UPT PEACE ASSESSMENT
When Inclusion Is Contested: Is It Better to Show Up or Walk Away?
Can visibility create more opportunities for peace than withdrawal?
Case Study: Gay Games XII, Valencia, Spain, 2026
UPT Peace Lab | 18 October 2026
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1. Assessment Statement
Imagine planning one of the world’s biggest celebrations of LGBTQIA+ inclusion, only to discover that some of the very people you’re celebrating don’t want to be involved.
Welcome to the controversy surrounding the 2026 Gay Games in Valencia, Spain.
When political disagreements threatened the event, some LGBTQIA+ organisations withdrew their support. Others believed that continuing the Games was more important than ever.
Both approaches raised an interesting question: When our values are challenged, does peace benefit more from standing our ground, walking away, or finding another way altogether?
This assessment explores what happens when people who want similar things choose very different ways of achieving them.
2. Assessment Overview
The Valencia Gay Games brought together an unusual combination of celebration, controversy, pride and protest. While athletes and supporters prepared for an international sporting event, several local LGBTQIA+ organisations were questioning whether the Games should proceed under the existing political arrangements.
At the heart of the dispute was an uncomfortable question: could a government benefit from appearing LGBTQIA+ friendly through hosting the Games while pursuing policies that LGBTQIA+ advocates believed threatened their rights?
Some organisations decided that withdrawing was the most responsible response. The Federation of Gay Games believed that remaining visible was an important expression of inclusion.
Both approaches carried opportunities and risks.
Withdrawal allowed organisations to maintain their boundaries and draw attention to political concerns. Continuing the Games kept an international platform for LGBTQIA+ participation, connection and celebration alive.
The assessment finds that visibility and withdrawal aren’t necessarily opposites. In fact, protest can create visibility of its own.
The biggest weakness in the system was not necessarily the disagreement itself, but the damaged trust surrounding it.
And the biggest opportunity? Learning how people can disagree about their methods without losing sight of their shared humanity.
This is where peacebuilding becomes considerably more interesting than simply deciding who was right.
3. Context: How Did We Get Here?
In 2021, Valencia was selected to host the 2026 Gay Games. It was an exciting opportunity for a city to welcome athletes, artists and supporters from around the world.
Then politics entered the picture.
Following elections in 2023, changes in Valencia’s political leadership created concerns among local LGBTQIA+ organisations about representation, government involvement and protections for LGBTQIA+ people.
By May 2024, four local entities had withdrawn from the Games’ organising arrangements. The Federation acknowledged their withdrawal but disagreed with several of their claims about the proposed governance structure. [1]
The argument wasn’t simply about sporting arrangements.
Local organisations were worried about what the Games might represent.
This is where pinkwashing entered the conversation.
Pinkwashing is the practice of using LGBTQIA+ inclusion to project a positive public image while other actions may contradict that image.
Think of it as putting an enormous rainbow flag over a problem and hoping everyone admires the colours rather than looking underneath.
The organisations raising concerns believed political authorities might benefit from the Games’ inclusive reputation without adequately supporting LGBTQIA+ rights.
The Federation saw matters differently. It maintained that accepting public support did not mean endorsing a government or surrendering organisational independence. In June 2025, it publicly opposed proposed changes to Valencia’s transgender legislation, demonstrating that it was prepared to challenge government policy while continuing to organise the event. [2]
By June 2026, local organisations including Lambda were pursuing their own Pride activities and demonstrations, separate from the Games. [3][4]
The Games nevertheless took place from 27 June to 4 July 2026.
So the city ended up with two highly visible expressions of LGBTQIA+ advocacy: people celebrating inclusion through sport and culture, and people publicly protesting what they believed threatened that inclusion.
That leads to an intriguing possibility.
What if both groups were making important contributions, even while disagreeing with each other?
4. Specialist Assessment: Rupture, Choice and Sovereignty
When shared values lead to disagreement
One of the more frustrating things about human relationships is that people can agree on what matters and still have an almighty disagreement about what to do next.
Valencia offers a good example.
The organisations withdrawing believed that continuing under the existing arrangements risked compromising their principles.
The Federation believed abandoning the event risked losing an opportunity to demonstrate those same principles.
Neither position automatically tells us whether the people involved cared more or less about equality.
They had different understandings of what responsibility required.
Through UPT’s Rupture Architecture lens, the disagreement becomes especially important when people begin questioning one another’s intentions rather than simply their decisions.
An argument about strategy can quickly become an argument about loyalty, integrity and belonging.
That’s when relationships begin to fracture.
The importance of choice
UPT places considerable importance on sovereignty: the ability to make meaningful choices without having those choices overridden.
For organisations choosing to withdraw, sovereignty meant establishing a boundary.
For organisers and athletes choosing to participate, sovereignty meant refusing to allow political circumstances to dictate their involvement.
Both positions involved agency.
The challenge begins when one group’s exercise of choice is experienced by another group as abandonment, endorsement or betrayal.
A peaceful system doesn’t necessarily require everyone to agree.
It requires enough freedom, trust and mutual respect for people to make different choices without automatically becoming enemies.
That is easier to write than to achieve. Human beings are wonderfully complicated creatures.
5. The 3D–7D Peace Scan
3D — What’s Actually Happening on the Ground?
The Games took place, creating opportunities for international sporting and cultural participation.
But the practical questions went beyond whether the opening ceremony happened or the sporting competitions proceeded.
Who felt welcome? Who could access the events? Were transgender and non-binary participants properly accommodated? Were local communities meaningfully represented?
These questions are essential because inclusion must eventually become something people can experience, not merely a word appearing on promotional material.
In March 2026, Games organisers announced changes to competition registration arrangements, including removing a legal-gender-documentation requirement from wrestling and grappling and clarifying gender self-identification. [5]
That’s an example of principles being translated into practical action.
Finding: The event’s continuation demonstrated organisational capacity. Changes to participation arrangements offered tangible evidence of inclusion in practice. But completing an event doesn’t automatically settle every concern about accessibility, rights or representation.
4D — What Is the System Carrying From the Past?
The Games didn’t begin in a vacuum.
They emerged from decades of LGBTQIA+ advocacy, sporting exclusion, discrimination and efforts to create places where people could participate openly.
That history helps explain why the Games mattered so much to supporters.
It also explains why some local organisations were deeply concerned about government involvement.
For groups that have spent years fighting for recognition and protections, changes in political leadership can carry very real consequences.
History influences what people see as dangerous, hopeful or acceptable.
Finding: The disagreement was shaped by experiences and expectations that existed long before the 2026 Games. Repairing relationships may require understanding those histories rather than treating the dispute as a temporary disagreement about an event.
5D — Sovereignty, Relationships and Belonging
Here’s a question worth considering.
If an LGBTQIA+ organisation decides it cannot support an event, should it be pressured to participate for the sake of unity?
Equally, if athletes want to participate, should they be expected to withdraw because other organisations disagree with the arrangements?
Both situations raise questions about autonomy.
The Federation’s public statements defended its decision to continue. Lambda and other organisations defended their right to take a different path.
In April 2025, AVEGAL was formally appointed as a local LGBTQIA+ community partner for the Games, showing that participation arrangements could change as the event developed. [6]
However, renewed organisational involvement does not necessarily mean every grievance has been resolved.
Finding: The system contained genuine opportunities for choice, but relationships were strained by disagreement over how those choices affected others.
6D — Meaning: When Everyone Sees a Different Picture
Imagine two people watching the same rainbow parade.
One sees courage, celebration and a community refusing to disappear.
The other sees a government smiling for photographs while serious questions about LGBTQIA+ rights remain unanswered.
Neither person is necessarily inventing what they see.
They’re interpreting the event through different experiences, concerns and expectations.
For supporters, the Games represented presence, pride and participation.
For opponents, the event risked becoming a distraction from unresolved political concerns.
This is an important distinction.
A public celebration can be genuinely meaningful to participants while also being used by others for political or promotional purposes.
Finding: Conflicting interpretations contributed to the disagreement. Understanding the system requires looking beyond the event itself to the meaning different groups attached to it.
7D — The Bigger Picture: What Might Become Possible?
Now things get interesting.
The controversy didn’t result in the complete disappearance of LGBTQIA+ visibility.
Instead, the Games continued while other groups organised alternative demonstrations and activities.
This meant that different messages were reaching public audiences at the same time.
One message celebrated LGBTQIA+ participation.
Another challenged political decisions affecting LGBTQIA+ rights.
These activities may have reached different people, encouraged different conversations and created different forms of engagement.
Whether this produced lasting improvements in attitudes, policies or relationships is not yet established.
But it raises a possibility worth investigating.
What if a community becomes more capable of creating change when it has several ways of expressing its values, rather than insisting everyone follows one strategy?
The difficulty is preserving those different voices without allowing disagreement to destroy cooperation.
Finding: Valencia offers a possible example of expanded collective choice, alongside the risk that damaged relationships could undermine future collaboration.
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6. Assessment of the 12 Peace Stabilisers
The 12 Peace Stabilisers are the foundational conditions that Unified Peace Theory identifies as supporting healthy, resilient and peaceful human systems: Honesty, Open-mindedness, Willingness, Forgiveness, Unity, Discipline, Faith, Responsibility, Love, Wholeness, Joy and Peace.
Let’s see how they behaved in Valencia.
1. Honesty — When the Rainbow Isn’t the Whole Picture
Both the Games organisers and their critics had important claims that deserved examination.
Honesty requires more than expressing genuine convictions. It also requires accuracy, transparency and acknowledging information that may complicate our preferred interpretation.
The Federation challenged claims about its governance and independence. Local groups continued to question the political arrangements.
Assessment: Honesty was under pressure because conflicting accounts remained unresolved. Greater transparency could help rebuild confidence.
2. Open-mindedness — Could Both Groups Have Something Worth Hearing?
It’s tempting to assume that if someone disagrees with our strategy, they must not understand the issue.
But two groups can understand the same problem and still choose different responses.
Listening seriously to why someone withdrew doesn’t require agreeing with withdrawal. Listening to why others continued doesn’t require endorsing the government.
Assessment: Open-mindedness was present in some efforts to engage, but persistent disagreement suggests it remained strained.
3. Willingness — Nobody Could Accuse Them of Sitting on Their Hands
Whatever people thought about the controversy, considerable effort went into both continuing the Games and organising independent advocacy.
People showed willingness to act on what mattered to them.
The question is whether that willingness can eventually extend to rebuilding relationships.
Assessment: Willingness was a strength, although it was directed towards different approaches.
4. Forgiveness — Can a Bridge Be Rebuilt Without Pretending Nothing Happened?
Forgiveness is often confused with forgetting, excusing or agreeing.
But relationships can sometimes recover without everyone deciding that past actions were acceptable.
For Valencia, the more immediate question may be whether organisations can acknowledge hurt, accept differences and find useful ways of working together again.
There’s insufficient evidence to establish whether meaningful forgiveness has occurred.
Assessment: Forgiveness remains an open question and a possible area for future healing.
5. Unity — Same Rainbow, Different Routes
Unity doesn’t mean everyone must think alike.
The Games brought people together through sport and celebration. The protests brought others together through advocacy.
Both demonstrated forms of collective connection.
The trouble began where those connections became divided from one another.
Assessment: Unity existed within different groups, while unity across the wider network was weakened.
6. Discipline — Keeping Things Moving
International events don’t organise themselves.
Continuing to coordinate competitions, cultural activities and participation during controversy required sustained commitment.
The protest organisations also maintained advocacy efforts over an extended period.
Assessment: Discipline was a strength in the continued organisation of different activities, although organisational competence alone cannot establish wider social success.
7. Faith — Believing Something Better Is Possible
Here, faith means confidence in a meaningful possibility, rather than necessarily religious belief.
Continuing the Games involved confidence that visibility mattered.
Withdrawing involved confidence that protest and boundaries mattered.
Both approaches reflected belief in the possibility of change.
Assessment: Faith was evident through commitment, although shared confidence in one another had been weakened.
8. Responsibility — Who Is Accountable for What?
This may be one of the most important Stabilisers in the entire case.
A sporting organisation is responsible for how it operates, whom it includes and how it honours its commitments.
Governments are responsible for their own decisions and policies.
Community organisations have responsibilities towards the people they represent.
The difficulty comes when these responsibilities overlap.
Assessment: Responsibility was a central source of disagreement. Clearer boundaries between organisational and government accountability could strengthen future cooperation.
9. Love — Caring Doesn’t Always Look Gentle
Love, in the wider UPT sense, includes care, dignity and genuine regard for others.
Sometimes caring means showing up.
Sometimes it means saying no.
And sometimes people disagree so strongly about what care requires that they struggle to recognise it in one another.
We cannot know the private motivations of everyone involved. But the stated goals of both approaches concerned protecting and affirming LGBTQIA+ people.
Assessment: Care and solidarity were visible in different forms, while strained relationships limited their expression across the wider system.
10. Wholeness — Nobody Gets Left Outside the Rainbow
An event can advertise inclusion while some people still feel invisible.
That’s a challenge worth remembering.
Wholeness requires looking beyond broad labels and noticing whose experiences are missing.
Athletes, local residents, activists, transgender people, bisexual people, non-binary people and others may experience the same event differently.
Assessment: Wholeness remains an important development opportunity. A truly inclusive system must be able to hear people who celebrate it and people who criticise it.
11. Joy — Yes, Joy Matters Too!
We sometimes speak about human rights as though seriousness is compulsory.
But joy has a place in peacebuilding.
Playing sport, making friends, celebrating identity, laughing, dancing and feeling welcome can be powerful experiences of connection.
Enjoying life isn’t a distraction from dignity.
For many people, being free to enjoy life openly is part of what dignity means.
Assessment: The Games provided opportunities for collective joy. The experiences of individual participants would require further research to establish.
12. Peace — More Than Everybody Getting Along
Peace isn’t simply the absence of disagreement.
A system can look harmonious while important concerns remain unspoken.
Equally, people can disagree openly while maintaining respect, agency and connection.
Valencia demonstrated organisational continuity alongside unresolved relational tensions.
Assessment: Peace was neither completely absent nor fully established. Different parts of the system showed resilience, while relationships and trust remained vulnerable.
What Do the 12 Stabilisers Tell Us Together?
The strongest conditions involved willingness, discipline and the capacity to create opportunities for participation and connection.
The greatest pressures concerned honesty, trust, responsibility, unity and the difficulty of respecting different choices.
The important point is that the system was not simply failing or succeeding. It was doing both in different ways.
That’s why looking beyond a single measure of success matters.
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7. Intervention, Prevention, Maintenance and Expansion
Intervention — What Needs Attention Now?
The Games have happened. The disagreement cannot simply be undone.
What remains is the question of relationships.
There may be opportunities for dialogue between organisations that continued and those that withdrew.
Such conversations would need to go beyond asking everyone to move on.
People may want their concerns understood before considering cooperation.
Independent discussions, clearer accountability and genuine listening could help distinguish disagreements about government policy from disagreements about the Federation itself.
Prevention — How Could Future Games Avoid Similar Problems?
Political leadership can change between awarding an international event and actually holding it.
Valencia demonstrates why organisers need to plan for that possibility.
Clear commitments to inclusion, meaningful community representation, independent decision-making and processes for handling disputes could reduce future difficulties.
Importantly, prevention shouldn’t mean eliminating criticism.
It should mean developing systems strong enough to respond to criticism without falling apart.
Maintenance — What Is Worth Protecting?
The Games’ international participation opportunities, volunteer contributions, sporting activities and commitment to inclusion are worth protecting.
So is the ability of local organisations to advocate independently.
Neither participation nor dissent should automatically disqualify someone from belonging to the broader LGBTQIA+ community.
Expansion — Could This Become Something Bigger?
Imagine a future Gay Games where organisers, athletes and local advocacy groups don’t have to agree on every political question to contribute to progress.
Some might focus on sport.
Others on cultural celebration.
Others on legal rights, community education or monitoring government commitments.
These approaches could remain independent while sharing information and opportunities.
The possible expansion isn’t just a better event.
It’s a stronger network of people capable of making a difference in different ways without demanding that everyone think alike.
That would create more choices, more relationships and potentially more pathways to peace.
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8. Cross-Disciplinary Insights
What Does Research Say About Visibility?
Research offers some useful clues.
A 2026 systematic review of 104 studies on LGBTQ+ events found that celebrations, festivals and gatherings can offer opportunities for identity expression, belonging and community connection. [7]
But there was another finding.
These events can also reproduce exclusion, commercialisation and unequal representation.
In other words, putting everyone under the same rainbow banner doesn’t necessarily mean everyone feels equally represented.
The review also noted that bisexual and other plurisexual people were often grouped into broad LGBTQ+ categories without their distinct experiences being properly examined.
That’s a reminder that inclusion is an ongoing practice, not a certificate an organisation earns once and hangs on the wall.
Does Meeting People Actually Change Attitudes?
Psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp reviewed more than 500 studies examining contact between different groups.
Their research found that contact generally helps reduce prejudice, particularly under favourable conditions. [8]
This matters because inclusive sporting events can create opportunities for people to meet, cooperate and experience one another beyond stereotypes.
However, simply being in the same place isn’t a magic formula.
The nature and quality of the interaction matter.
And there is insufficient evidence to conclude that the Valencia Games themselves produced measurable changes in public attitudes.
What About Protest?
Protest can also create awareness, challenge assumptions and put neglected issues into public discussion.
Importantly, the Valencia organisations that withdrew weren’t necessarily choosing invisibility.
They organised alternative public activities, including a Pride demonstration.
So rather than asking whether visibility beats withdrawal, we may need to ask:
Which kinds of visibility create which kinds of change?
That’s a more useful question for future research.
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9. Future Outlook
The Valencia experience leaves several possible pathways.
If disagreements remain unresolved, organisations may carry distrust into future relationships, even when they share similar goals.
If dialogue improves, those same organisations may discover opportunities to cooperate without having to abandon their original positions.
Future Games may also benefit from clearer agreements about independence, inclusion, community representation and accountability.
There is another possibility worth exploring.
International sporting events may become more than temporary celebrations. They could contribute to ongoing community development, education and relationships that continue long after the closing ceremony.
But that outcome can’t simply be presumed.
A celebration can end with wonderful memories while local political concerns remain unresolved.
Likewise, a protest can attract public attention without producing immediate policy changes.
The real test is what changes afterwards.
Do more people feel included? Are relationships stronger? Do people have greater freedom to participate? Are decision-makers more accountable? Have new opportunities emerged?
Those questions would provide a much clearer picture of peace than simply declaring one strategy successful.
10. UPT Summary
The controversy surrounding the 2026 Valencia Gay Games began with an uncomfortable disagreement over how best to protect and promote LGBTQIA+ inclusion.
Some organisations believed withdrawing was necessary to preserve integrity and challenge political decisions. The Federation believed continuing the Games was an important way to maintain visibility, participation and solidarity.
The Games went ahead, while local organisations pursued independent advocacy.
From a Peace Science perspective, the most interesting finding is that both approaches created forms of visibility, even though they were often presented as opposing strategies.
Continuing an event can preserve opportunities for connection and celebration. Withdrawing can protect boundaries and bring attention to concerns that might otherwise receive less scrutiny.
Neither approach guarantees social progress.
The 12 Peace Stabilisers reveal a system with considerable willingness and organisational resilience, but also strained relationships and competing understandings of responsibility.
The greatest opportunity for intervention lies in rebuilding trust. Prevention depends on clearer governance and accountability. Maintenance involves protecting inclusive participation and legitimate dissent. Expansion becomes possible when different groups can pursue their goals without unnecessarily closing off future relationships.
The longer-term effects of the Valencia controversy remain uncertain.
What the case demonstrates is the importance of examining the whole system rather than judging it by one event, one disagreement or one outcome.
Perhaps peace isn’t always about getting everybody onto the same page. Sometimes it’s about making enough room for people to write different pages without tearing up the whole book.
And that may be one of Valencia’s most useful lessons.
11. About the UPT Peace Assessment
The UPT Peace Assessment applies the framework developed in Peace as a Science: Towards a Unified Peace Theory by Michelle Lightworker.
It examines what strengthens or weakens peace across individuals, relationships, organisations and communities.
Using the 3D–7D Peace Scan, all 12 Peace Stabilisers and the four orientations of Intervention, Prevention, Maintenance and Expansion, it explores not only what is going wrong but also what is working and what greater peace might make possible.
It draws on credible research while recognising the difference between established evidence, personal experience, interpretation and unanswered questions.
Its purpose is not to prove a theory or declare a winner.
It’s to help us understand what’s really happening before deciding what to do about it.
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References
[1] Federation of Gay Games. (2024, May 27). FGG notified of withdrawal of four local LGBTQ+ entities from Gay Games XII València 2026. https://www.gaygames.org/press-releases/fgg-notified-of-withdrawal-of-lgbtq-entities-from-valencia-2026
[2] Campbell, D. (2025, June 12). FGG statement about proposed changes to Valencia’s Trans Law. Federation of Gay Games. https://www.gaygames.org/news/draft-amendments-to-valncias-trans-law
[3] Holmes, J. (2026, June 20). Why LGBTQIA+ groups are boycotting the Gay Games over ‘pinkwashing’. QueerAF. https://www.wearequeeraf.com/why-lgbtq-groups-are-boycotting-the-gay-games-over-pinkwashing/
[4] Lambda Valencia. (2026). Presentamos la agenda de actividades y el cartel del Orgull LGTBIAQ+ 2026. https://lambdavalencia.org/es/presentamos-la-agenda-de-actividades-y-el-cartel-del-orgull-lgtbiaq-2026/
[5] Gay Games Valencia 2026. (2026, March 16). Clarifications and updates to Gay Games XII Valencia 2026 registration system to support trans and non-binary identities. https://www.gaygamesvalencia2026.com/en/news/clarifications-and-updates-to-gay-games-xii-valencia-2026-registration-system-to-support-trans-and-non-binary-identities/
[6] Federation of Gay Games. (2025, April 16). AVEGAL has been officially appointed as the local LGBTQ+ community partner for the XII Gay Games in València 2026. https://www.gaygames.org/press-releases/avegal-appointed-local-community-partner
[7] Ong, F., Bondarchuk-McLaughlin, A., Ferris, L., Hinton, J. D. X., King, J., & Anderson, J. R. (2026). A systematic review of LGBTQ+ events: Community, consumerism, and cultural politics. Journal of Bisexuality. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2026.2734003
[8] Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751
Foundational framework: Michelle Lightworker, Peace as a Science: Towards a Unified Peace Theory.