Trans activist mantras with some sugar sprinkles.
The blurby bit
The room
This being Dalston, an area with a dense population of lesbians, the room was full. Very full. About a hundred people at least. Mostly lesbian/TIFs but there was a fair sprinkling of cis allies and, of course, friends and fam of the panel. Many faces recognisable from the Birkbeck Trans Symposium ‘Existing Otherwise’ two weeks earlier. Certainly Sarah Lamble, a Birkbeck academic, had been there (Sarah likes to be called Lamble, cos’ she’s non-binary, orwite?). Had Eli Erlick been a draw? One sensed not.
Lavender Pages Project
A woman representing the Lavender Pages Project (founded 2024) explained it was a solidarity project for imprisoned queer and trans people, which sends free books and zines to them (yay!), mostly written by queer or trans artists (oh¡) and has essentially replaced Books Beyond Bars. In its first year over three hundred books were sent out. It was an important project, because on the inside, queer prisoners rarely had access to these sorts of books and often the only queer book which could be found was an Oscar Wilde. Lamble’s book Unsafe – The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash is on the distribution roster as a sleep aid – sorry, inspirational book for trans lags to read, whilst pining for DIY HRT and face fillers.
Lamble’s reading from Unsafe – The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash
Lamble’s main argument is that terfs have ‘weaponised safety politics’, but that there are women on the left who could be got back and bought on side. (They can’t Lamble, and if you read this all the way through, you will understand why – promise.) UK terfs were great organisers and the trans movement needed to learn from them (smirks in terf).
The book has three sections, firstly she covers the rise of the ‘anti-trans backlash’, the second is that safety carceral politics don’t keep us safe, and the third sets out a vision for a more transformative politics of safety. In other words, it’s at least two-thirds word salad and then some.
Lamble read from Chapter 2, recounting the time she attended a Women’s Place UK event called ‘A Woman’s Place is NOT in Prison’. Some giggled. Big brave Lamble, eh? How she worried that she might get ejected! The thing she was really worried about though, was would acquaintances think she was a terf? I attended the 2021 event too and there were plenty abolitionist people in the room, and at least one on the platform, and I am yet to hear a credible alternative to prison from these people.
Lamble basically characterised it as a mass gathering of lunatic women, there to ‘amplify feelings of outrage and injustice’ built on the notion of ‘exclusion’. (It goes without saying that Lamble couldn’t engage with the argument that trans-identified males have to be excluded from the female prison estate, because they have the advantage of male strength, often retain male sex organs and a propensity of sexual violence, and otherwise, towards women.) She also found fault that the meeting was one which spoke on behalf of women in prison (what other kind could there be?) and accused speakers of robbing these women of their agency, which she ascribed to ‘white savourism’. Though she didn’t name her, Lamble heavily implied that Rosie Duffield MP, wanted poor women to be saved by rich white women, but was mainly fobbed off that Duffield had said that trans-identified males should not be in the female estate. Instead believing that Duffield should have been expressing solidarity with such men. Lamble felt that such concerns reduced women in prison to ‘hapless’ with ‘little agency’ (a necessary condition when you’re banged up actually, Lamble).
Then she said this (from the book):
Speakers at the event reinforced the assumption that only the relatively innocent deserve to be spared from imprisonment.
S. Lamble reading from chapter 2 of her book
Fuck me, no. That was not said and never implied. The speakers were, on the whole, loony left, with one (no names – if you know, you know) telling us that women should never be imprisoned. As in ever. This is the kind of feminist/abolitionist politics I have no bloody time for. Why should someone get a free fucking pass for murder just because they have a fanny? Anyway, I digress …
Back to Lamble, because this is where it got really interesting. Sorry, not interesting. Funny. It was where it got really funny because she thought she was communicating something singularly profound and controversial, when, in actual fact, she was just repeating trans activist mantras.
Lamble had noticed the event had been protested by a group of trans-identified males who shouted racist and sexist insults at people attending the QEII conference centre (there was also a black people in business event being held at the same time). I came across these trans ladies a good hour before the start of the event, when they were already having trouble with their powder puffs. Towards the end of the evening, the behaviour had deteriorated to this:
Lamble felt that the protesters were calling out ‘a lack of solidarity from other women’ and was ‘struck by the disconnect between the heartfelt feelings that the audience had for the imagined women in prison, versus the treatment of the protesters outside, who literally had the cops called on them’. Lamble correctly pointed out that these men had more common with imprisoned women, than your average terf did, to which one can only agree, given the ubiquity of substance abuse, prostitution and mental ill health amongst both.
Laughably, Lamble believes that the black TIM, dressed like a slag, had addressed ‘other black women’ as ‘peers’. Which is funny because I remember him using the word ‘cunt’ quite a lot, which is always a great leveller, isn’t it?
Lamble said the comment the black TIM made (‘we’re are attracting your boyfriends and your husbands’), was him ‘asserting the power of desirability and pushing back against the shaming and dismissal of trans women, the protesters challenged both the attendees and the wider societal assertions that they are not real women.’ On the issue of Julie Binbag (see, I hate her too) she justified the black TIM telling Binbag to join WeightWatchers (which I agree with, obviously), he wasn’t just being snide and awful to her, explained Lamble, he was ‘talking back to the over-reaction of calling law enforcement’ and that this was a form of ‘violence’ Binbag was enacting on the wannabe sex worker.
Calling the cops, could have had very grave consequences, you know! Especially as black people are much more likely to face arrest and death in custody! (Blind to her own white savourism, was Lamble.) Not only that, but Binbag was only considering her own safety, she wasn’t considering the safety of the lubbly-wubbly twans womxn telling her to join WeightWatchers (she should). This is how nuts abolitionists are, where an unknown deranged drugged wannabe sex worker’s ‘level of safety’ – by which she really meant level of threat – can be justified to be the same to that of a publicly known middle-aged woman with no history of violence.
Though Lamble did pay lip service to the fact that the insults were misogynistic, it was obviously more important to her that ‘black trans women’ had been ‘reduced to the offensiveness of the remarks, rather than the systemic conditions of oppression, exclusion and violence they routinely face’ because they failed to ’embody the ideal victim’. While those ‘least at risk’ (i.e. Binbag) had been granted ‘sympathy, care and support.’ (Not by me. Anyone?)
The discussion
Eli Erlick began. He met Lamble almost a decade ago (i.e. Trans Tipping Point) when he was finishing off his PhD (in clown studies) and knew her from the abolitionist scene. Erlick believes that Unsafe is at the cutting edge of abolitionist thought and spoke to the ‘global panic around gender and safety’ which would help abolitionists and trans activists rethink their approach to activism altogether. The day before had been the ‘enactment’ of the ‘EHRC guidance which allowed trans people to be excluded from all gendered spaces’. Erlick noted the guidance was not enforceable but that it would still mean trans-identified people had no legal recourse in such situations. The whole notion of ‘safety’ was being used more regularly on the right, by the likes of Tommy Robinson, Reform and Restore.
Of course, Erlick has had his own safety scare, when right wing US political commentators, like Matt Walsh, came after him. All he did was offer hormones to kids he’d never met! So many trans women are punished and excluded from the trans community for how others perceive them! So many, in fact, that some of his mates started a really cute FaceBook group called Trans Girl Jail. Had anyone in the room heard of the Karen White case*? They hadn’t. Erlick summarised it as a ‘trans woman’ who had ‘sexually assaulted other women’ in prison which had sparked a conversation about safety.
*Karen White, aka Stephen Wood, was found guilty of two rapes committed in 2016, the rape of a pregnant woman in 2003, the wounding (stabbing with a steak knife) of an elderly male neighbour and burglary – see Trans Crime UK.
In the US, there had been a similar incident to that of Karen White’s. That of Synthia-China Blast (see Reduxx’s article and the second half of this article, in summary, Blast raped and murdered a 13 year old girl and trans-identified whilst in prison). Erlick told the room that Blast was accused (rather than convicted) of killing a 13 year old girl and qualified this with ‘it definitely wasn’t true’ (a ridiculous assertion, given Blast’s friends testified against him and he and his co-conspirator openly laughed in court). Erlick told us that Blast’s ‘innocence doesn’t really matter, because she was being chronically misgendered and held up as a representation of the whole trans community’. Laverne Cox had read a letter out in support of Blast’s plight. However, when Laverne Cox learnt why Blast was in jail (and that his guilt was beyond doubt) even Cox #peaktrans, asking for the copies of the video to be taken down and for it to be scrapped from the internet (as confirmed by the Silvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), who continued to stand with Blast). Erlick didn’t think the community should distance itself from ‘allegedly bad people’ since Blast was genuinely experiencing torture in the US prison system (he was actually being held in solitary confinement, which may have been for his own safety, or the safety of others, or both).
Because of [Blast’s guilty conviction] it creates a very complex dilemma where we can disavow her, we can disavow her experiences, because of who she is, or what she may- or definitely didn’t do. Um, or we can actually lean into it because the fact is, if Synthia [-China Blast] can be taken out of solitary confinement, then anyone can.
Eli Erlick on Synthia-China Blast
Right. If we can get a (white) whole ass man off the hook for a cold blooded sexually sadistic murder of a (black female) child, then we can basically have absolute anarchy. This is who these people are. Abolitionists and trans activists. They are anarchists. And they are hypocrites.
Erlick was very keen on the use of the word ‘complicated’ and said trans-identified people were ‘so severely targeted by the government and these highly organised groups of people claiming to be feminists’. (Incidentally, on the day I started writing this blog, Andy Ngo reported on the murder of Williams Evans, a 7 year old boy, and that two trans-identified males, alongside the mother, were arrested. Yet again, in order to protect transgenderism, the MSM had reported that three women were involved.)
If Lamble were to re-write Unsafe today (i.e. after the EHRC guidance) how might she reframe the discussion around safety?
The Supreme Court Judgment (a clarification, atchooly) had been handed down just before she finished the book, so it is mentioned. Lamble thought trans activism was in a mess because it was too focussed on what the law would do in its favour and it should focus more on legal strategy (sounds like a contradiction to me). Rights were being rolled back which carried acute consequences. There was a tendency to romanticise what rights actually do; the law wouldn’t be the source of liberation.
Erlick spoke of the profound influence that Dean Spade (a TIF, founder of SRLP and author of the influential Mutual Aid) had had on him.
Lamble felt that trans activism had gotten bogged down in the Gender Recognition Act reforms (aka Maria Miller’s (remember her?) ill-fated attempt to implement ‘self-ID’). The proposed reforms were largely symbolic, as is a Gender Recognition Certificate itself, trans activism had reacted as if it were a win but had suddenly stumbled when it had to answer the incredibly difficult (for them, anyway) question: What is a woman? There had now been almost eight years debating what a woman is, when the arguments should be: Everyone needs free accessible healthcare, everyone needs housing, everyone needs income security (note she didn’t say ‘job’). Lamble is as guilty as anyone, she too had made a video about the Gender Recognition Act.
Unsafe does a controversial thing, it suggests that trans activists work with left wing feminists who might be sympathetic to some of its arguments (you know, nutters like Jane Cassandra Jones). Erlick wanted to know more, was there a boundary? When do we call people in? Lamble objects to all gender critical feminists being ascribed as right indeed (indeed, they are mostly left) or being characterised as fascists. Lamble had had the epiphany that many terfs were just simple women, with real experiences of male violence, who just didn’t understand that TWAW. She had realised that when an organisation like WPUK (which is now extremely defunct, by the way, Lamble) was compared with outfits like Sex Matters, it was to trans activism’s ‘strategic peril’. Coalitions had to be built. She didn’t want to call in billionaire J.K. Rowling though, Rowlint was not on side. But there was still a bunch of dykes who might be got. (Nice to see she has set her sights on the powerhouses, lol.)
Another Lamble epiphany. The self-righteousness of the left. You know the left is really up its own arse when a radical trans activist, abolitionist, non-binary academic can even see it. She had been at meetings where she had been shouted at for using the wrong language. Whereas gender critical feminists were the best organisers (I guess she meant it is a broad church and people don’t lose their shit when someone gets misgendered (though it has occasionally happened when someone gets gendered, to be fair)).
The J.K. Rowling moment
Every trans activist meeting has its J.K. Rowling moment.
Erlick wanted Nim Ralph to explain the public letter of support for J.K. Rowling she had circulated in 2020 (I tried to find the actual letter, but could only find puff pieces praising the noble-act and -signatories). The letter apparently condemned The Sun for interviewing Rowling’s violent ex-husband, who (unsurprisingly) expressed no remorse for his violent behaviour. Do you know who else has expressed no remorse for violent behaviour?
Every mention of Rowling bought out giggy-giggles in the room. Ralph got giggy-giggly too. She wanted to emphasise that she didn’t really like or care about Rowling, since Rowling ‘basically doesn’t like trans people’ but managed to generate a very tiny bit of faux outrage – via a Dawn French ‘funny’ serious voice – that The Sun corroborated the allegation of domestic violence (put into the public sphere by Rowling herself) with the perpetrator (who admitted it and said he wasn’t sorry). According to Ralph, this was ‘misogyny’ on The Sun’s behalf.
Erlick’s next book is about trans people who had been drawn into right wing spaces, because left wing spaces won’t accept them, and thus they had become radicalised. He thinks this is also what happened to Rowling, she had been bullied for liking a tweet, which at some point pushed her over the edge and into the arms of … Maya Forstater? Erlick failed to specify whom but did qualify that he didn’t want to work with people like Rowling.
Funnily enough, one of Erlick’s recent posts about Rowling alleges that she is a ‘holocaust denier, an Epstein supporter and pedophilia defender’, which isn’t defamatory at all, is it?
Lamble thought that Ralph’s lip service letter, which completely misrepresents the tone of The Sun’s article, was a great example ‘of solidarity in a complex way’, as it showed that ‘trans people can disagree and vehemently disagree with her views, so it wasn’t giving her a free pass by any means, but it was saying “We can vehemently disagree with your views and we can also hold that it is not okay for this level of misogyny to be targeted against you”‘.
REMINDER: And this cannot be understated, Lamble was referring to The Sun, not to the thousands of trans-activists who have posted tens of thousands of extremely obnoxious and pornographic insults, including rape and death threats, or to the weirdos who filled her timeline with pornographic images on a thread she posted about storybook illustrations (The Ickabog). I mean, really, what planet are these people on? They have not got a fucking clue.
Oh, ha-ha-ha, hee-hee-hee, Lamble went on, as if she was saying something so fucking groundbreaking. She probably literally thinks she’s thought up ‘hands across the aisle’ as a concept. Lamble went on to clarify, for the umpteenth time, that the letter of support for J.K. Rowling, wasn’t a letter saying ‘I’m defending J.K. Rowling or that we still have empathy with a billionaire’. No, it was a perfect example of ‘doing solidarity politics differently.’ All said with a Dawn French smile in her voice (aka inane frothing at the mouth).
Ralph added in this nuanced gem: ‘[We need to] change the frame of the conversation away from: “Because she hates us, we have to hate her” to “We actually are fighting the same system here and we are on your side in that system, even though you hate us”.’
We are not going to win when we play victim politics, said Lamble.
Au contraire, Lamble, it’s the only way trans activism has ever or will ever win anything.
This was the next line of ‘complicated’ argument that had dislodged from Lamble’s psyche. Again, she wanted to make clear that trans people are victims but couldn’t ever be considered ‘the right kind of victim’. She wasn’t saying that the community shouldn’t grieve its losses or do ‘that work’, it’s just that she thought as a political strategy it didn’t work and the focus should be on ‘what is it we want, to build material safety’. In other words, she did really want to play the victimhood card after all and ’embrace the abolitionist politics that no one is disposable, which says everyone is entitled to safety […] and we have to build models that don’t throw one group under the bus, to protect another group.’
How do we do that?
Lamble said we could provide meals to the hungry and DIY healthcare to the sick. Check in with a neighbour if they’re experiencing domestic violence! Do they have a safe place to go? So that they don’t have to call the police? Again, I am yet to hear a credible alternative to prison from these people.
Like a dog returning to its sick …
… Ralph returned to J.K. Rowling. Would she have written that letter again today? Strategically, yes she would, because you should stand against misogyny, yeah. The reason why she wouldn’t, was because everyone in the room would cancel her and got all giggy-giggly again. But then a moment of erudition: Sometimes abolitionist politics looks like liberalism. She explained more fully: ‘So, if I say I think people who hate me expect me to hate them and I work on my own humanity so that I don’t internalise the hatred, that sounds so liberal.’ (Navel-gazing is the phrase you’re looking for, pumpkin.) Thus, if she were to say: ‘I empathise with terfs and their trauma,’ that would be a bit liberal. But what did Lamble think? Well, she rambled on about the ‘politics of non-disposibility’ and how she worried that, when she talked about non-disposibility, people might think she was in favour of liberalism.
Question and Answer with Audience
Of note, all of the questioners were of European extraction, sounding like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. It may have been a coincidence but it typified, for me, that so many of these activists occupy a certain milieu.
A trans-identified male, also professional trans activist, wanted to know how Lamble dealt with dykes who held suffragette flags. How do we avoid having a polarised discussion?
We needed to listen before engaging, as this was where the bridge-building would happen. So many of the narratives from gender critical feminists were connected to trauma stories, where they had genuine concerns about gender-based violence, which they had attached to trans people. Even Lamble recognised that you can’t just tell someone not to be fearful.
Ralph added that trans activism wasn’t accustomed to having difficult conversations due to the fear of feeling unsafe. There was also the vacuous assumption of being on the right side of history and having a moral superiority complex. Further, people entered into debates pretending not to have certain values or politics, or to be neutral, and pretend to be open to listening to other peoples’ view. After these eminently sensible statements, Ralph told us she wouldn’t bother cutting this slack to card-carrying terfs, just the people you reckon you might be able to turn, rendering everything she had just said as meaningless.
A trans-identified female said J.K. Rowling probably never even met a trans person in her life, just like people who complain about (illegal) migrants or muslims (i.e. Islamists), it was all faux outrage. Shouldn’t coalition-building with other (loony left causes) be the priority?
Lamble said her book is about trans politics but she hoped that people would recognise that it wasn’t just about trans people. In the same way that trans people aren’t sex predators, this also was also the case in the anti-migrant and anti-muslim tirades that we see. It was the same playbook of dangerous others and isolation.
Class is missing from the conversation, said an autistic trans-identified female, who had experienced homelessness and the hostel system. She was uncomfortable to write a letter of support for Rowling. The working class were being screwed over and were looking for an enemy and didn’t have free time between jobs. How do we include the working class without being associated with them?
Lamble said that safer spaces were often used to enforce class norms (?). Lamble also said we shouldn’t tolerate misogyny against Rowling but we also shouldn’t tolerate her billions of pounds! The narrative was that she earned this but it was, in fact, ‘wealth extraction’ (as if writing children’s books was exactly the same as big pharma). We should be claiming that money back, said Lamble, clearly still butt hurt over the money she’s spent on Harry Potter memorabilia. Lamble said that cis women were often very uncomfortable with gender non-conformity and thus trans people, which was why they were policing lots of different aspects about the performance of gender expression. If you asked people about the practical things which keep you safe, people answered: a home, food, friends. Most people don’t say: police or prisons.
Erlick wanted to give a shout out to Black Trans Liberation Kitchen in New York, who provided free food and space for trans-identified people to hang out in. He wanted trans groups to focus on ‘cis women issues’, like birth control and period products, the affordability of the latter is apparently a big issue in the US right now with hyperinflation, but then, in an about turn, he expressed that trans people probably wouldn’t have the time or the transportation to run such programmes.
A co-founder of the Black Trans Liberation group said she is “sick and tired’’ of hearing about the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and called top New York Dems “the real terrorists’’ at a Big Apple rally over the weekend.
“The reality is the people who are the real terrorists are sitting in office right now!” screamed trans activist Qween Jean at a crowd of fellow demonstrators, labeling the war in Gaza a “genocide.
Trans leader is ‘sick and tired’ of hearing about Oct. 7 massacre, calls NY Dems ‘the real terrorists’, New York Post, 3 March 2024
Ralph told us that she had recently shared a cab with one of the women who disrupted the 2018 London Pride (L without the T). The terf was hugely proud of this fact, not being able to keep it quiet for five minutes. The room instantly got giggy-giggly again, though, to be fair, I was one of those chortling away (well, more sort of snarking really). The terf was terrified Ralph would kick her out the cab if she told her (you know, the thing she wasn’t able to keep secret a few seconds before) and Ralph promised she wouldn’t. Then poor Ralph had a thirty-minute taxi ride in which the terf told her every single transphobic view she had and really expected Ralph to kick her out the cab at every new transphobic point. (A clear lie, since there is only one perennial terf view – sex is immutable.) Ralph disagreed with her but connected with her. We shouldn’t be scared of having disagreements, even when they really hurt us, said a terf-weary Ralph.
Post meeting, I contacted Julia Long, who was part of the 2018 protest, and we discussed Ralph’s anecdote and agreed, given who the other protesters were, that there was almost zero likelihood of it being true. So, being the generous sort, let’s just say Ralph meant it to serve as allegory.
Why trans activism will never be able to build coalitions.
Because they’re fucking nuts, that’s why. Here we have eminently sensible people in other respects, defending a drug-crazed wannabe sex worker shouting racist and sexist abuse at complete strangers, the defending of sadistic sexual killers, like Synthia-China Blast, making up a bullshit story about a cab ride and going on and on and on and on about J.K.-fucking-Rowling, is why no one of any serious political calibre will want, or be able, to coalition-build with you. They might agree with you on some issues, -stopped clocks and all of that- but they’re not gonna sit round the fucking table with you while you dribble at the mouth as a result of your iatrogenic drug abuse.
Post script
This was initially published before I learnt of Jason Arday’s sad death. Arday got so much heat for his rubbish work and rubbish credentials (not to mention lies), but he was actually not an anomaly in academia and it will be a shame if no lessons are learned from his example.
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The Lies They Tell 
