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.
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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
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
Other books of interest
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Abolition Feminisms Vol. 1
Edited by Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, et al. -
How to Abolish Prisons
by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché -
Enemy Feminisms
by Sophie Lewis -
All Our Trials
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How to End Family Policing
Edited by Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, et al.