Following the Supreme Court Judgment,
The Feminist Library reaffirms our unwavering solidarity with trans people in the face of the Supreme Court Ruling handed down on April 16th 2025. Despite debate about how the ruling will be applied by the government and institutions and the fact it is not law, we anticipate that, alongside the EHRC interim guidance, it will have widespread effects on trans people’s ability to access state resources and shared public spaces. We know that the gendered application of this ruling will have a disproportionate impact on trans women and trans femmes, placing them at further risk of state violence from police as well as harassment from members of the public.
This legal claim has been the basis of far right campaigning by women’s organisations in this country for years. It arises in the context of increasingly fascistic social policy propelled by the scarcity logics produced by two decades of austerity measures. We must pay attention to the tactics used by For Women Scotland and other groups in order to successfully combat them. As radical feminists, our task is not only to reframe the debate in the mainstream but to move beyond the liberal affirmation that ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’ in order build long-lasting, life-affirming mutual aid networks of support, a radical feminist ethic of collective responsibility, that seeks to sustain trans life in the face of attempts to extinguish it by the state. Because we are abolitionists, we believe that it is not the law, courts or rights frameworks who decide our fates, only we have the power to do this.
Since 2016, we have been clear that the Feminist Library wholeheartedly opposes any feminist projects that seek to define womanhood using biological essentialism or re-inscribe rigid ideas of sex as an immutable truth (we reaffirmed this stance in 2021 with a collective statement on Transphobia and Accountability available on our website). We see this ruling as part of a fascistic attempt to make simple what is complex about human existence. The framing of ‘biological sex’ as ‘uncomplicated’, ‘common sense,’ or ‘self-evident’ betrays the logic at the heart of radical feminist projects: that it is the world that produces us and that if nature is unjust, we must change it. At the Feminist Library, we believe that feminism is a political methodology that seeks freedom for every person on earth and we use feminist theory as a means of analysing our material conditions and working to transform them.
It is precisely the legacies of black, trans and lesbian feminist thought in the United Kingdom that help us understand that feminism’s enemies are capitalism and the gendered division of labour, the family, the surveillance state, imperialist war committed in our names, climate catastrophe, the prison, our inability to access housing, education, childcare provision, healthcare, domestic violence services and so much more. We are committed to building, alongside a range of organisations, a capacious and broad based feminist movement that retrains our focus on the forms of exploitation and the uneven distribution of resource that kills women daily in this country and across the world. It is the violent and structural expression of gender, the regime of gender, in all its forms that kills, cages, detains and limits our attempts at liveable life. We will not be distracted.
Feminism for us is a messy political tradition, filled with contradiction and we must loudly, and vehemently object to the use of the feminist project to limit the safety of trans people, trans women especially. We must also be critical of the ugliest parts of our tradition: the histories of feminist justifications for colonial violence, war and fascist social policy. We feel it is important to reiterate this because we understand what is at stake in this political moment: far right women’s organisations are wagering the feminist tradition, a liberatory political genealogy, to further state violence.
When the state and its institutions act to break our solidarity, our response should be to strengthen those bonds instead. In the words of Nat Raha and Mijke Van Der Drift “Indeed, a transfeminist ethics, the practice of care and solidarity, are ways to manifest alternatives of support, survival and nourishing worlds, while challenging and dismantling the separability of white supremacist states and cultural logics. Through this ethics, we practice the refusal of a system that enacts dispossession and harm, that mobilises separability as a contemporary form of segregation.” Our work as a Library and archive must include cultivating the capacity to envisage, imagine and create different futures where all women and all people are safe and free.
We have thought long and hard about what we, as a small collective, can offer materially. We want the library to be a resource for radical grassroots organisations working to transform material realities for trans people. We want it to be a space for people to learn, grow and to access feminism as an intellectual tradition as well help us expand our collecion. To this end, we are offering our space for free to radical grassroots trans organisations to organise, meet, share resources, host events and provide support and solidarity for one another. All are welcome, we do not police gender in our spaces. The Feminist Library is a space to strategise for what comes next on every front: in the courts, on the streets and in the home. For enquiries into booking the hall for free, please contact our events team at events@feministlibrary.co.uk.
A Very Short Reading List:
Trans Femme Futures – Nat Raha and Mijke Van Der Drift
The Invention of Woman -Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Black on Both Sides – C. Riley Snorton
A Short History of Transmisogyny – Jules Gill Paterson
Enemy Feminisms – Sophie Lewis
Vocabularies of the non-normative – Zethy Matebeni and Thabo Msibi
The Unforgivable Transgression of Being Caster Semenya – Tavia N’yongo, Bully Bloggers
Transgender Marxism – Jules Gleeson and Elle O’RourkeFeminism Against Cisness – Emma Heaney
Black Trans Feminism – Marquis Bey
Deadly and Slick – Sita Balani
Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation – Jules Gleeson
Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue – Leslie Feinberg
Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens – Cathy J. Cohen
We Want it All: An Anthology of Transpoetics – edited by Kay Gabriel and Andrea Abi-Karam