[scroll to read the full letter]

As organisations, queer and trans performers, and members of the Cambridge community, we call on Cambridge Pride to act on the five demands made by Trans Liberation Cambridge, ORCA for Environmental Liberation, and Cambridge for Palestine on 2nd April 2025, in the email whose text is reproduced below, to ensure that the event honours its roots instead of providing pinkwashing for its sponsors and corporate participants.

We believe that Pride in the imperial core must not come at the expense of migrants, refugees, colonised peoples or those in current and former colonies bearing the brunt of catastrophic climate change; that it must not allow rainbow-adorned photo opportunities to institutions that don't value trans lives or joy; that it must remember its history and reject systematically racist policing. These demands are as follows:

1. Reject sponsorship from the University of Cambridge.
2. Reject sponsorship from companies with military ties.
3. Do not permit the Labour Party to participate in the event.
4. No cops at Pride.
5. Queer-friendly anti-racist security.

We expand upon these demands below.

1. Reject sponsorship from the University of Cambridge.
As we're sure you'll be aware, the university recently sought a shocking injunction preventing the protest of its complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza—after it reneged on all of the commitments it made to the students, faculty, staff and community members of the Cambridge for Palestine encampment last year—covering many university properties and lasting five years.

A reduced version of the injunction was granted, lasting four months and covering the areas of the university used for graduations and most frequently visited by tourists. This clearly demonstrates that the university will unabashedly stifle peaceful protest in favour of maintaining its public profile.

The Cambridge for Palestine encampment last year was set up to demand that the university investigate and disclose its investments in so-called "defense" companies and other corporations recognised by the BDS movement as complicit in apartheid and genocide in Palestine, and take action to divest as swiftly as possible. It also highlighted an urgent need for the university to cease its research and academic collaborations with organisations complicit in the genocide.

After the encampment persisted for more than 100 days in protesting and raising awareness of the university's complicity, the university promised to enter dialogue with a taskforce from the encampment. Since then it has not only failed to follow through on any of its commitments but also, as noted above, acted to criminalise further protest of its contentment to abet genocide.

israel offers queer Palestinians equality only in the form of indiscriminate displacement, injury, bereavement and death. israel is known to target queer Palestinians with threats of outing them in order to force them into acting as informants; this serves to further stigmatise queerness in Palestine due to the association between queerness and collaboration with the settler-colonial regime.

israel spends the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars on its pinkwashing campaign, where it seeks to uphold its reputation as a progressive state through marketing itself as a gay paradise, rather than by affording even basic rights to the Palestinians whose land it colonises. We recall the disgust we felt when the infamous image of an israeli soldier holding a pride flag amidst the rubble and destruction in Gaza was posted by the state of israel to Instagram.

We refuse to let the University of Cambridge use its sponsorship of Pride as its own pinkwashing campaign while it supports a genocidal regime.

In addition, March 2025 also marks a year since the university claimed to be pausing its ties to fossil fuel companies. It has yet to divest. Instead it continues to collaborate with major polluters: recently they hosted a "Nature Action" conference and invited Drax (the UK's biggest carbon emitter), mining companies Teck and Anglo-American, IPIECA (an oil and gas lobby group), and Aviva (whom we're delighted you dropped as a sponsor a couple of years back), among others, to discuss sustainability—an obvious greenwashing project.

Their careers service platforms more mining and fossil fuels companies, including those will well-documented human rights violations, plus Barclays, a BDS target.

We note that your ethical sponsorship and partnership policy rightly includes a clause stating that the charity would have significant concern over partnering with "companies with a poor reputation or track-record for ethical sponsorship or cause-related marketing, including green washing and pink washing". We ask you to recognise that the University of Cambridge is guilty of both greenwashing and pinkwashing and on those grounds reject any offer of sponsorship from them. We also ask that the university is not offered a stall at the festival, or a presence in the parade.

It's also relevant that some years ago the university very quietly dropped out of the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme. This isn't documented anywhere and it appears the uni didn't bother even to inform their HR department: multiple TLC members took a job which had the programme's kitemark in 2021, and only later discovered that this was actually dishonest as the uni was no longer part of the programme. One of these members guesses that the uni left in around 2017-2018.

We are not great supporters of Stonewall or of that particular programme, but the reasoning for leaving the programme apparently had to do with Stonewall being a non-politically-neutral group that exerted "ideological control" within the university; i.e. the university felt that Stonewall's influence stifled "debate" around queer and trans issues.

Later attempts to persuade the university to rejoin the programme failed, for reasons including that the uni was unhappy with Stonewall's stance of not entirely embracing the Cass Review. While the University was happy to bypass all of its own administrative processes to silently drop Stonewall, it weaponised all of these when it came to the fight to reinstate membership, a process that took well over a year to achieve.

Finally, fairly recently and of course entirely without fanfare, the university rejoined the programme—though people who had fought for this to happen were not made aware.

2. Reject sponsorship from companies with military ties.
Your sponsorship and partnership policy states that you will not accept sponsorship from companies in the arms sector. However one of your sponsors last year was the Marshall Group.

Front and centre when you open their website is a banner advertising that they have been licensed as a maintenance centre for Lockheed Martin C-130Js, military transport aircraft (the Royal Air Force no longer uses these, but a number of those they formerly owned alarmingly appear to have been acquired by Türkiye, and other C-130Js are owned by the israeli and US Air Forces). Other scrolling banners announce that they are "Delivering for the US Marine Corps" and "Supporting military (...) personnel". It appears fairly clear that they are heavily involved in the arms sector.

We ask that you review sponsorship offers more carefully and reject any coming from companies participating in the arms trade, and that you refuse stalls or parade participation to these companies too. Whether or not they are welcoming places for queer and trans people to work, they profit from perpetuating mass violence around the world. We feel strongly they should not have the opportunity to soften their image by slapping their logo on a list of Pride sponsors.

3. Do not permit the Labour Party to participate in the event.
It is abundantly obvious that the Labour Party enacts harm against trans people by using us as political pawns, through the puberty blocker ban, by doubling down on the transphobic prison allocation guidance, by dropping their pledge to introduce self-ID, and by kowtowing to transphobic talking points; the Labour Party should be excluded from all Pride events on this basis.

However they have also recently shown their willingness to throw disabled people under the bus with their plans for PIP cuts and other cruel welfare reforms; to neglect the elderly by scrapping most winter fuel payments; to further ostracise refugees and migrants by boasting of their prowess in deporting "illegal immigrants" in unbranded, Reform-style Facebook adverts; and to continue to materially support the israeli genocide of Palestinians.

Labour is not a party that values queer, trans, poor, disabled, elderly, migrant, refugee or Palestinian lives or joy. They should not be afforded the opportunity to pretend otherwise. We do not want to see them or their branding at Pride.

4. No cops at Pride.
We don't need to point out to you that Pride originated as a commemoration of a riot against police violence against trans and gender-nonconforming racialised people, many of whom sex workers, in the US.

We would like to note that non-binary people are not explicitly recognised in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which puts them at risk in police interactions, and that police can ignore stated preferences concerning gendered treatment in custody. Trans people are discriminated against in the NHS and many only have access to life-saving medication through private prescriptions or via DIY routes which might be withheld if they were detained by the police.

While our local police may seem friendly enough to white gays, those of us who have been involved in local copwatch organising know about their habit of victimising young Black people, and a cursory websearch turns up numerous results about recent racism in the Cambridgeshire police force.

The police also often accompany immigration enforcement officers—we've noticed a marked increase in the number of removals of our neighbours and community members recently—meaning their presence makes Pride, which should be a safe space for all, an unsafe event for people with precarious immigration status, as well as Black people, other racialised people and Travellers.

We want to see Pride events honour their roots and ask that you stop inviting cops to police the event, hold a stall or recruit.

5. Queer-friendly anti-racist security.
Security guards also often bring their prejudices to their work, endangering for example racialised and Traveller community members. We ask that you carefully check the queer-friendly and anti-racist record of any security hired for the event, perhaps considering a queer-led company like Safe Only, and ensure that the aim of security presence is welfare, de-escalation and harm reduction rather than aggressive or punitive measures.

We would like you to encourage community accountability by inviting copwatchers to monitor security and listening to their feedback, as the organisers of Strawberry Fair agreed to last year after hired security acted in racist and heavy-handed ways in previous years, and also since the police may be present even if uninvited.

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As signatories of this letter, we commit to the following until Cambridge Pride acts upon the above demands:

Organisations
As signatory organisations, we commit not to hold a stall, participate in the parade or publicise Cambridge Pride.

Performers and artists
As signatory performers and artists, we commit not to perform at, hold a stall at, attend or publicise Cambridge Pride.

Other community members
As signatories, we commit not to attend Cambridge Pride events, donate to Pride, volunteer with Pride or publicise Pride.

We believe in the power of Pride to bring the community together in joy and resistance. We look forward to Cambridge Pride engaging with the community it is organised for to build an inclusive event guided by a commitment to the liberation and joy of all.

The list of signatories is available here.