Pride, Visibility & Solidarity: Women Will Not Be Safe Until the Most Vulnerable Women Are Safe

Pride, Visibility & Solidarity: Women Will Not Be Safe Until the Most Vulnerable Women Are Safe

Pride Month is often framed as a celebration. And it is: it's colour, community, and the profound act of being visible when the world has told you to stay hidden. But Pride is also, and has always been, a safety issue.

This year, I want to say something clearly, from my own lived experience as a queer woman, a survivor, a neurodiverse woman living with MS and chronic pain, someone who has spent years learning to take up space without apology.

We as women will not be safe until the most vulnerable women are safe.

That is not a slogan. It is a truth that shapes everything I do.

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Who We Stand With

Womanhood is not a single, narrow thing. It never was.

It includes trans women, navigating a world that too often questions their right to exist. It includes queer women and bisexual women, whose experiences are still too frequently erased or minimised. It includes kinky women, sex workers, disabled women, women of colour, neurodiverse women, women whose bodies and choices and identities have been policed, pathologised, or dismissed.

When I say I stand with my trans sisters, I mean it. Not as a performance of allyship, not as a statement crafted for visibility, but because I have seen how systems fail women. I have been failed by them myself. And I know that the women who are most failed, most marginalised, most at risk, are the clearest measure of whether any of us are truly safe.

If your feminism doesn't extend to the most vulnerable women in the room, it is not yet finished.

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Safety Is the Real Question

Here is the assumption I want to gently disrupt: that Pride is about visibility for its own sake.

The corrective: visibility without safety is exposure, not liberation.

When your nervous system doesn't feel safe, being seen feels threatening. That is not weakness. That is your body doing exactly what it was designed to do, protecting you from harm. For so many women, trans women, queer women, women carrying the weight of trauma, women whose identities have been weaponised against them, visibility has historically come at a cost.

So when we talk about Pride, we have to talk about safety. Not just the safety to march in June, but the daily safety to exist. To access healthcare without being dismissed. To report violence without being disbelieved. To move through the world without your nervous system perpetually braced for impact.

You are not broken if visibility feels frightening. Your body adapted to survive. That is what bodies do.

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The Measure of All Women's Safety

There is a tendency, even within women's spaces, to create a hierarchy of who deserves safety first. To fight for some women's rights while quietly sidelining others.

I have never believed in that hierarchy. And working with survivors of sexual trauma for nearly a decade, supporting women whose programmes are now licensed by nearly 20 UK organisations, has only deepened that conviction.

Trauma does not discriminate. Sexual violence does not discriminate. Waiting lists do not discriminate either, they leave everyone waiting, though the most marginalised women often wait longest and receive the least when support finally arrives.

Trans women face some of the highest rates of sexual violence of any group. Sex workers face violence that is rarely counted, rarely prosecuted, rarely even named. Disabled women are at significantly higher risk of abuse and significantly less likely to be believed.

Their safety is not a separate issue. It is the measure of all women's safety.

When we fight for the most vulnerable, we raise the floor for everyone.

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Lived Solidarity, Not Performative Allyship

I want to be clear about what I mean when I say I stand in solidarity.

It is not a badge. It is not a flag in my bio for one month of the year. It is a commitment, imperfect and ongoing, to keep learning, to keep listening, and to keep widening the circle of who I consider worth protecting.

It means examining the assumptions I carry. It means being willing to be corrected. It means using whatever platform and credibility I have built, through years of working in trauma recovery, through the trust of survivors, through being endorsed by organisations like RSVP since 2017, to make space for voices that are too often pushed to the edges.

Solidarity is not agreement on every point. It is the decision that your safety matters to me, regardless.

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Visibility and Safety, The Sanctuary's June Theme

This month inside The Sanctuary, we're sitting with the theme of Visibility and Safety. Because so many of us have learnt, through experience, that being seen carries risk. And we're gently, carefully beginning to explore what it means to be visible on our own terms, in a space that holds us steadily.

Being visible when you don't feel safe is overwhelming. Your nervous system reads it as danger. But when safety comes first, visibility becomes something different. It becomes connection. Recognition. The quiet power of being known.

The Sanctuary is a space where we practise exactly that. It's a place for women navigating trauma, neurodiversity, chronic illness, and perimenopause , women who need a community that sees them without judgment, without pressure, without the performance of being okay.

This month's conversations are grounded in the truth that healing begins with safety, and that being truly seen, in the right space, is part of what heals us.

If you're looking for a community where visibility feels safe, I'd love you to come and find us. The Sanctuary is £25 a month, and the door is always open.

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Coming Home to Yourself

Pride, at its best, is about coming home. To your body. To your identity. To the parts of yourself you were told to hide or minimise or be ashamed of.

That homecoming is not a one-time event. It is a practice. And it is not always comfortable.

For so many of the women I work with, including the queer women, the trans women, the women whose desires and bodies and histories have been used against them, the path to safety runs through self-knowing. Through understanding your nervous system, not as a problem to be solved, but as an intelligent system doing its best.

You are not broken. Your body adapted to survive.

Healing should not have to wait. Not for waiting lists. Not for a political climate that decides your rights are up for debate. Not for anyone's permission.

This Pride Month, I want to celebrate every woman finding her way back to herself. In whatever form that takes. At whatever pace feels right.

Stand steady. Stay grounded. Take up space.

And know that your safety matters , not just to you, but to all of us.

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If you'd like to explore what it means to feel safer in your own skin, you're welcome in The Sanctuary. Join us this June as we sit with Visibility and Safety, together.