Gary Powell is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group, the UK’s oldest conservative think-tank, and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California. He currently is, or has been, an occasional contributor to GB News, a writer for Conservative Home, a writer for Lesbian and Gay News, and a contributor to other publications in the UK and the USA.

A UK conservative political activist and a longstanding advocate for fair treatment for gay and lesbian people, Gary also campaigns for the global abolition of surrogacy.

Gary argues for respectful and accepting attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual people and also towards transsexual people who have been engaged in, or continue to be engaged in, a painful struggle with gender dysphoria and related social prejudice. However, he strongly opposes the modern western LGBT+ movement for its adoption of gender ideology, its failure to represent the mainstream gay community, its lack of respect for the rights of women, children, and people of religious faith, its aggressive attempts to silence and misrepresent even minor dissent from LGBT+ orthodoxy, and for its ever-increasing Eurocentric focus on the self-indulgence of identity politics when gay people still suffer very serious persecution in many parts of the world. 

He asserts the right of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to organise and meet independently, based on their shared minority characteristic of sexual orientation, and he rejects the very recent attempt to bolt gender identity politics on to the mainstream gay rights movement, given that gender identity is a completely different issue from sexual orientation. 

Gary founded a national campaign to improve justice for those who have been victims of local authority maladministration and argues for the abolition of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman as an organisation that is systemically biased against complainants. He founded Local Government Ombudsman Watch, an organisation that put pressure on the LGO and attempted to expose its bias to the public and the political establishment: an organisation that he ran for several years. He also served as a councillor in Buckinghamshire for six years. 

Gary graduated with First Class Honours from Oxford University, where his Philosophy tutors included the Rt Hon Baroness Mary Warnock, who first inspired his interest in the ethics of third-party reproduction. He is an original signatory of the Stop Surrogacy Now Statement and argues for a ban on all forms of surrogacy for all people, regardless of sexual orientation, because of the unacceptable risks and harm it involves, including the exploitation and commodification of women and children.