By Sarah Lamble
This is such a rational, needed book, which carefully unpacks the current anti-trans landscape in the UK. Lamble explains clearly and logically how some strands of British feminism started to think excluding trans people makes women safe. From their point of view as a prison abolitionist, they make a convincing case for the ineffectiveness of prisons, punishment and exclusion, and they link this to how unhelpful (and impractical and hurtful) it is to segregate trans people from cis people.
Lamble really cuts through the chaos of the arguments going on at the moment – they explain how we are taught to focus our fear on individuals or symbols, when in reality, structural issues are much more likely to cause harm. In the debates around trans inclusion, there’s too much focus on the false assumption that individual trans women pose a threat to cis women, and not enough focus on the structural misogyny and inequality that makes women so afraid of (gendered) violence. Lamble applies this thinking to a wide range of issues around safety, and points out the things that truly make us safer, such as access to safe housing, food, water, secure employment and financial support. It’s easier to exclude individuals who we perceive to be dangerous than it is to tackle the structural problems that slowly erode our security and freedoms, though exclusion often fails to actually make anyone safer.
Lamble’s overall message is abundantly clear: we have to find ways to make everybody safe, instead of blaming minorities for structural problems. Arguments about identity and the meanings of different labels don’t make anyone safer. What we need is to rethink the criminal and social systems that do so much more harm than good, and lead us to feel unsafe in the first place.
Review by Jamie