This essay builds upon our work from the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024). The essay describes the ongoing transphobic reaction in Britain, particularly crystallized by the British Supreme Court’s April 2025 Ruling, with a focus on community and activist responses to the Ruling. We discuss a number of mobilisations across the UK that have connected the Ruling to recent problems raised by feminists regarding racist and sexist policing. By framing the ruling as the authorisation of state harassment, we consider how the ruling connects to other currents of misogyny that are readily practiced in institutional and media contexts. The ruling is one strategy of separability – of divide and rule – among others.
Contra this ‘exceptionalisation’ of transness, we discuss how trans communities and allies have forged practices of solidarity and care in its wake, and consider the connections between transfeminism and abolition feminism in resisting state violence and cultivating collective safety. We argue that such everyday practices of abolition feminism are key in dismantling the use of the law to divide populations or groups.

The essay appears in dialogue with photographs of protests for trans liberation from Spring 2025 by Tarun Iyer.