Unsafe

Lamble is a community organizer and Professor of Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. Their work explores questions of gender, sexuality, and justice with a focus on feminist and abolitionist alternatives to prisons, police, and punishment. They grew up in southern Ontario and are now based in London, UK.

Unsafe brings the universality of abolition to everyone, and it does so precisely through the “issue” that many are most likely to think doesn’t concern them at all: transness. The result is an explosive illumination of the interdependence of all liberation struggles at a time when we desperately need such light. Even as the carceral state makes its deep structural investment in forced cissexuality plainer than ever, many of us have persisted too long in regarding trans matters as a mere culture war. Thank you, Lamble, for doing the work we so urgently needed. I’ve been waiting for someone to write this book for a long time.―Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against LiberationAs attacks on trans people reach new, terrifying heights, activists and scholars around the world must take a careful look at what has transpired in Britain. Unsafe provides a sobering, detailed, insightful account of how anti-trans activists have influenced British politics in recent years. Lamble's abolitionist analysis dismantles how women's safety has been weaponized. This book is exactly what we need right now.―Dean Spade, author of Love in a F*cked-Up WorldThrough careful and compassionate analysis, Lamble makes evident that struggles for justice by and for different marginalized groups are not a zero sum game. Our goals do not exist at an atomized level; our strategies galvanize when they are collective. Unsafe is a loving act of documenting, remembering, and bringing together knowledge deeply rooted in community organizing, with a clear steer towards justice and liberation for all of us.―Leah Cowan, author of Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?Unsafe goes beyond critique to show how people are taking collective action for structural change that results in material rather than merely symbolic safety. Rooted in solidarity, care, and commitment, this book is a welcome boost in discouraging times.―Rachel Herzing, co-author of How to Abolish Prisons

• Introduction: Rethinking safety politics in the wake of the ‘gender wars’Part I: The safety politics of the gender warsUnsafe: the rise of the “gender wars” in BritainTraces the manufacturing of a “trans danger” discourse, and how it was amplified by “gender critical” campaigners, politicians, and corporate media to escalate the gender wars in Britain.Weaponizing safety: the carceral politics of the “gender wars”Argues that carceral politics are a central factor in understanding how and why the gender wars escalated so rapidly in Britain, and makes the case for rethinking safety politics more broadly.How we got here: the neoliberal carceral roots of “bad man” feminismTraces a political shift in Britain from a broader critique of patriarchal structures to a narrower focus on the “violent man” as the new enemy of feminism, and shows “trans danger feminism” as an extension of this logic.Part II: Carceral politics don’t keep us safeDangerous others and the problem of sexual exceptionalismArgues that at the heart of narratives of dangerous sexual predators are logics of “sexual exceptionalism”―a framing that treats sexual violence as fundamentally distinct from other harms and people who commit sexual harm as inherently different from ordinary people.Why prisons, policing, and punishment don’t make us safeExplains why a feminist abolitionist approach to safety is necessary to overcome the current impasse of the gender wars and the wider limits of existing safety politics.Part III: Building a transformative politics of safetyFrom symbolic to material safetyMakes the case that an abolitionist approach requires a refocus on the material conditions necessary for genuine safety, e.g. housing, health care, food security, and freedom of movement.From individual to collective safetyArgues that an abolitionist approach to safety requires a reorientation from individual to collective agency.Safety through solidarityExplores what a politics of ‘no one is disposable’ means in practice, and how this politics can foster greater practices of safety and liberation for all.Conclusion: We keep us safeSummarizes the importance of building queer anti-carceral solidarities in both local and international contexts and the necessity of connecting struggles for gender justice with those of racial, economic, social, environmental, and anticolonial movements.