by Sarah Lamble
Haymarket Books
8/11/2026, paperback
SKU: 9798888906064
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.
Reviews:
"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 The Transgender Issue
About the Author:
Sarah 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.