At a recent inquest into the July 2022 death of trans activist Taylor Atkinson, a jury recorded his death as suicide and found that the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence was likely the most significant factor in driving him to that despair.
After serving 13 years on what should have been a three-year 265-day sentence, Taylor was repeatedly denied freedom simply because he could not prove he had a future the state deemed ‘safe’.
The absence of a release date – the very heart of the IPP regime – stripped him of hope, eroded his mental health and trapped him in a cycle of self-harm and rejection that the inquest concluded contributed directly to his death.
Even when he cried out for protection in his final days, asking to be constantly watched, his pleas were ignored – a tragic failure of care and humanity.
Below is a speech delivered to a memorial protest in Newcastle for Taylor by Elena Odesa, FRFI supporter.
Comrades, friends, and all who stand for justice –
I am Elena from the organisation Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Today I speak of Taylor. A trans comrade. A human being. Someone crushed under the weight of a system determined to silence difference, to erase identity, to punish hope.
Taylor was imprisoned by the state under an indeterminate sentence – a merciless tool of repression. Even after his sentence expired, he faced no release date; the walls around him stretched on, indefinite. His ‘crime’ was not just a past act, but a future judged untrustworthy – a future the state feared, a future bound in prejudice.
This inhuman sentence, known as Imprisonment for Public Protection, was introduced to supposedly protect society – but in reality it has created a regime of endless punishment. Under IPP, the state holds power to detain indefinitely, subject only to the judgement of a parole board. Even though IPP was abolished years ago, thousands remain locked up under it, many for crimes that once would have carried relatively short sentences.
The regime of IPP has been described by human rights observers as ‘psychological torture.’ Suicide rates among those imprisoned under IPP are disproportionately high. The system does not rehabilitate, it destroys. It does not heal – it erodes hope.
But Taylor’s story is not just about IPP. It is about the deeper, structural violence inflicted by the capitalist state on trans people and other oppressed communities.
In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that under the Equality Act 2010, ‘sex’ must be read as biological sex, not gender identity – even for people holding gender recognition certificates. This ruling legitimises the exclusion of trans people from single-sex spaces: toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, shelters – even prisons. Stripped of legal protections that barely recognised our existence, trans people are once more rendered disposable, invisible, and vulnerable.
Under such a ruling, how easy does it become for the British prison system – built on control and dehumanisation – to treat trans people as ‘other’? How easy to deny us dignity, proper medical care, safe facilities, basic respect? For a trans person inside prison, every door becomes a barrier; every corridor a danger; every moment a threat. This is the calculus of state-sanctioned violence. And for Taylor, it became lethal.
Let us be clear: this is not simply ‘bad luck,’ or ‘an unfortunate case.’ This is systemic. This is capitalism and state power working in concert to keep certain people down — to punish difference, to erase identity, to guarantee control. When the world insists on rigid categories – male, female, ‘safe,’ ‘dangerous’ – the state seizes the power to decide who deserves freedom, who deserves dignity and who deserves to live.
Taylor paid with his life. The violent indeterminacy of IPP. The institutionalised transphobia codified by the courts. The neglect, the invisibility, the dehumanisation: the prison complex – the capitalist state – killed him.
We must honour his memory not with silence, but with struggle. We must reject the IPP regime – call on all IPP prisoners to be resentenced, freed and rehabilitated with dignity. We must reject legal orders that deny trans people our humanity. We must fight for a world in which no state, institution or law has the right to condemn someone to death simply for existing differently.
To all trans comrades, to all those locked up, to those marginalised, to those who survive: we stand with you. We will not rest while people are erased, while bodies are broken, while spirits are crushed. From the ashes of this injustice, we raise a demand: abolish IPP now, dismantle transphobic laws and build a world where trans liberation is inseparable from working-class liberation in the fight for socialism.
Taylor – we see you. We remember you. We fight for you. In your death, we find not silence, but fuel – the fire of resistance, solidarity and hope.
