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Join Lamble to discuss their new book Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash with Natalie Kouri-Towe.
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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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Speakers:
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.
Natalie Kouri-Towe/NKT is an Associate Professor of feminism and sexuality at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. Her edited collection, Reading the Room: Lessons on Pedagogy and Curriculum from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom connects to her new research on transformative pedagogies. In October 2025, she launched the Transformative Pedagogies Lab at Concordia University, a research space for the collaborative development and dissemination of scholarship and popular education tools on gender and sexuality pedagogies.
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Co-sponsored by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, L'Euguélionne and Haymarket Books.