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.
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Rethinking safety politics in the wake of the ‘gender wars’
Part I: The safety politics of the gender wars
Unsafe: the rise of the “gender wars” in Britain
Traces 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” feminism
Traces 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 safe
Dangerous others and the problem of sexual exceptionalism
Argues 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 safe
Explains 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 safety
From symbolic to material safety
Makes 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 safety
Argues that an abolitionist approach to safety requires a reorientation from individual to collective agency.
Safety through solidarity
Explores 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 safe
Summarizes 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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
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 Liberation
As 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 World
Taking the anti-trans backlash that has gripped the UK as its starting point, readers are provided with a fascinating historical account of how feminists and queer people alike threw their lot in with a broken, ineffective criminal justice system. Unsafe is a challenging, rigorous, and genuinely nuanced read for those interested in a more expansive lens on both feminism and queer liberation in Britain.
―Shon Faye, author of Love in Exile
Through 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
