the UK, who helped achieve the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. Andrew asked me to join the panel: I was the only member of the original steering group of the UK Gay Liberation Front he was able to contact. My first reaction was to think it would be a good opportunity to add a gender-critical note to the celebratory atmosphere, but I also wondered if I was really welcome. I wrote back:

Dear Andrew

Nice to hear from you. Thanks for your invitation. On the one hand I love the idea. It would be great to meet up again after such a long time. On the other hand, I’m curious to know whether someone like me would still be welcome at such an event. I am a gender-critical feminist who believes that in the current climate, many kids who would otherwise grow up to become gay men or lesbians are being encouraged to “transition” instead. In other words, in some cases this transitioning is a kind of conversion therapy against gay and especially lesbian teenagers, as confirmed by several therapists who resigned from the Tavistock Clinic. …

I insist on protecting women’s sex-based rights and the right to same-sex relationships. I do not have a “gender identity” and regard the notion as subjective mumbo-jumbo based on outworn stereotypes.

I am not “transphobic” but do not accept that transwomen are women and believe that some spaces such as women’s shelters should be for biological women only. I also reject the idea of people born male taking part in women’s sport.

If all this doesn’t put you off, I’ll definitely try to come!

I look forward to hearing from you.

All the best,

Bev

Andrew put this warning to the LSE organizer, who replied that all was well: “From an LSE point of view we have to ensure free speech and the LSE academic we asked to chair [Hakan Seckinelgin] would have to allow any question to be asked …. Under our responsibilities as an HE institution, we don’t allow no platforming or shutting down of people’s arguments (unless they break the law, e.g. are obviously racist, incite to violence etc….)”

This seemed heartening so I happily agreed to take part. However, I objected to being the token woman on the panel. I made two suggestions for other participants: Elizabeth Wilson, another GLF veteran and one-time partner of the late Mary McIntosh, and Kate Harris, to whom I had just been introduced, and who had campaigned for years as a volunteer fundraiser for Stonewall. She had opted for Women’s Liberation rather than Gay Liberation in the 1970s and I thought that might open up an interesting discussion about the position of lesbians within the early gay rights movement. These suggestions were rejected. Instead, I was informed that Nettie Pollard had been invited to join the panel.

I knew Nettie Pollard superficially, though not from the 1970s – I had left the UK in 1971. I had met her in 2016, together with Andrew and Stuart. We went for drinks after the three of them came to listen to a talk I gave at Housmans’ socialist bookstore in London. I was promoting my book A Month with Starfish – about my work volunteering with refugees in Greece. At the pub, Pollard told me she was campaigning against the commercialization of Pride and against the organizers’ hypocritical acceptance of funding from British Aerospace, which supplied arms to homophobic Saudi Arabia – which it was using to bomb civilians in Yemen. These efforts struck me as wholly admirable. However, when she was invited onto a panel with me to discuss and celebrate GLF’s early history, I thought I’d better check to see what she had been up to in the 1970s.

My reaction to what I read is best summed up as: Whoah!! Just about anyone who spends one minute Googling Nettie Pollard will have the same reaction. A series of articles published in 2014, in media ranging from the BBC to the Daily Mirror, revealed that Pollard had been the key player in the infiltration of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) into sections of the UK Gay Liberation Front. As a member of GLF and a senior staff member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), the forerunner of today’s Liberty, she had forged ties that had endured for several years. I set about researching the issue myself to find out if the articles had misrepresented her or exaggerated her role. On the contrary, I found she had been on terms of friendship with the notorious pedophile Tom O’Carroll and had edited his book Paedophilia: the Radical Case for him.

From the Acknowledgments of Paedophilia: the Radical Case

I went to YouTube and found a recent (!) interview with Tom O’Carroll in which he described how he might have mutually satisfying masturbation sessions with 7-year-olds. This man, now nearly 80, continues to promote his sick ideas online. (I also discovered that he had joined the Labour Party in 2015 – had helped to canvas in a by-election – and had then been expelled the following year.)¹

I further discovered that in the 1990s – long after the feverish 1970s and its over-reaching liberationism, a period in which pedophiles persuaded some extraordinarily naïve people to support what they presented as “children’s rights” – Nettie Pollard had contributed a chapter to a book on pedophilia in which she advocated the complete abolition of the age of consent. This was an essay entitled “The Small Matter of Children,” which starts: “The British feminist movement has never really addressed the issue of children’s liberation.” It quotes many writers such as Gayle Rubin who had promoted similar ideas in the 1970s.

Armed with all this knowledge, I wrote to Pollard in June, confronting her with what I had found. I assumed she must now deeply regret these positions and asked her how she felt about what she had said and done, since the issue was bound to come up during the panel discussion. She wrote back cheerfully that she would answer my email but “I honestly think there is nothing to worry about.” My concerns deepened. I wrote back saying I didn’t understand and asked: “Why do you think there is nothing to worry about?” After that Nettie declined to answer. She corresponded only with Andrew Lumsden, who wrote to me that Nettie didn’t want any more discussions of PIE and that the accusations were part of a campaign by the right-wing media to smear Labour Party politicians. (This refers to Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt and their links to the NCCL.) He also assured me that Nettie “wouldn’t harm, or risk harm to, anyone unable to grasp the concept of consent, whether it was a child or an adult.”

And there you have it, still alive and well in the 21st century: the pernicious notion that children can “consent” to sex with adults. A notion that has been endorsed a number of times by Peter Tatchell. Nor do the LGBTQ+ establishment or the media seem bothered about the views expressed by Tatchell or Pollard. Tatchell is still a frequent guest on radio and TV programmes where he pontificates on issues such as women’s rights, and although Nettie Pollard is little known, she served on the board of the National Campaign for Homosexual Equality for decades – until it was wound down, in fact, in 2019. I will write about the implications of all this later on. It is an ugly chapter – or area – of gay rights history that should not be glossed over.

I spent days agonizing over the best way to proceed. I didn’t want to forego the opportunity to explain where I felt the LGBTQ+ rights movement was going wrong today, but neither did I want to besmirch the entire history of GLF. This was meant to be a celebration, and despite the dark chapter of PIE and its links to some branches of GLF, there was much to celebrate in the creation of the gay rights movement. Eventually I wrote to the event’s proposed moderator, Hakan Seckinelgin of LSE, setting out what I knew, how I proposed to distance myself from Pollard, and the disquieting similarities between the breakdown in child safeguarding in the 1970s and events such as those at the NSPCC in recent months.

Dear Hakan (if I may),

It is with a heavy heart that I disrupt your sabbatical on a difficult issue that cannot, I fear, wait until mid-September. My concern relates to the GLF event planned for 22 October and the composition of the panel.

As I understand it, the primary focus of the event is to be on the early years of GLF, partly in celebratory mode and partly looking critically at some aspects that have echoed down the decades, like the under-representation of women. But now another subject looms, which I fear threatens to overshadow the event altogether.

Until a few weeks ago, my only knowledge of Nettie Pollard was of her recent activism in trying to hold BAe to account for its hypocrisy in sponsoring Pride events while selling arms to Saudi Arabia with which to bomb Yemen. Not to mention Saudi Arabia’s appalling policies on gay people and women. These efforts struck me as wholly laudable.

When I heard she was to be invited onto the panel, which will be focusing on the early years of GLF, I Googled her name to see what role she had played in the 1970s. I was extremely disturbed by what I read. I double-checked and triple-checked, avoiding right-wing tabloids, to see if there had been some vile fake news campaign. According to all the sources I have found, Nettie was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and helped to earn this body some standing with the NCCL and one branch of Gay Liberation. Then I read her own chapter in a book published in 1993. There was no doubt. Nettie had herself believed in and promoted the “liberation” of the sexuality of children.

The 1970s were a turbulent era. I wrote to Nettie, asking how she now stood in relation to the events of the 1970s and her essay of 1993, and she declined to reply to my questions. I wrote again, urging her to respond, and she did not reply at all, instead asking a friend to reply. This friend expressed the view that the information found online reflected a right-wing plot to smear Labour and certain Labour MPs.

I find all this extremely troubling. The charge of paedophilia within the Gay Liberation movement has parallels with charges of antisemitism within the Labour party. On the one hand, it is absurd to insist that it is endemic, but it is equally absurd to pretend that it does not exist at all, or that it has been properly acknowledged and dealt with.

Indeed, the subject of boundaries and safeguarding is at present highly topical:

--Consider the question of the NSPCC worker who recently filmed himself masturbating in fetish gear in a toilet at the NSPCC and posted a picture of himself online, proudly mentioning where he was. When some people protested that this was outrageous and the man should be fired, others responded with cries of “homophobia.” It strikes me that it is in fact more homophobic to suggest that such behaviour is entirely the sort of thing that may be expected of a gay man.

--Then there is the case of eleven-year-old Desmond, who is all over the internet in his drag act. He is acclaimed as a wonderful star – “Desmond is Amazing.” But when Tom O’Carroll wrote online that Desmond was a “sexy kid” and it was fabulous to see him embracing his own sexuality, Desmond’s parents were outraged that a paedophile was looking at their son in a sexual way. Tom O’Carroll was the chairman of PIE, a former associate of Nettie’s. Indeed, Nettie helped to edit one of his books. In a YouTube interview conducted recently with Tom O’Carroll, which I have seen, he discusses the mutually satisfying masturbation sessions he might have with children aged 7 or 8. He has served two custodial sentences.

The question of paedophilia, and how to restore boundaries, is an issue that needs to be examined fearlessly. Is this the right occasion on which to do so? Such a discussion is likely to provoke a considerable amount of negative publicity, including on social media, which could end up overshadowing the main subject, the history of GLF.

Please understand my position. I am known (Twitter account @BevJacksonAuth) as an ardent feminist and lesbian activist seeking to combat lesbian erasure. My own views are also controversial within a section of the gay community. I oppose non-platforming, so I will not say that I refuse to take part in the panel alongside anyone who believes in abolishing the age of consent. But I will need to protect my reputation by making my own views on the subject perfectly clear if and when the topic is raised, either in the panel discussion or in the Q&A session.

I cannot solve this difficult problem. I simply offer it to you, in the hope that you can decide on the best course to take.

Kind regards,

Bev Jackson

Within an hour, the other panellists withdrew and the event was cancelled. To be clear, this was not the fault of Hakan Seckinelgin or of the LSE.

I sat in my home office in Amsterdam and gazed out at a barge passing by. Drunk-looking English people were singing out of tune. Then I stared back at my screen, rereading the message from Hakan Seckinelgin, which contained this passage:

“After an email regarding concerns about reputational damage raised by one of the panellists, we heard from the former members of the GLF, who had originally proposed this event, with a request for us to cancel the event. One panellist [I infer this was Pollard] has made it clear that they will stand down so that other issues do not overshadow the GLF event. In this event, another of the other panellists have made it clear that they will not attend this panel discussion if that panellist is not on the panel.”

Seckinelgin went on to propose that the public event be replaced by a private, “informal gathering” – which I had no wish to attend. It was clear that I was now persona non grata for having raised the problematic chapter in GLF’s history. You are not supposed to talk about it. One of the very few people to have asked difficult questions — decades ago — about the implicit or explicit tolerance for pedophilia expressed by some gay men in the early gay rights movement is the courageous journalist and women’s rights campaigner Julie Bindel, in her article “Gay men need to talk straight about paedophilia” (Guardian, 3 March 2001).² We need a wide discussion of this issue, as is constantly emphasized by my friend and colleague, the gay rights activist Malcolm Clark.³ If we do not talk about it, there is a danger that the mistakes of the past will be repeated. Some are already repeating them.

Once I had digested the news that the public-facing event was cancelled, I phoned Kate Harris and told her what had happened. There was to be no panel discussion about GLF at all. Still, I had already received my ticket from Amsterdam to London and thought I should use it. I said: “Why don’t we organize our own event on 22 October?” Kate was immediately elated: it was what she had been trying to organize for months. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all year!” I had a sudden feeling that I had taken a leap without looking very carefully what was below. That was certainly true. We held our meeting and LGB Alliance was born – into a tumultuous online welcome of support and gratitude – and of fierce abuse.

So when I suddenly received a New Year’s message from Nettie this year, regretting that we had fallen out over “the trans issue,” it came as a sharp reminder that many people in our society have completely failed to understand what divides LGB from TQ+, and why we had to found LGB Alliance. It is not about the “trans issue.” It is the sexist and homophobic “gender identity” doctrine itself, which has seeped into all parts of our society, the worst consequence of which is pediatric “gender transition.”

Just as in the false advocacy of “children’s rights” in the 1970s, today’s advocates for “children’s bodily autonomy” display either ignorance of, or contempt for, child safeguarding. The main victims of all this misguided activism are lesbian and to a lesser extent gay teenagers, who are being persuaded they need wrong-sex hormones to be their “true selves.” In 2019, Kate and I saw the “LGBTQ+” movement promoting this abuse and it galvanized us. We became determined to reclaim what was good about the gay rights movement. We were equally determined to fiercely oppose not just the bad elements of that movement, but the apathy and indifference that had allowed them – and still sometimes allow them – to flourish. That is our mission.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35597729

2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/03/gayrights.weekend7

3. See his X posts as @Twisterfilm and his Substack pieces as Malcolm Richard Clark: for instance https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-the-paedo-files.