Join Lamble to discuss their new book Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash on 24th November at Juno Books.
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. They are based in London.
Dr Sylvia McCheyne (she/her) is an independent scholar-activist, writer and researcher. She recently completed her PhD researching trans women working in the UK LGBT+ charity sector. Her work has been published in Ebb Books, i-D magazine and New Socialist. Currently, she is an editor for Prometheus magazine, a physical and online publication that draws on Marxist traditions that have been enriched by Black Radicalism, (Trans-)Feminism, Eco-Socialism and Abolitionist politics.