Trans safety, survival and solidarity in hostile times

I was really delighted to be asked to do a talk for the Open SU Pride Committee as part of Trans Awareness Week in November 2025. Life as a non-binary central academic at The Open University and co-chair of the OU Trans Staff Network can feel so distant from student life, even though our interests are so obviously entwined. The University and Colleges Union strike materials remind us that, ‘our working conditions are your learning conditions’. So, opportunities to connect with each other, share and make sense of our experiences, and find common ground, are rare and magical. In my talk I shared some of my experiences of being a non-binary lecturer, including some of the personal challenges and struggles that I’ve faced, as a jumping-off point to talk through what trans safety, survival and solidarity mean to me.

Making trans lives

To paraphrase feminist and queer thinkers Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, all gendered lives are not born but are made. Living a gender expansive life involves making moves to get free from the sex/gender category that you were assigned to at birth (or the gender binary altogether for agender and non-binary people), often within worlds that deeply invest in preserving the sex/gender binary as the only natural, legitimate and moral order of things. We know the pain common to interactions, systems and structures that refuse to recognise or respect our understandings of our bodies and selves. This is why, as Hil Malatino theorises, trans care resides in the small everyday acts of ‘preservative love’ we give to each other. We don’t assume pronouns, sometimes we display them, we ask about them, we use correct names, we see and are seen in each other’s selfhood, we donate what we can to meet unmet needs, we rage at injustice and rollbacks of our rights, and over time we can glimpse and taste freedom in moments of gender euphoria.

1. Trans safety

When populist attention is spent primarily understanding transness as a threat, danger and intrusion on safety of others (usually ‘vulnerable women and girls’), trans needs for safety become obscured and overlooked. Thinking with an evolving typology of social harm as developed by Steve Tombs, Avi Boukli, Simon Pemberton and others helps to make sense of trans safety needs, and how trans safety is routinely compromised in our current moment:

• Physical: having bodily integrity and safety from physical intrusion that results in injury, ill health and premature death.
• Emotional: ability to have a sense of emotional stability and nervous system regulation.
• Financial and economic: having a stable income and spending power.
• Culture: having trans contributions to art, literature and knowledge celebrated, valued and protected.
• Recognition: the inclusion and belonging of trans individuals and communities.
• Autonomy: the ability to lead a life of one’s own choosing.

Trans safety is compromised across all these areas, and has worsened in the rollback of trans rights, media scrutiny and humiliation of trans individuals, and uncertainty around trans access to public spaces, services, justice and healthcare. Trans harms emanate from neglectful and intentional decisions lobbied for and made by the powerful to limit the rights and protections that many consider necessary for a liveable trans life. Many of these decisions have not included or meaningfully engaged with the voices and experiences of trans people at all. This includes (for example):

• the CASS Review and restrictions on trans children and young people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare (Noone et al., 2025)
• the puberty blocker ban (Kennedy, 2025)
• long waiting lists for NHS gender-affirming care (QueerAF, 2025)
• increases in trans-related hate crime (Stonewall)
• conversion practices that target trans people (Galop, 2022) (and refusal of an inclusive LGBT+ conversion therapy ban)
• ‘organised transphobia’: powerful actors who ‘other’ and those who promote hostility towards trans people (Amery & Mondon, 2025; Gwenffrewi, 2025)
• increases in the restriction of trans women from women’s prisons (Gorden & Hughes, 2025)
• negative legal outcomes – e.g: the UK Supreme Court Ruling (TransActual, 2025)
• exclusion of trans athletes (Greey & Lenskyj, 2023)
• endless public consultations about us (e.g. Department for Education, the EHRC)

All of which, not surprisingly, erodes our mental health and wellbeing (Lees, 2025).

2. Trans survival

Given that we are making trans lives in conditions that are not of our choosing and out of our control – we are required to endure hostile times, sometimes in silence and in isolation. For a ruminator and dweller like me, when I’m faced with the horror of the state of things, my brain won’t stop whirring, trying to solve problems that are impossible to solve. Instead, I had to find ways to survive – a way to continue to exist despite conditions that might kill or destroy me. Here is some of what gets me through tough times:

• Making sense

I needed some way of making sense of what had happened and continues to happen. Perhaps this was an attempt to connect knowing with an ability to protect myself in uncertain and confusing times. I am grateful for all the trans writers and researchers that help to regain my balance in wobbly times. Witty, quick and insightful writing about trans life – fiction and non-fiction – help me to counter the gaslighting. Shout out to the trans horror and dystopian writers Alison Rumfit, Gretchen Felker-Martin and Rivers Solomon. Trans writers who take it all on and still stay soft: Shon Faye and Juliet Jacques. Smart as hell academics like Ruth Pearce, Fran Amery, Hil Malatino, Sara Ahmed, Gina Gwenffrewi, Jules Gill-Peterson, Joss Greene, Cal Horton, the RESIST and the Beyond Opposition projects. It helped to know that I wasn’t alone and that other people could see through it too.

• Communal care

Turning to the ‘community’ for care and support is common. This can be difficult, especially if you are isolated, feeling low and under attack. I find being in spaces with and alongside trans people, no matter how transient, incredibly important, whether this is co-working at my local queer club, going to a football match with the LGBT+ supporters’ group, dancing at a gig or club night, volunteering at a queer book event, going to a trans creative writing workshop… Showing up in spaces to commune, create and be with other trans and non-binary people got easier. They became opportunities to cultivate arts of living that make us possible in a culture that is hostile to us. Even in times when I didn’t have the confidence or the latitude, someone would say or do something genius and I got a wave of relief and joy in feeling seen, heard and held.

• Leaving evidence

I think as a trans person living in the UK right now, I am pretty used to loss, disappointment, betrayal and burnout. I have had to learn when it is not possible to act or intervene, and when I need to step back from the fight. Drawing on the blogger Mia Mingus’s call to “leave evidence”, I found importance in leaving traces of the things, even if they failed, for others to find in the future. I found so much comfort in histories of previous struggles, resistance and survival. I visited the Museum of Transology Transcestry exhibition, I read about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ activists in histories of Section 28 and intersex liberation, as well as tender explorations of community helplines like the Lesbian Line and Switchboard. This helped me understand that even in the most crushing of times, it is important to leave a trace that there were people who stood up and spoke out despite the costs and consequences.

3. Trans solidarity

This brings me to the final theme of solidarity – how we understand our common cause. By this I mean how our struggles around trans rights connect with other struggles for safety and autonomy – such as movements for Black lives, disability justice, women’s rights, queer liberation, workers’ rights, reproductive justice, migrant rights and many other groups who are subjected to state control and regimes of conditionality. Often the seeds of polarisation have been planted by the powerful to distract us from collectively dismantling the conditions that harm us all.

On staying soft in a hard world

Hil Malatino draws on the work of Sara Ruddick, a feminist care ethics scholar, to define preservative love as, ‘a shorthand for all of those acts that keep a being alive and intact, and is characterised by a specific response to the vulnerability of an other. It means “to see vulnerability and to respond to it with care rather than abuse, indifference, or flight”’(Malatino, 2020, p. 67).

I have seen so many around me do nothing when trans individuals are under attack. At best they choose to stay quiet or stay out of it. At worst they collude with the cruelty. In these situations, it is difficult to stay present and connected. It is hard to stay soft, open and curious when faced with unbelonging. However, it is also an important signal to create new, or shift existing, boundaries, find ways to centre your needs, and invest time in the things, people and projects that align more with your values and integrity.

Throughout all the adversity I have come to see my work as a small contribution to past, present and future trans and queer labour that cultivates spaces in which we – as trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people – are loved, cared for and affirmed on our own terms. I am at peace with that.