Keeping Us Safe

In ‘Unsafe,’ Sarah Lamble discusses the demonization of trans people and the use of the concept of safety to demonize trans people and separate all of us from one another.

by

Magazine

In the United States, transgender people make up just 1 percent of the population. Why, then, have their bodies and their very identities been the subject of so much political and cultural angst in recent years? This is the central question of Sarah Lamble’s important new book, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash, one which they tackle with finesse.

Lamble is a community organizer and a professor of criminology and queer theory at Birkbeck College, University of London. These two vantage points lend Unsafe both a depth and lightness; the book is immensely readable while also imparting scholarly lessons about the reasons why trans people—and trans women in particular—have become the latest dangerous “other” used to justify our carceral state and its dependency on punishment, exclusion, and abandonment.

Unsafe centers on recent trans-focused political machinations in the United Kingdom, but the issues Lamble covers are by no means provincial. As anyone paying attention to politics in the United States can attest, trans people have been repeatedly dragged through the mud here in recent years simply for existing. Lamble skillfully zeroes in on the social and political atmosphere that’s happened around them while also not letting anyone off the hook.

In the United Kingdom, transgender activists are fighting a battle to allow trans people to self-identify their legal gender on official documents, including those issued by the government. Progress was being made on this front, Lamble argues, until smear campaigns driven largely by gender-critical feminists—including Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—undercut trans people’s right to claim their own identities.

Lamble provides a wealth of examples that highlight the shift in gender politics in the United Kingdom, especially since 2018. Until then, as in the United States, trans visibility and progressive views on gender and sexuality had been on the rise, at least on the surface at a “pink-washing” level, as Lamble points out. Think Target, with its displays of rainbow-hued Pride merchandise that pop up in June, or the newer practice of adding one’s pronouns to an email signature.

All of this supposed progress quickly evaporated after 2018, as far-right politics took root globally. Questions about trans women and whether or not they belong in spaces occupied by cisgender women have become endless fodder for fearmongering politicians and news cycles, to devastating effect. Prisons have become an immediate area of concern, with much hand-wringing over whether or not trans women should be allowed in women’s prisons for fear they will behave like men with violent tendencies.

The question, Lamble asserts, should not be whether trans women belong in women’s prisons, but why we so quickly default to a carceral state model of punishment, exclusion, abandonment, and demonization of a scary and dangerous “other.” Black and brown people across the globe have plenty of firsthand experience with being forced into this role; now, the price of increasing visibility for trans people seems to be an increase in the criminalization of their very existence.

We do not have to look far to find examples of this in the United States. Anti-cross-dressing laws were used for centuries to legally enforce norms around gender and sexuality. Drag queen story hours held at public libraries have caused moral panic from coast to coast, thanks to trumped-up fears and the overt demonization of the LGBTQ+ community. Protests at public libraries seem almost quaint these days, in comparison to the increasing attacks on gender-affirming care for minors and other fundamental trans rights in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Lamble’s analysis focuses on the concept of safety and how it has been used not only to disparage trans people but to separate all of us from one another. This leaves everyone less safe and more polarized, while prisons remain full and the root causes of violence stay buried. What we need instead is a way to connect and care for one another more deeply through collective organizing and community-based models of accountability and harm reduction.

No one, Lamble insists, is disposable. That is the mindset that will set us free and keep us safe.