The End of the Gay Rights Revolution?

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The End of the Gay Rights Revolution?

Ronan McCrea - Beyond Gender #59

Feb 05, 2026

Ronan McCrea is a Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College London. His latest book The End of the Gay Rights Revolution (Polity Books, November 2025) makes the case that the gay rights movement is undermining its own achievements through overreach. McCrea is a gay man who grew up in Dublin in the 1990s.

McCrea’s central argument, which he walks through in the conversation, is that the current level of gay rights is unprecedented and not guaranteed to last. The movement, he believes, has bought into an “end of history” assumption that progress only moves in one direction. Gay rights, in his telling, were never an independent achievement but a side effect of the straight sexual revolution. He compares the situation to Estonian independence. Estonians fought hard, but Estonia was never going to be free unless the USSR collapsed. Rather than consolidating those gains, the movement expanded its demands. He sees the shift from LGB to LGBTQ+ as a major misstep, turning what was a request for a modest tweak into a demand to rewrite all norms around sex, family, and gender on an ongoing basis.

The book opens with a story McCrea tells in detail here. At thirteen, he was working as a ball boy at a charity tennis event in Dublin when the French player Henri Leconte publicly mocked him for appearing effeminate, getting the crowd to laugh along. The next day, the liberal Irish Times reported it as a good-natured event. The shift in attitude since then has been fast, but McCrea argues it is fragile. London is now the most anti-gay region of the UK, according to research by the Theos think tank, which McCrea links to demographic change. He references Olivier Roy’s work on second-generation immigrants and religious identity, and Sarfraz Manzoor’s book They.

The conversation covers what McCrea sees as the movement’s reluctance to be honest about gay male sexual culture. He brings up the 2022 mpox outbreak and draws on Tony Judt’s argument about how accumulated small lies eventually discredit the larger cause. He references Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots, Thomas Nagel’s writing on privacy, and Louise Perry’s work on sex and gender differences.

McCrea discusses why he believes the gay rights claim and the trans rights claim are fundamentally different. The gay claim, he says, is a claim to be left alone, while the trans claim is a claim to recognition.

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Ronan McCrea