Reclaim The Night Brighton 2025

Transcript of my speech at Reclaim the Night Brighton 2025 - 28th November 2025 

Hi everyone, I’m Victoria, my pronouns are she/her, I'm Director of Trans Pride Hastings and also work for The Clare Project here in Brighton, I’m the Training Lead. I’m really pleased to be here with you all in Brighton tonight. I’m often here for reasons like this, it is a city of many voices, one that has seen the impact of activism, of community solidarity, and of refusal to accept the status quo time and time again. Being here tonight reminds me that the fight for safety and dignity is not abstract - it is lived, it is urgent, and it is necessary.

I take that back to Hastings with me and I want to thank all of you for contributing to that.

People sometimes say gatherings like this are symbolic. That they’re about visibility, about feeling part of something for one night and then going back to the same reality tomorrow. But I'm pretty sure no one standing here right now came for symbolism. You don’t show up on a bitterly cold night, in a political climate as volatile as this one, unless something deeper is at stake. You come because you’re tired of being told to adjust your life around danger. You come because the pressure to stay silent has become unbearable. You come because the promise that 'things will change eventually' has stopped meaning anything at all.

Everywhere I go, the stories do not differ. People avoiding the same unlit paths. Calculating journey's home. Knowing exactly which streets to detour down, which corners to speed past, and which areas you simply don't risk at all after dark. These calculations have become so routine that we believe they’re just part of life. But they’re not. They are evidence of a society that has normalised fear.

And the forces that keep us unsafe are not mysterious either. They’re the same forces we’ve named for decades: misogyny shrugged off as culture, transphobia dressed up as 'common sense', racism embedded in institutions, services gutted until they barely function. A society that treats gendered violence as inevitable is a society that has already abandoned responsibility.

We are living in a moment where feeling safe, to walk home, to take up space, to exist is deniable. That fear is simply the price of existence.

Safety is not an abstract aspiration. It's infrastructure. It’s lighting that works. It’s public transport you can rely on. It is services funded properly, not patchworked together by exhausted staff, volunteers and vulnerable community members. It’s belief instead of suspicion. It’s institutions that prioritise truth over reputation. And right now, too many people across the coast - in this city - are being left without any of that.

And if we’re going to talk about safety honestly, then I have to talk about trans people. Not as a diversion, or after-thought, but as part of the central picture. In the past year, we’ve watched a coordinated effort to turn trans lives into political theatre. To cast us as threats, as intrusions, as problems to be solved. We’ve watched media outlets build entire narratives designed to pit communities against each other. We’ve watched politicians on the far right and, and let's be honest, some much closer to the centre, claim they’re 'protecting women' while simultaneously voting against us.

It is a cynical tactic. A distraction. A way to avoid confronting the real causes of violence by inventing imaginary enemies instead. And it does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make women safer. It simply makes trans people less safe, leaves survivors unsupported, and it fractures the solidarity that movements like this rely on.

I want to be absolutely clear: trans people are not the threat. We never were. The threat is a culture that treats gendered violence as inevitable. The threat is the institutions that fail survivors. The threat is political leaders who exploit fear for power. The threat is the growing normalisation of far-right rhetoric, a rhetoric that dresses itself up as concern while doing nothing to build the conditions where anyone can live free from harm.

The threat is division, where cis women, trans people, non-binary people, sex workers, migrants, disabled people are put on rotation to be singled out, vilified and pitted against each other.

What gives me hope, is that the people gathered here tonight know this. We understand that safety is collective. We know that intersectionality is not an academic concept; it is the day-to-day reality of who gets listened to, who gets believed, and who gets dismissed.

We know misogyny and transphobia don’t just materialise. That they are built and maintained by the powerful. And because they are built, they can be dismantled. And every time someone tries to split our communities apart, they reveal exactly how frightened they are of what we can achieve together.

We have to recognise, though, about the weight many of us are carrying. This work, and it is work... is heavy. The grief, the fear, the rage, it accumulates. It wears people down. Some of us have been doing this for decades. Some of us have lost people we love. Some of us have simply been ground down by the constant demand to justify our own humanity. Some choose to stand, some are forced. These aren’t individual burdens, they are political ones. And when we gather like this, the weight doesn’t disappear. But it does change. It becomes evidence of the world we’re fighting to change and the reason we refuse to stop.

Because the landscape we are confronting is not one of isolated failures. It is an entire system that consistently chooses institutional convenience over the safety of the public. Reports vanish into processes designed to minimise damage to reputations rather than prevent harm. Survivors face suspicion before support. Trans people are treated as complications in systems that were never built with our lives in mind. I can't stress enough how these failures reveal priorities - and safety is not one of them.

And the pattern of who bears those failures is not random. It is always the communities pushed to the margins: those living with racism, poverty, disability, insecure housing, precarious work, or open hostility because of gender or sexuality. These communities face greater risk and fewer protections, and that imbalance is not an accident - it is the architecture of inequality itself. Any movement serious about ending violence has to confront the structural forces that make some lives so readily dismissed or unheard.

I want to take a moment to honour the people who cannot be here. Those who didn’t feel safe enough to come. Those who are grieving. Those who have been lost to violence on our streets, in their homes, or institutions that failed them. We carry them with us tonight. We walk in their memory, and for their future.

I'll end with this:

We are not powerless. Far from it. This is not symbolic. It is transformative. It is how change has always begun.

The night has never belonged to those who harm us.

It never will.