Written for LinkedIn but sharing here too in solidarity and love for my trans family and friends.

LinkedIn began with a clear mission: to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

For whose ends?

We’re almost all masked on LinkedIn. Trust me — I’m neurodivergent, I know. Chasing the algorithm, curating tone, watching words, worried about the consequences of speaking outside the echo chamber.

As part of my year of being curiously active on here, I’m paying attention to what’s discussed — especially in the context of recent news, global and UK.

Why aren’t more UK professionals talking about what’s happening in the USA? Thinking ahead, like professionals, on how we should be anticipating the ripple effect here?

I can’t help but be reminded of the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came…” Every erosion of rights, every narrowing of legal recognition, sets precedent. It always starts somewhere. And it almost never ends there.

Yesterday, in the UK, they came for trans women.

The UK’s highest court ruled that only biological — not trans — women meet the legal definition of “woman” under equality law.

And the government says, “it’s good we have clarity for women.”

I’m a woman. I wholly disagree. This isn’t clarity.

This is also not biology. It’s ideology dressed up in legal robes. A slow, strategic narrowing of who counts. Who gets protected. Who gets to belong.

We are quietly watching the first significant tests of the hard-right, US-style culture war playbook in the UK. JK Rowling — a billionaire — funded this.

Of course, the ruling insisted it wasn’t delegitimising trans people, nor privileging one group over another.

But it did.

This isn’t just about trans rights. It’s how we excuse institutions in how they define who is equal enough to protect. It’s about how we let fear and profit reshape our laws, our workplaces, our norms — conversations I want more of on LinkedIn.

What kind of careers are we building? What kind of leadership do we want to foster?

As my brilliant non-binary teen, Bea, put it:

“People don’t understand exclusionary spaces — the culture of the group defines who comes. If it’s built around cis women’s experiences, trans women might not want to go anyway.”

And it’s not just about a ruling. It’s about what we let happen after. We need to talk about it and what it means for all women:

The women who don’t fit the tidy, binary ideal of womanhood. The tall girls. The broad-shouldered ones. Those who don’t want children, or can’t have them. The ones who like football, hate dresses, never mastered the “right” kind of femininity. The women told they were too loud, hair too short, hips too narrow. The women who didn’t — or couldn’t — breastfeed, those who don’t shave, who choose or have to stay at home.

And the biologically intersex people born into bodies this binary system pretends don’t exist — surgically and socially erased.

And most of all, trans men and women. 

If this platform is for professionals, then let’s act with moral professionalism. Say or share something that benefits someone other than you.