Here is the story you will not hear on the front page: women organising not against trans people, but alongside them. A new group has formed under the banner "Not in Our Name", making clear that the anti-trans movement does not speak for all women, does not speak for most women, and does not speak for them. That is worth pausing on, because the media landscape has spent years suggesting the opposite.

The framing we have all been subjected to positions women and trans people as natural opponents, as though feminism has a fixed amount of compassion to allocate and giving any to trans women necessarily takes it from someone else. That framing is wrong, and more women are saying so out loud. "Not in Our Name" is one of them. Good.

What does feminist solidarity with trans people actually look like?

It looks like this. It looks like women saying: trans women are women, and the fight for their dignity is part of our fight, not a threat to it. It looks like recognising that the same forces pushing hardest against trans rights, the same rhetoric, the same political energy, the same newspapers, have never been particularly interested in women's liberation either. The "protect women" framing deployed against trans people has been used to restrict abortion, police women's bodies, and keep women out of public life for as long as anyone can remember. Feminism that makes common cause with those forces is not protecting anyone.

Solidarity means naming what is actually happening. Trans women face violence, discrimination, unemployment, housing insecurity, family rejection, and denial of healthcare at rates that should horrify anyone who cares about women's wellbeing. Non-binary people face erasure. Trans men face a world that often refuses to see them at all. These are women's issues, gender issues, human issues, and a feminism that looks away from them has lost the plot.

Why does it matter that women are organising on this?

Because the public narrative has been captured. Open a mainstream newspaper on any given day and you will find a piece claiming to defend women's rights by attacking trans people's existence. The voices of women who reject that framing are systematically underrepresented, which means groups like "Not in Our Name" are doing something important simply by existing and saying so clearly.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have had to fight for decades to be heard at all, often without the institutional backing, the column inches, or the political allies that their opponents enjoy. When cisgender women step into that space and say "not in our name", it shifts something. Not because trans people need cisgender women to validate them, they do not, but because movements are stronger together, and because it directly challenges the false claim that gender-critical politics represents women as a group.

It does not. It never did.

Feminism has always included trans women

Trans women have been part of feminist organising, queer liberation movements, and grassroots activism for decades. The idea that their inclusion is new, or contested, or threatening is a recent political construction, not a historical fact. Trans women were at Stonewall. Trans women have been in women's refuges, women's healthcare spaces, and women's political movements throughout living memory, and the sky has not fallen.

What has changed is the political will to weaponise gender as a culture-war issue, and the media appetite to amplify it. Groups like "Not in Our Name" are a direct answer to that: a reminder that the culture war is manufactured, that most women are not at war with trans people, and that solidarity is both possible and already happening.

Trans lives are ordinary, joyful, rich human lives. The women who are standing up to say that are not making a concession or taking a risk. They are simply telling the truth. And the more voices that join them, the harder that truth becomes to drown out.