PHOTOS BY TARUN IYER
We commissioned the following text to the two authors of the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024), Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. It describes the ongoing transphobic reaction in Britain, particularly crystallized by the British Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling. Against this, trans communities and allies forge practices of solidarity, care, and abolition feminism, resisting state violence and cultivating collective safety.
Transphobia, usually in the form of transmisogyny, has been a steady feature of Britain’s media landscape, and its strongest ideological export product. Now, driven by funds from a fantasy writer, the imaginations of reactionary women, and some gay men, have wangled themselves into a ruling of Britain’s’s Supreme Court. In a mind-bogglingly contrived argumentation from three judges, released in April 2025 about the category of “sex” in the light of the Equality Act, it seems that “biological” sex—the administrative one assigned at birth, based on a hasty visual inspection of a baby’s genitals—is “real” because “women can get pregnant.” Sex is thereby made to function as a protected characteristic under equality law, rather than the more social aspect of “gender.” In Britain there’s a huge tension between, on one side, the State and its institutions, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the government, some sports federations and, on the other, people who protest the ruling. The protesters are not only trans people, their lovers, friends, but also a large constellation of union organizers, neighbors, and other indignant folk who flock together and show up to protests and are refusing to throw trans people under the bus.