Jacob Breslow

Jacob Breslow participated in queer youth activism for almost a decade prior to beginning his PhD, which led him to study #MeToo, homonationalism, and incarceration.[4] Dr Beslow soon became an expert on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them, including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements.[1][3]

A former trustee of the transgender children's charity Mermaids, Breslow is an active critic of gender critical and transphobic rhetoric, giving a January 2022 lecture at the University of Cambridge entitled "‘Sex is Real,’ and other Gender Critical Non Sequiturs: A TERF Grammar Book".[5][6] However, he quit Mermaids a year later when gender critical activists publicized that he had spoken at a conference as a first-year graduate student in 2011 that was organized by B4U-ACT, an organization that provides support to paedophiles.[7][8] However, after Dr Breslow was placed under independent investigation by the LSE in 2022,[9] the School stated in January 2023 that, "The independent investigator found that there was no basis for the School to take action against the individual."[10]

Dr Breslow released a statement on 6 October 2022 regarding his participation in the B4U-ACT conference when he was an early PhD student:

"I unequivocally condemn child sexual abuse. My work is about protecting marginalised children and young people, not exposing them to harm.

It was my understanding in 2011 that B4U-ACT was an organisation that promotes treatments to prevent offending by paedophiles. I believed at the time that the purpose of the conference was to enable better treatments and interventions that prevent harm to children. I would not have attended the symposium otherwise. I have not been affiliated with B4U-ACT since.

I decided to resign as a Trustee of Mermaids as I did not want to distract from the good work the charity is doing to help transgender and gender diverse children."[10][11]

A graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies familiar with Dr Breslow's work further stated,

"Jacob’s research, from what I understand, touches upon childhood, sexuality … but [it] also touches upon trans and queer identitities. And I think people made that association way too fast because from what I understand, there is no evidence that anything this man wrote is pro-paedophile."[11]

Mermaids remains the subject of investigation by the Charity Commission for alleged safeguarding failures.[7][12]

• Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child. University of Minnesota Press. 2021.