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Activist pasts and imagined futures

Back in October I caught the train down to Coventry to visit my old stomping grounds at the University of Warwick. The occasion was the 20th Anniversary of Warwick Anti-Sexism Society (WASS), a student campaigning group at the university. Technically WASS was 21 this year, but whoever let technicalities get in the way of a good celebration?

Co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, the event brought current WASS members, including WASS president Izie Lopez-Scott and Students’ Union sabbatical officer Ananya Sreekumar, together with former students and feminist academics, including founders Sam Lyle and Cath Lambert, and early member Maria do Mar Pereira.

As I arrived on campus, it occurred to me that I must have been one of longest-running members of WASS. In contrast to the likes of Sam and Cath, I never played an organising role, instead on volunteering my time with Warwick Pride (the LGBTUA+ society), Rocksoc (for the metalheads), and later also Bandsoc (for whom I still occasionally judge the university’s annual Warwick Battle of the Bands). Nevertheless, after originally joining WASS way back in the academic year of 2005-2006, I maintained an on-and-off membership through my undergraduate, masters, and PhD degrees, finally leaving in 2016. During that time I attended numerous talks, workshops, protests, and occupations as a member of WASS, and joined fellow members as a delegate to Women’s Conferences hosted by the National Union of Students.

I wasn’t quite sure how it would feel to participate in the anniversary event. I anticipated it would be somewhat nostalgic.

Certainly the event served me nostalgia in spades. A WASS exhibition featured numerous t-shirts, hoodies, zines, posters, and pamphlets produced by the society from 2004 to the present day. I brought along a couple of zines from the 2010s – Sam brought along a huge amount of old material, much of which dated back to my undergraduate days. In a panel discussion, we reflected together on the context in which WASS was formed, why it felt so difficult and important to name yourself as a feminist in the early 2000s, and how the society’s early campaigns reflected the priorities and debates of the day (lads’ mags! feminism for men! Page 3!)

Photo of WASS exhibition, with t-shirts, zines, and newspaper clippings.
Photo of WASS exhibition, with zines, flyers, t-shirts, a hoodie, a tote bag, and a progress Pride flag.
Photo of a t-shirt bearing the slogan FHM: Feminism Helps Men.


But my main takeaway was the way in which our actions can echo through time, informing and influencing others in ways we might never be aware of.

When Sam and Cath founded WASS, they were focused on the present. They didn’t think much about how it might provide a way into activism and feminist thought for hundreds of people over two decades. Looking at the exhibition, speaking in a session about what had changed and what happened, it felt clear to me that we are living in a world shaped hugely be the world of 00s feminism, even amidst an enormous misogynist backlash.

There is something here about the complexity of wins, and the importance of work over time. It is not simply the case that the world gets better or worse. At the event, we discussed the growing cultural impact of violent misogynists from the manosphere. Sam highlighted how rates of femicide remain extremely high, half a century after the second-wave feminist movement kicked into gear. Equally, we reflected on how there is far more mainstream acknowledgement, understanding, and support for survivors domestic violence than there used to be even 20 years ago. This matters: it provides more people with a way out, a route into rebuilding their lives with the support of their families and communities.

Similarly, even as racist rhetoric dominates mainstream political discourse, feminist movements have increasingly learned from the difficult discussions around intersectionality that have taken place across years, decades. Meanwhile, other social movements have got better at acknowledging sexism, and embracing feminist ideals. WASS was originally an all-white, all-cis, non-disabled collective, which struggled to build alliances with other student liberation groups. This has not been the case for years. Key issues for student feminists at Warwick in 2025 include the genocide in Gaza, and fighting back against the university’s attempts to implement anti-trans policies. Warwick’s liberation movements frequently collaborate and cross-advertise events, and current students described how activists were often involved simultaneously in anti-sexist, anti-racist, and pro-queer groups.

A young man at the event asked me how campaigners stay motivated when there is so much rollback. I said I was inspired by the fact that we can still help people, that we can still create ideas and resources that it turns out are useful to others years, decades later. This was illustrated perfectly by the most unexpected story I heard that day, from an early career academic who thanked me for my old writing on TeachHigher.

A decade ago, TeachHigher was the University of Warwick’s attempt to advance insecure employment on campus, and undermine trade unionism. Branded as “a more consistent approach to the employment of hourly paid staff who work in different departments”, TeachHigher would provide a framework specifically for casual teaching contracts, offering an alternative to full-time, salaried lectureships. As a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of Warwick, it would technically be a separate company, while still funneling profits directly back into the university. This meant workers contracted through TeachHigher would be unable to benefit from collective bargaining with the University and College Union (UCU). The intention was to expand the model already used by Unitemps, another Warwick-owned subsidiary which “offers flexible staffing solutions” (often zero-hour contracts) across the higher education sector.

An enormous struggle over TeachHigher happened in 2015. The scheme was pushed aggressively by management, and opposed vociferously by hourly-paid teaching staff: the very people TeachHigher intended to contract. In subsequent years, I spoke and wrote about how this model for internal outsourcing was defeated through collective action on the part of students and staff. Workers such as myself carefully scrutinised the university’s proposals, identified pressure points within our own departments, found allies amongst more securely employed faculty, and organised accordingly. We effectively took over our local UCU branch, while also planning outside of its structures. Loopholes in existing casualised contracts enabled us to circumvent the UK’s anti-union laws, through moves such as departmental teaching boycotts. Multiple departments declared that they would refuse to participate in the TeachHigher pilot. The final straw came when UCU announced a national demonstration on a University of Warwick open day, which would have been an enormous embarrassment to the institution.

The successful campaign against TeachHigher brought student groups such as WASS and Warwick Anti-Racism Society together with staff bodies such as UCU. Due to the unequal impacts of casualisation, we recognised – as my late, great colleague Christian Smith put it – that “TeachHigher is sexist, and TeachHigher is racist”. We built on tactics developed in previous years. For example, the idea of protesting on an open day was developed by the 2013 Protect the Public University campaign, which grew out of the 2011 Occupy Warwick encampment. WASS members, naturally, were involved in both.

The defeat of TeachHigher was an enormous win for campaigners. Not only was the scheme withdrawn: we also negotiated pay rises, better terms and conditions for all casualised staff, and pathways towards more secure contracts for some.

Photograph of trees with yellowed leaves lining a road on an autumnal day

Yet by 2025, there was very little institutional memory of TeachHigher. For all that we won, many teaching staff remained on casualised contracts, and Unitemps continued to prosper. Meanwhile, the vast majority of those involved in the struggle have moved on, to live and work elsewhere. The university was largely under new management, and there had been an enormous turnover within human resources as well as student bodies. For those who even know the dispute happened, it can be hard to find concrete information. News platforms delete old stories, and enshittification makes it harder to use search engines to find those that remain.

At the WASS Anniversary, I learned that a key source of information on TeachHigher today can be found in my past blog posts.

Old wins echo down the years. Temporary gains are gains nonetheless. I would guess that every one of us who benefited from the TeachHigher defeat is better off now as a result. Personally, I found myself in a better place financially to finish my PhD and continue an academic career. I also learned an enormous amount about the practicalities of collective organising. I know I have draw on those gains repeatedly over the last decade to continue supporting others in turn.

Even if pay rises for casualised staff were eroded over time, the fact that we fought and that we won can continue to inspire workers facing similar struggles. Just as TeachHigher was inspired by Protect the Public University, which was inspired by Occupy Warwick, which was inspired by the Red Warwick occupations of the 1970s as well as the US-led Occupy Movement, the Spanish Indignados Movement, and the Arab Spring. These long influences don’t just happen: they rely on people writing things down, saving artifacts, and remembering together.

The funny thing is, I had no idea anyone might find my old blog posts on TeachHigher useful after so many years. I was one small part of a far larger movement, and have been involved in so many other campaigns since. Nevertheless, through chronicling events it turns out that I created a resource that remains useful to this day.

At the WASS Anniversary, I was reminded how important it is to commemorate our local histories of activism, and to share what we have learned along the way. Social progress is neither linear, nor guaranteed. But if we imagine there might be a better future around the corner, and act accordingly, then we might change the world in ways we cannot possibly anticipate.

Photo of a poster with bold text and a small picture of a sapling plant. Text reads as follows "By choosing a feminist politics, you are making a commitment to a world that has not yet been built" - Lola Olufemi. Warwick Anti Sexism Society. Campaigning for gender liberation. @warwickantisexismsociety


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Call for abstracts: World Community Development Conference

In summer 2026 the World Community Development Conference will be coming to Scotland! I am part of a group of lecturers from the Community Development programmes at the University of Glasgow who are helping to organise this event.

Running from 29 June to 2 July 2026, the conference will be a space for connection, critical reflection, creative exchange, and global solidarity. It will be rooted in the values of justice, participation, community empowerment and human rights and underpinned by Community Development’s emphasis on collective initiatives for collective outcomes.

Conference Themes and Guiding Questions

We invite submissions aligned with one or more of the following core themes. To support your thinking, we offer the following open questions:

1. Challenge

This theme centres on critiquing and confronting systems of injustice and advocating for policy and funding to support rights-based Community Development.

  • What are the most urgent challenges facing communities and how is Community Development responding?
  • How are issues of power, inequality, technology, marginalisation or oppression being confronted and addressed?
2. Change

This theme is about co-creating new approaches through collaboration and future-focused dialogue, while strengthening the resilience of practitioners and communities in complex environments.

  • What new ideas, or practices are driving meaningful change in your work?
  • How is resilience being built in communities facing political oppression, social or economic inequality, or the ill effects of climate change?
  • How are human rights and Community Development being used as tools for accountability?
3. Collective Action

This theme explores community organising through inclusive, participatory, and justice-driven practices and connecting across borders to build solidarity.

  • How are people coming together to organise, mobilise, and demand justice?
  • What examples of effective collective action can you share, and what impact is it having?
  • How can we ensure that Community Development is oriented towards collective justice rather than exclusion?

Presentation Formats

We welcome a wide range of formats, including:

  • Conference Paper: Research or practice-based presentations (20 minutes)
  • Facilitated or creative workshop: Participatory, performative or creative workshops by individuals or groups (1 hour)
  • Lightning talk: A concise presentation highlighting a key issue or insight (5 minutes)
  • Poster presentation: Digital or multimedia posters showcasing projects or research
  • Creative and participatory formats: Including book launches, exhibitions, and cultural events

Submission Requirements

Please submit a 300-word abstract or a 3-minute video of your proposed contribution, including:

  • The topic and framing of your contribution
  • The format of your presentation
  • The relevance to one or more of the conference themes
  • Author/s name(s), organisation/institution, contact information (e.g. email address, mobile/telephone number).

Submissions should be submitted via this page.

Logo for the Glasgow World Community Development Conference 2026.
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Reject Trans Doom-Posting

This week I took the long train down to the south of England for my friend Robyn’s funeral. She died very suddenly three weeks ago, aged just 32.

Robyn gave so much love to the world, and was so loved in turn. Around a hundred and fifty people crammed into a small building for the service. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, so many stood at the back and sides of the room. I sat on the floor. More attended online.

We shared stories from Robyn’s life, learned from each other, cried together. Like many funerals, especially for young trans people, it was absolutely gutwrenching. It also helped move us towards closure. It was good to be in community together, to think and speak not just of Robyn’s past, but of our collective futures. Robyn lived life to the absolute maximum. Surely we could take inspiration from her example.

Photo of a punk crowd having a good time. In the centre of the image, a white butch woman exclaims and points with delight.
Robyn at Manchester Punk Festival 2024. Photo by Chris Bethell for The Guardian(!)


After the funeral, I stayed the night with queer friends in rural Surrey. We went for a curry, toasted Robyn, caught up about our lives. We talked about work and about books and about art and about holidays we wanted to take. That evening I felt tentatively more at peace with the world.

And then I looked at my phone. And I learned that another young friend, Jessica, had also just died.

***

It’s a shit time to be trans. Many people are saying this.

But then again, when has it not been a shit time?

Eight years of moral panic have taken an enormous toll. In the UK, as in many other countries, our civil rights and our access to public services, public spaces, and public life are all being rapidly rolled back. Politicians and influencers fall over themselves to promote anti-trans violence and praise one another’s incendiary takes. We are less safe at work, at home, in hospitals, in schools, and in the streets.

Trans people often die young, including too many of my friends. Sometimes (all too often) we die by suicide, driven to despair in a world full of hate and malice. Sometimes (mercifully less often in the UK) we are murdered, usually in incredibly violent ways. Other times, it’s more complicated. I think of Denise, who died a sudden death from melanoma. I think about Elli, who died of Covid-19. And now I also think about Robyn and Jessica, who each died suddenly of apparently natural or accidental causes.

These days, the high rate of untimely trans death can feel like a consequence of the trans panic. Certainly I believe it’s making things worse. However, this phenomenon pre-dates the current political situation. Trans people disproportionately died young in the 2010s, at the time of the so-called “tipping point“. Trans people disproportionately died young before this too. Sociological theory can tell us why.

A decade or so ago, I worked for a couple of years in Warwick Medical School. I was there to teach medical students about social determinants of health. The basic concept is that our general health is affected enormously by the context in which we live. This includes factors such as the resources and services we do and do not have access to, and barriers we might face in attempting to access healthcare services or otherwise look after ourselves

So, it’s not a coincidence that – for example – life expectancies are shorter in poorer neighbourhoods, or that Black women are more likely to die in childbirth. There is nothing inevitable or biological about any of this, something intrinsically different about poor people or Black people. The issue is that entire groups of people are more likely to experience particular kinds of illness, and more likely to die of things others might survive. This is because of the social disadvantages they face, and because of the discrimination they experience at the hands of bigoted doctors and nurses.

There is a massive scientific literature on social determinants of health. I’ve contributed to it myself, co-authoring a recent study showing an association between transphobic microaggressions and poor mental health among trans people. For this reason, I know it’s no coincidence that so many of my trans friends have died untimely deaths. Trans people are more likely to have worse health because of transphobia. They are less likely to receive timely and effective treatment because of transphobia. This means when trans people are seriously ill, we are on average less likely to survive. I see this when I look at the academic literature, and I see this every day in the lives trans people I know.

I see the impact of transphobia when I look at Robyn’s life and death. Her health deteriorated significantly in her final years. She was afraid to seek help from doctors though: and for good reason, given the discrimination she and many of her friends experienced in NHS services. I wrote my entire goddamn PhD thesis on this problem.

Things were even worse for Jessica. I witnessed so many organisations and institutions in her home city of Coventry failing her time and time again. I could fill whole books with accounts of the violence done against her. She was failed by her school, her church, a political party she gave so much energy to, the council, the local hospital, the psychiatric ward, the housing association. Just last year I sat helplessly on the other end of the phone while she attempted suicide, doing the best I could in this moment to ensure that she was not alone.

The institutional failings experienced by Robyn and Jessica and so many others are the result not just of ignorance, but of actively malicious transphobia and transmisogyny. I believe these factors contributed significantly to their untimely deaths.

How can any of us expect to find hope and purpose in the face of such violence?

***

In recent months I have noticed an uptick in trans doom-posting. By this I mean trans social media posts, blog posts, and videos which dwell entirely on negative feelings and convey a sense of hopelessness.

A prominent example is Shon Faye’s recent essay, well, it’s over, which she describes as “a brief eulogy for the ‘trans rights’ movement”. Shon observes that powerful transphobic movements in the USA and UK are succeeding in many of their aims. They have spread fear and disinformation far and wide, made allies of mainstream politicians and media platforms, and enacted bans on trans healthcare. Now they are attempting to criminalise our very existence, as part of a campaign to eliminate us altogether.

Shon’s conclusion appears to be: well, that’s it. We’re all fucked.

“Today I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime. Who knows what may yet be taken away.”

I very much empathise with her account of trying to talk about this in any way with cis friends and family:

“their instinct is to try and generate hope or minimise despair [which] typically minimises the gravity of the situation and the depth of my grief and exhaustion and fear – increasing my resentment.”

Shon concludes that she doesn’t want to hear “fucking platitudes” – “there’s time for hope later”. For now, she wants time to grieve. I’ve seen similar sentiments shared by other authors on various social media platforms, including posts from extremely popular trans meme accounts.

I understand intimately where all of this is coming from. Just look at everything I said earlier about social determinants of health. I recognise the violence we are subject to, and its costs. This post too is written from a place of deep grief.

But there is also the question of where and how we grieve. We do need space to vent and to despair. But we also need space to process, and figure out what happens next. Ideally, we need places and times we can do this collectively, rather than just being isolated as individuals. Robyn’s funeral offered this.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about what is happening to us. What I am concerned about is the individualising effect of public platforms, and the parasocial relations we hold with high-profile accounts. We tend to consume doom-posting on our own, on a phone. We often have no-one to process it with, and little context beyond the content in front of us. In this way, doom-posting offers only a partial account of reality, and no way out from despair.

And there is a way out. We find it in community.

***

Look, I have a great deal of respect for Shon Faye. I have a hard enough time navigating the consequences of my own very minor microcelebrity. Shon has to tackle a great deal more attention: from trans people looking for someone to idolise and/or tear down, from cis readers who project heroic expectations onto her, and from haters who see her as the antichrist or something. She’s great on camera, and a brilliant writer. I would recommend her book The Transgender Issue to literally any cis reader. I also recognise that her blog post comes from a place of incredible pain.

At the same time, I am concerned that many trans people and allies are putting way too much energy into engaging mainstream institutions and liberal systems on their own, individualistic terms, rather than looking to the alternative power and support we can build in our communities. Notably, a lot of Shon’s post talks about civil society, legislation, lobbying, and the role of organisations such as Stonewall. This is definitely a realm in which “trans rights” face a seemingly terminal decline. But it is also not the first place I would look for real, grounded hope.

You can find a similar energy in Jules Gill-Peterson’s dire essay Reject Trans Liberalism, which is referenced by Shon. Jules’ piece simultaneously criticises the trans liberation movement for being about more than transition, while also insisting that preparing ideologically sound documents for the US supreme court is a radical act. It posits a false and ahistorical dichotomy between transsexuals (good, pure, radical) and transgenders (bad, elitist, liberal). The essay does not consider how gender diverse people might work together or support one another across our differences. This contrasts with existing critiques of trans liberalism already advanced by activist-scholars such as Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. Again, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Jules’ previous work. But as trans people, and especially as trans women, we owe each other so much more than this.

Now, I’m hardly without fault. This very blog is replete with examples of myself and others putting untold hours into lobbying politicians, participating in public consultations, advising the National Health Service and so on and so forth. In her post Stepping Over The Line, Josie Giles, who once again I admire greatly (look, I just fucking love trans women) argues that:

“Theoretically, an army of well-resourced energetic activists could simultaneously engage in state-centred advocacy and also do grassroots politics. In practice, it doesn’t happen. In practice, state-centred pseudo-organising dominates the social media feeds and the limited energy reserves of an already depleted community, and absorbs what little money is available to pay for the salaried self-licking ice-cream cone of the lobbying profession.”

Sick burn!

Meme depicting two femme white women. One is labelled "trans NGOs", and is holding the other woman firmly by her hair. The second woman is labelled "broke trannies facing a highly funded segregation movement". The first woman is force-feeding the second woman a bottle of milk, labelled "email your MP".
Meme acquired via one of them social media platforms we’ve all heard so much about.


I do disagree with Josie a little. Unlike Shon and Jules and also Josie, I transitioned in the early 2000s. This was well before the tipping point, and before most trans civil rights even existed in law. I remember how we fought successfully for changes that genuinely improved many people’s lives. I feel it will always be worthwhile to use what levers we can to minimise the harm caused by those who have power over us. Lobbying is the most accessible form of activism for some people. I still have an auto-reply on which encourages every damn cis person who emails me at work to contact their MP.

But Josie is completely right that many if not most trans people can and should be putting a lot more of our energy into grassroots politics. This must necessarily involve re-imagining what our worlds could look like, using what we already have as a basis from which to build. I know from lived experience that we can not only survive in the absence of certain civil rights and recognition, but also see material improvements in our lives when we come together. I met Jessica because we built trans-led community services in Coventry from the ground up.

Similar points are made by Roz Kaveney, who first came out over 50 years ago. In her criminally underrated 2022 poetry collection, The Great Good Time, Roz does reflect on the violence faced by young trans women in her youth. However, she also details the vibrant lives they lived together, the joys they experienced, how they shared housing and clothes and had each others’ backs. In a short forward to the book, she notes:

“I observed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things have been, if not worse, then at least as bad in different ways”.

As Josie states in Stepping Over The Line, white, middle-class trans people in particular need to understand in this current moment that we are as disposable to the ruling classes as any other minoritised individual. Our strength lies in practical solidarity with others subject to the violence of corporations, fascist movements, and the state. To once again reiterate the point, we need to be in community with one another.

Both Robyn and Jessica’s lives offered perfect models for this.

***

Every single speaker at Robyn’s funeral talked about how much time and energy she put into punk and folk music, building and fixing things, and caring for others. She was a loud, proud butch who was incredibly committed to sustaining community wherever she went. When she saw a need, she sought to meet it. Many of us only wished that she was better at asking for or accepting help herself.

If a trans person needed somewhere to stay, Robyn would put them up. If a trans person needed to move house, or was being evicted or was fleeing a violent relationship, Robyn would turn up with a van. If a trans person was having trouble at work, Robyn would show up online or in person with sensible advice. This attitude inspired Robyn to volunteer with groups such as Reading Red Kitchen, a grassroots project which provides a social foodbank and free community meals for asylum seekers experiencing food poverty. For Robyn, radical politics could never simply be about slogans and demonstrations: it was about cooking, connecting with others, and washing the dishes.

None of this is to say that Robyn was never found at a protest: quite the opposite. When I lived in the south we co-founded Trans Liberation Surrey, a collective which worked to oppose transphobia in a county hardly known for its activist movements. My most treasured memory of Robyn is from this time, when we attended a small anti-fascist demonstration in Wokingham. A coalition of neo-nazis, anti-vaxxers, and climate conspiracists descended on the town to protest a drag queen storytime event for young children. Robyn and I joined other locals outside the library to wave rainbow flags and play upbeat music, enabling families to attend the event without disruption.

Photo of people with placards around a banner labelled Trans Lib Surrey.
Trans Liberation Surrey, at Surrey Pride 2021.


Jessica was also extremely motivated to help others, in spite of her own difficult circumstances. Like Robyn, she was a committed trade unionist. For many years she was also involved in a small political party, before eventually being ejected for challenging the leadership. Her motivation for this was a genuine belief in the possibility of positive political change, and in the potential for people to come together and make that change happen. Later in life she would rediscover her Christian faith as alternative vehicle for community action.  

After hearing of Jessica’s death, our mutual friend Charlotte reached out, and we asked one another how we knew her. It turned out Charlotte had also been a member of that political party, and reconnected with Jessica several years later as they both sought new ways to make a difference in the world. In turn, I explained how Jessica and I met while lived in Coventry, and was myself involved in organising trans community social events, meals, and punk nights. Charlotte and I also both knew Robyn. “Christ Ruth,” said Charlotte, “trans lives are so entangled and we often don’t even realise”.

So it is. Right now, Jessica’s Facebook wall is replete with people thanking her for being there as a friend, for providing them with advice, for helping them come out.

In a hostile world, we are everything to one another. In the face of the most horrific hate, our love is so powerful. Such love survives death.

Selfie photo taken by a white woman with shoulder-length brown hair. She is wearing colourful clothes and a cross around her neck, and smiling at the camera.
Selfie taken by Jessica.

***

This is where I find hope. At protests and demonstrations, sure, but more importantly in the contexts where we give each other’s lives meaning.

I find hope in community meals, mutual aid, queer bars and queer bookshops and queer gigs. I find hope in small parties, in big Pride events, in quiet meetings at work, in food pantries. I find hope in housing projects and healthcare projects, and in the Glasgow Electrolysis Project, which has created actual jobs for trans women and a vital new service for hundreds of us across the city. We know we are failed constantly by mainstream institutions: rather than seek incremental change, is it not time to re-imagine the clinic, re-think the workplace? Our problems will not be solved by refusing to engage with existing services, nor by creating trans charities that replicate existing hierarchies. We need to find ways to build something new entirely.

I find hope in the fact there are more of us out than ever, more connected than ever. These collective endeavors are all so much more important than anything I personally might write, any research I might do, and certainly any “progressive” policy I might influence.

Doom-posting and finger-pointing cannot deliver any of these things. We need to take the time to connect with one another, especially outside the internet. Yes we need to grieve, but we need so much more than this. We need to actively look after one another, and provide space for rest and recuperation. We need to have each others’ backs. We need to connect across difference, and not (re)create hierarchies of oppression or need.

These are no fucking platitudes. This is my life. This is the lifeblood of our shared communities. This is how we create better social determinants for our goddamn health.

Long may we live together.  

Photo of a butch white woman playing a banjo next to a Scottish loch.
Robyn in the Highlands. Photo by Elaine O’Neill.

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wormboys gigs: Greenbelt Festival + fundraiser in Leeds

We have a couple of very exciting events coming up for wormboys in a couple of weeks!

First, on Wednesday 20th August we will be playing a fundraiser gig at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds. Themed around the film I Saw The TV Glow (which promises to be…weird) the event has been organised in support of The Hangout, a super awesome LGBTQIA youth project. We’ll be sharing a stage with oli reeves and Leeds Queers Against Fascism.

The TV is Still Glowing – Get your tickets here!
£8 waged / £4 unwaged + fees.

Event poster for The TV is Still Glowing, featuring an old TV and calm moon face against a blue and pink background. Text reads as follows: a fundraiser for LGBTQ youth club the Hangout. Inspired by I Saw The TV Glow. Wednesday 20th August, 7:30pm. Featuring wormboys, oli reeves and queers against fascism. Tickets £4 unwaged or £8 standard. Hyde Park Book Club.


Secondly, for the weekend of 22-24 August we will be whizzing down to the countryside near Kettering for Greenbelt Festival! This will be my second time performing at Greenbelt, as I gave a talk about trans feminism in 2023. The whole event had thoroughly excellent vibes, especially the Rebel Rouser stage in the woods. I’m excited to be returning there with wormboys this time around for a full set of live music – including lots of material written for our forthcoming debut album. I can’t wait for us to share it!

Greenbelt Festival – Get your tickets here!
Adult tickets £110 – £300: pay what you can.

Poster for Greenbelt festival, featuring many many artists and speakers. Key text reads as follows. Greenbelt: hope in the making. 21-24 August 2025 Boughton House. A festival of artistry, activism, and belief.

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Endorsement: Writing Badly (2025)

In recent years I’ve provided a few written endorsements for cool books and other publications. I’ve decided to start sharing them to this site so more people are aware of these works!

I’m starting off with the first issue of Writing Badly. This is a new journal of letters, written by and for trans women on the subjects of misogyny and feminism. It is – intentionally – only available in print.

Here’s what I had to say about issue 1 of Writing Badly:

“Throw away your phone and read this instead. From cookery to consciousness-raising, from deep theory to casual misandry, from practical advice to impractical advice, the essays and letters of Writing Badly will help you build new worlds.

Imagine deep conversation with the cleverest women you know. Imagine organising with the coolest women you know. Imagine arguing with the most annoying women you know. Imagine being in community with women who will always have your back.

By turns profound and infuriating, beautiful and devastating, this collection has it all.“

Photo of Writing Badly Issue 1. The cover image is greyscale and features an abstract image of several fish.


On publication, I supported Writing Badly through buying myself a copy from my local independent bookshop, for the grand price of a tenner. They didn’t have a copy when I first went in, so I asked them if they could order one in for me. They instead ordered in a load, and now have them on the shelf for other women (and other people). Maybe you can do the same! Alternatively, it’s available to order online through ebay.

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New article: Embodied Experiences of Trans Pregnancy

I recently had a new co-authored research article published in the journal Body & Society, titled Embodied Experiences of Trans Pregnancy. It is part of a special issue on Pregnant Bodies and Embodied Pregnancy.

For this piece of writing, we were particularly interested in how embodiment is gendered and vice-versa. In the article, we draw on interviews with trans men and non-binary people to explore the lived, bodily complexities of trans pregnancy. We consider the strategies trans men and non-binary people engage in to manage their gender presentation during pregnancy, and the degree to which pregnancy might disrupt their ability to control the presentation of gender.

The published article is currently behind a paywall, but you can download a free version here from the University of Glasgow’s Enlighten repository, or from the publications page of this website.

This is likely to be the last published article from the Trans Pregnancy Project, an international study which ran 2017-2021. Together we have written around 15(!) other articles and book chapters, and edited a special issue of the International Journal of Transgender Health. You can learn more on the Trans Pregnancy Project website.

Cover of the journal Body & Society.

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Interview with Xtra: lesbians resisting transphobia

Even if the worst-case scenario occurs and the interim guidance becomes law, Pearce emphasizes that laws “only make sense if people uphold them.” People and organizations must be willing to fight for trans rights, and make the laws essentially impossible to enforce. 

As Pearce puts it, “We need intentional, aggressive, extremely homosexual non-compliance.”


Earlier this month I spoke with journalist Emma Bainbridge about lesbian community responses to the UK’s transphobic Supreme Court judgement. That piece is out now in the Canadian magazine Xtra. You can read it here:

U.K. lesbians are resisting state-mandated transphobia

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Respond to the EHRC consultation together! (10 June)

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s segregation consultation is a horrible document to look at. But if you’re planning to fill it in, you needn’t do so alone.

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday 10th June) I’ll be joining Katy Montgomerie on her livestream from 8pm to talk about and work through the EHRC consultation. We’ll hopefully make the process that bit less grim together, and also highlight other important and perhaps even joyous things that are going on.

If you can’t make it, Katy will also hopefully be able to put a recording of the stream up on her channel at a later point.

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PDF zine: But what can I do? How to fight the trans panic

This is the latest version of a zine I have distributed at wormboys gigs over the last couple of years. I’ve recently updated it to address recent events, including the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling.

The zine is written particularly with allies in mind. It provides some background information on the UK’s anti-trans moral panic, and offers some suggestions for easy things people can do. These include: changing the conversation in everyday settings; making complaints or compliments; writing to politicians; introducing pro-trans policies; refusing to comply with anti-trans policies; supporting small trans organisations; and supporting trans creators.

This zine is intended to be freely copied and distributed. Please feel free to download and share the PDF. If you want to print it as an A5 booklet, simply select “print as booklet” and print onto A4 paper, then fold it in half.

Cover image for the zine, but what can I do? How to fight the trans panic. It contains various images of transphobic newspaper headlines behind the title text.


But What Can I Do? PDF download

You can also download a more accessible simplified version here, which is text-only and will hopefully work with screen readers:

But What Can I do – May 2025 accessible

I am once again distributing the zine at wormboys shows in coming months, as well as queer bookshops such as Category Is Books in Glasgow. However, if you want copies in your area, the best thing to do is to download the PDF and print some off.

Tell your friends!

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It’s a long hard revolution

Lesbian conspiracies in Lausanne

On the evening of Tuesday 15th April 2025, I was widely perceived to be a British lesbian, both legally and socially. By 11am the following day, that was no longer the case, following a ruling by the UK’s Supreme Court.

I was not actually in the UK for this momentous occasion. I was instead in the Swiss city of Lausanne, for a workshop on standards of evidence in sex and gender policy. I was there to consider the very questions the UK’s highest court, in their supreme ignorance, had effectively dismissed. Their ruling determined that the term “sex” in the Equality Act referred to “biological sex”, which in turn should be understood as “the sex of a person at birth”. But what do we actually need to know about when we make policy around sex and gender, and what is the role of evidence in this?

The Tuesday evening found me hanging out in a second-rate Thai restaurant with Professor Sarah Lamble, an esteemed criminologist and fellow dyke. Lamble and I spent some time talking about how conspiracy theories around “disappearing lesbians” highlighted the strange ironies inherent in British anti-trans discourse. The anti-trans movement has been extremely successful in raising “reasonable concerns” around supposed problems that are completely ungrounded in reality, to the point where that reality itself begins to warp.

Mainstream political discourse in the UK increasingly reflects anti-trans claims that lesbians are somehow threatened by trans people, or are even being transed en-masse in gender clinics and youth groups. The true biological attraction between two adult human females is disrupted. Young people are tempted away from lesbianism with promises of luxurious facial hair and male privilege; meanwhile, horrifically manly and/or confusingly attractive trans dykes are introduced to the dating pool.

If these claims were true, we might expect to see some kind of reduction in the number of homosexual females. Instead, the evidence we have indicates quite the opposite. Surveys such as the Annual Population Study show a rising number of lesbians over recent years, part of a wider increase of 1.2 million in the recorded lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population of the UK. This is driven especially by young people coming out, with over 10% of people aged 16-24 identifying as LGB as of 2023.

But what about the lived reality of queer womanhood? Well, there’s great news here too: we are living in a truly historic time for sapphic culture in the UK. Proudly out lesbian and bisexual women can be found across the pop charts, on TV, and across social media. Queer bookshops are on the rise. Pop-up butch bars and new queer cafes can be found in major cities and small towns.  And, excitingly, even the much-maligned lesbian bar is making a comeback, with three permanent venues and numerous occasional nights now running in London alone. It’s all got so out of hand that in 2024 the Queer Brewing company sold a juicy pale ale named Dyke Renaissance, which conveniently listed an educational series of cultural milestones on the can.

If trans people are trying to disappear lesbians, we’re doing a really bad job of it.

Photo of a beer can. Text on the can reads as follows. The great Dyke Renaissance of Spring 24. The lesbian tapas riot of Broadway Market. Rapid increase in lesbian parties. Carabiner sales increase. Finally more than one lesbian bar in London. Leatherdyke night. Top shortage worsens. Bestie to lover pipeline shortens. Queer Brewing, pale ale, 4.4%.


Meanwhile, queer cis women tend to be pretty supportive of trans people. In fact they’re one of the single most supportive demographics in the UK – which is presumably why the Equality and Human Rights Commission is, right now, attempting to ban trans dykes such as myself from associating with any more than 25 biological lesbians at any one time.

On evidence

As lesbian conspiracy theories show, the very concept of evidence has had a bit of a hard time over the past decade.

In the UK, this was perhaps best encapsulated in 2016 by the Conservative politician Michael Gove. While campaigning for Brexit, he declared that the British people “have had enough of experts”. Gove’s claim is echoed in a growing anti-intellectualism across the globe. From the mass purge of universities in Türkiye, to the post-truth bizarro world of Donald Trump, to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza, this trend manifests in blunt and brutal ways. Anti-expert authoritarianism doesn’t care about your facts or your feelings.

However, attacks on evidence can also be more subtle. Gove’s comments are widely quoted, but it’s less well-known that he singled out a particular kind of expert for criticism: “people from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. While this was gloriously vague in a way that allowed the listener to project all kinds of things onto Gove’s words, in context it was nevertheless evocative of the kind of group that tends to advocate for social justice. LGBTQQIAAP groups, perhaps.

From academic thinktanks, to charities, to campaigning organisations, the implicit problem was any kind of challenge to conservative common sense. The UK’s political mainstream has since doubled-down on this approach. In the run up to the 2024 general election, Tory home secretary Suella Braverman criticised “experts and elites”, while the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Michelle Donelan, promised to “kick woke ideology out of science”.

One of Donelan’s targets was the “denial of biology” in research by feminists, social scientists… and biologists. The problem here is that supposedly common sense notions of sex and gender, which assume clean and tidy biological divisions between male and female, collide violently with the beautiful messy reality of the material world. At this point in history, it is well-established that sexual diversity exists throughout nature, that men are not biologically superior to women, that social advantage is not conferred or denied by chromosomes, and that queer, trans, and intersex people exist in the world. The evidence for this is gloriously multifaceted. We find it in laboratories, in systematic reviews, in surveys and questionnaires, in the way that men shout abuse at us in the streets, in how our sexed bodies shift and change under hormonal influence, in the way we feel when we finally have a language that describes our experiences.

Michelle Donelan decided to tackle the thorny problems of feminist science, intersex bodies, and trans existence by commissioning a research project by Alice Sullivan, a supposed sociologist who doesn’t care one jot for any of the evidence outlined above. Published in March 2025, the Sullivan Review insisted that data collection relating to sex and gender should rely on a very narrow definition of biological sex: one that ignores trans and intersex women’s real lives, bodies, and experiences of misogyny, while promoting a sexist model of essentialised womanhood. Her findings were echoed in those of the Supreme Court judges a month later, whose pronouncements on biological sex were made without any reference to relevant social, scientific, or philosophical research on how this might actually be understood or defined in practice. 

To position this as a wholly new trend would, of course, would be inaccurate. Western jurisdictions have long used and abused pseudoscience to oppress minoritised groups, especially in colonial contexts. This can be seen for example in the British state’s shameful embrace of “race science” and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we are now witnessing is an example of the imperial boomerang, in which the logics of colonialism are turned inwards, resulting in increasingly fascist domestic politics.


But did you have a nice time in Switzerland, Ruth?

On that fateful week in April, I joined a group of feminist, trans, and lesbian researchers and activists for the workshop at the University of Lausanne. In the face of increasingly ill-informed policymaking across multiple contexts, it provided us a space to think together about the lessons we might learn collectively from our very different work on healthcare, sports, and prisons.

One overarching theme was the importance of evidence in understanding human experience, in terms of rigorous data collection, careful analysis – and accounting for the lived reality of actual people’s actual lives. A powerful account of the latter point was provided by Dinah Bons, a veteran campaigner for HIV prevention. She pointed out that if a sex worker repeatedly attends a community clinic for her STI tests, this provides evidence that the clinic feels safe enough for her to return regularly, which is far from a given. Such matters are often highly evident to service users and providers on the ground, without any need for a survey or interview.

Another key theme at the workshop was the extent to which various principles of evidence are increasingly abused by politicians, journalists, and institutions.

The concept of evidence has not been rejected wholescale by sexist, transphobic, and lesbophobic policymakers. Rather, “evidence” is increasingly a buzzword to justify particular approaches or points of view, rather than something grounded in a commitment to scholarly standards or an acknowledgement of lived experience. At the workshop, we explored how flawed notions of evidence have been used to support misleading statements or outright lies about human bodies or human experiences. We heard about the use and abuse of evidence in justifying invasive sex-testing for woman athletes, misrepresenting research on young people’s ability to engage in informed decision-making, and defending conversion practices. Notably, while most of these abuses arose from a specifically transphobic politics, they have far wider consequences: especially for women, intersex, and queer people, but also for scientific processes, community consultations, and informed advocacy more broadly.

You can see an example of this in the Cass Review. Through successfully performing the aesthetics of acceptable expertise and science to the satisfaction of the British public, the Review has become what one workshop participant described as a black box. By this they meant that it has become an abstracted justification for policy and practice, handily replacing any ongoing discussion of evidence regarding young trans people’s health and wellbeing. You don’t need to know what the Cass Review actually says or how rigorous it actually is, only that it exists. Well-documented criticisms of the review from healthcare practitioners, academic experts, trans community groups, and (most importantly) young trans people themselves are been rendered irrelevant. The Cass Review is the evidence, and no other systematic review, original research, or personal testimony can henceforth count against it. Not, at least, until 2031 at the earliest: the official end-date of a single £10 million study, based on the Cass recommendations and featuring precisely zero trans researchers.

The British establishment is now attempting to repeat this trick with the Sullivan Review – never mind that projects such as MESSAGE have conducted more extensive and nuanced work on the same topic with a far wider group of experts – and, of course, with the Supreme Court judgement.

Beyond doom

As with Cass, as with Sullivan, it is difficult to capture the sheer enormity of harm caused by the Supreme Court’s pronouncement on biological sex. The consequences are still playing out, and will no doubt continue to do so for many awful months and years.

At the time of writing, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have proposed a programme of mass segregation, designed to discriminate against trans people in the workplace, in public services, and in social groups. The guidance they have written is just that: guidance, not law. Nevertheless, major organisations such as the Football Association, the British Transport Police, and Barclays Bank, all of whom shamelessly paraded rainbows through their social media profiles last Pride season, are falling over themselves to comply. We are witnessing the attempted complete exclusion of trans people from public life, in the latest culmination of a transparent attempt to eliminate us altogether.

In such moments, it can be easy to despair. This is in part because it is easy to forget the strength, resources, power held within trans communities and by our allies. That includes the knowledge and evidence we have access to.

Don’t get me wrong. The people who want to eliminate us are better-funded, better-connected, and now have the Labour government on-side as well as the UK’s traditional right-wing parties. We are not going to win trans liberation overnight.

But then, again, we never were.

Everything I said about lesbian culture earlier is true of trans people too. There are more of us publicly creating art and culture, more of us creating events and running nightclubs and playing in bands and writing essays (hi). There are more community groups providing mutual aid and support when charities and state bodies fail us. And, importantly, we are not alone.

Trans women and non-binary people are a part of the dyke renaissance. We are at the butch bars, and bemoaning the top shortage. We are dancing to Le Tigre and to Chappelle Roan. We are reading Gideon the Ninth and watching We Are Lady Parts and having all the feelings. My partner of the last decade was probably the most surprised of all to learn from the Supreme Court that I am not, in fact, a lesbian, as every bit of evidence from our shared personal lives points to quite the contrary.

I will concede that some trans people are not in fact lesbians, or even queer. Nevertheless, there are so many other places to find us in community with others. Trans people are in trade unions. Trans people are in workplaces. Trans people are in schools and colleges and universities. Trans people are in the streets. Trans people are on the bus. Trans people are in families. Trans people are making families. Trans people are playing football (suck it, Football Association). Trans people are eating pizza. Trans people are restoring the countryside. Trans people are hanging out beside Lake Geneva in the glorious sunshine, enjoying a much-needed break.


There are more of us than ever, and it is too damn late to put us back in a box.

Resistance is fertile

I was honoured to present the keynote presentation at the Swiss workshop. I spoke about the findings of the Trans Pregnancy Project, a study that produced enormous amounts of evidence on the experiences, needs, and perspectives of men and non-binary people who conceive, carry, and give birth.

No matter how much our findings are slammed by the media and billionaire children’s authors and washed-up comedy writers, our peer-reviewed work has demonstrated the lived reality of male and non-binary pregnancy over and over again. Most importantly, it has helped people. We are part of a far wider movement of parent groups, midwives, and researchers who are collectively building knowledge. I am constantly hearing from people who describe how much this knowledge has resulted in better care for them and their child. This kind of story drives everything I do.

Towards the end of my talk, I discussed the anti-trans moral panic, and the Supreme Court judgement. I then showed the below table of findings from the National Maternity Survey. This annual survey involves those who have recently given birth every year in many (but not all!) English hospitals, over the course of a few weeks. Since 2021, they have started asking whether the person giving birth has a different gender to the sex they were assigned at birth – i.e. are they trans?

Table showing data in response to the question, is your gender different from the sex you were assigned at birth. It shows a statistically significant increase in the proportion of people answering "yes", which rises from 0.56% in 2021, to 0.65% in 2022, to 0.77% in 2023, to 1.58% in 2024.


Two things leap out from this table for me. Firstly, the 2021 data shows a very similar proportion of people indicating they are trans when compared to the 2021 censuses in Scotland, England, and Wales. This suggests that, contrary to assumptions around trans infertility or undesirability, trans men and non-binary people may well be just as likely to give birth as cis women are to become birth mothers.

Secondly, the number of trans people giving birth has risen dramatically over four years. Even as the anti-trans moral panic has deepened. Even as attacks on even recognising the existence of trans people in perinatal services have increased. As Del La Grace Volcano once it put it: “resistance is fertile!”

In the face of growing oppression, trans people are simply refusing to disappear. In fact, we are doing the opposite.

This, then, is the power that the anti-trans movement, the Labour party, and the Supreme Court cannot possibly take away from us. The more trans people are out and visible to one another, the more trans people come out and become visible to one another. Sure, we will unfortunately need to think more carefully about where and when we are out, and where and when we are visible, if this is something we even have any power over in our specific lives. I am sure that more trans people will be going stealth in future years, if they can. But regardless – there are more of us in community, more of us organising protests, and more of us than ever in the lives of our friends, families, colleagues, and allies, showing that it possible to have a good life while being trans.

In this context, it is important to know that people from many parts of the world gathered in Lausanne this April to pool our knowledge and skills and experiences. It is important to know that we have each returned to our home countries to share what we gained. It is important for people to know that similar meetings are happening across the world, in community centres and on university campuses, in board rooms and in bedrooms, involving trans people, and feminists, and yes, lesbians. We are constantly building a movement for positive change, and you do not have to be an academic or veteran activist to be a part of it. Trans power is for everyone.

There is much to say what needs doing in the current moment. We need allies to continue fighting alongside trans people for our collective liberation. We need to be demonstrating in the streets, funding mutual aid and legal action, actively resisting complicity in Labour’s eliminationist agenda, and encouraging every public body under the sun to do the same.

Evidence will be helpful for this. Evidence from academic research, sure, but also – as Dinah Bons pointed out – testimony from the everyday reality of trans people’s lives. And oh boy, do we have that evidence.

More of us than ever are producing evidence of trans existence, and trans persistence.

And this is how we win.