BOOK LAUNCH: Unsafe The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash
Join us for a reading, discussion and Q&A with Sarah Lamble to celebrate the release of Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash
Chaired by Nat Raha
The fiercest battles over gender today aren’t just about identity or womanhood—but about punishment, fear, and control.
The twenty-first century “gender wars” have been driven by a powerful and seductive narrative: that safety can be secured through exclusion, surveillance, and the policing of difference. These punitive logics have gained momentum across the political spectrum, fueling an anti-trans backlash and distorting the meaning of safety itself.
Unsafe is a clear-eyed and decisive challenge to the toxic ideas at the heart of this backlash. With patient rigour, Lamble exposes how carceral approaches to safety fail to address root causes of harm, ultimately deepening social divisions and legitimising new forms of violence and control.
Drawing on feminist and queer traditions as well as their experience organizing against prisons and policing, Lamble makes a principled case for a different vision: one where safety is not built on punishment but on collective care, radical solidarity, and transformative justice.
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.
Nat Raha is a poet, and lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. She contributed to the collection Transgender Marxism. She has authored four books of poetry, numerous journal articles, and her writing has been translated into eight languages.
🌟Practical Information! 🌟
This book launch is free!
Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event. There will also be copies available using the bookshop pay-it-forward fund.
📚 A note on the bookshop space and expectations. The bookshop space is small, so events like this tend to be magical, intimate, low key and occassionally chaotic. Seating is a mix of some chairs with backs, as well as benches, stools and floor cusions. Lighting is soft and low. The big doors can open for ventilation - and we always do a check before we start to make sure everyone is comfortable, and to make sure everyone who needs a seat has one. Get in touch if you need a space reserved.
Please note: There is (still) no bathroom at the bookshop. The closest accessible toilets are Glad Cafe or Tramway.
The bookshop has level access from the street. Let us know if you need more venue information or have specific questions on access / disability / neurodiversity needs.