We are excited to welcome professor and community organiser Lamble to Blackwell’s in partnership with University of Manchester’s Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture to discuss UNSAFE: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash. Lamble will be in conversation with Jackie Stacey.

About the book:

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.

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 are based in London.