IT’S OURS!

At 6.45pm on a chilly Saturday in October 2025, six women huddle in Nottingham city centre, wearing beanies, winter boots and bodycams. Suffragette flags ripple above us. Our signs read “Womanhood Is Not A Costume” and “Reclaim the Noun: Adult Human Female”. We’re waiting for the Reclaim the Night (RtN) procession, to protest at Nottingham Women’s Centre organising a march for females that enthusiastically invites males to join. We never see the marchers. We suspect they heard about our action and avoided our truth-telling altogether. So this year, we’ve created our own march, in the spirit of our 2025 action and the original marches nearly 50 years ago.

First, let’s start with the downfall of Reclaim the Night (RtN) in Nottingham. A decade of footage on YouTube charts its shift from a women-centred march, born of male violence against women, to an exercise in virtue signalling.

In 2016, the march is led mostly by women. Women and girls, young and old, sing and chant defiantly, carrying signs such as “My body, my choice” and “I’m reclaiming my night”. However, one lone figure towers above the rest holding an ominous “Trans Women Bash Back” sign. Ugh. And so it begins.

Fast forward to last year’s march, where men who say they are women take centre stage. As one speaker drones: “there is so much division and hate being created and we want to march in solidarity with ALL women. We want to make a particular special mention to the women who feel especially fearful…because of the rise of…transphobia.”

The photographs are worse. A tired-looking woman holds a “Terfs suck” sign; another carries a trans flag proclaiming “Safety 4 all women”. Then come the nauseating slogans: “Transphobia kills women”, “Sisters not Cisters” and the baffling “if you don’t fight for all women then you stand for no women”. An angry-looking male with a thousand-yard stare holds a sign declaring that he IS a woman, as if daring any woman to object.

Nottingham has a murky track record of failing women. In February 2025, a large, baying crowd of fanatical trans activists kettled attendees at a Let Women Speak event, forcing us to relocate to the police station on Maid Marian Way for fear of our physical safety. Then, on International Women’s Day this year, Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen and local women were ejected by police from an event after asking women’s organisations about their single-sex space policies.

Where the city fails women, a dedicated group of women’s rights activists stand strong. We saw clearly the spectacle Reclaim the Night Notts had become, particularly under the leadership of Nottingham Women’s Centre (NWC) in 2025. NWC has debased the cause it was originally set up for - to support women in immediate distress, including those fleeing abusive men, often with their children. What now exists is a captured organisation which panders to the TQIA+ ideology and suffers from a painful dose of delusion where ‘woman’ is in the name but not in the practice. 

NWC’s website says it exists to “help all self-identifying women achieve their goals”. Given the Supreme Court ruling, perhaps it should rebrand as a ‘people’s’ or, better still, a ‘human’s’ centre. Its obsession with ‘trans inclusion’ has driven women away. Last year, local women’s groups held secret RtN banner-making workshops away from the centre to ensure no males would be present.

Then, in August, something interesting happened. RtN Nottingham, the previous NWC-backed organisers, announced they had “paused” the event for 2026. “Whilst this may be disappointing”, they said, they wanted to “[ensure] that all women, including…trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people feel valued, represented and supported”. Our terfy senses were tingling. Could it be that NWC had to reconsider the purpose of RtN now that the Supreme Court ruling had reminded us all of the legal definition of ‘woman’? Or were its coffers running dry, leaving it unable to pay a freelance event and communications co-ordinator £2,500 plus expenses?

Upon this news,we sprang into action, joining forces with women’s groups across Nottingham and the East Midlands to ensure women could still assemble peacefully, march and demand safety on our streets. There was an added bonus: this march would be for women alone, Adult Human Females.

We’ve organised this march to get RtN back to its original purpose - an annual event founded and run exclusively for women, by women. It’s premise is simple: male violence against women and girls is rooted in biological sex and women’s sex-based rights, spaces and physical safety are paramount.

And we’ve had the kind of feedback from women planning to attend that makes all of this planning and hard work worthwhile - 

“I was so pleased to hear about the RtN Nottingham female only event. I have felt excluded the last few years due to men being included. It’s important women own this event and honour its history. This is a sex-based event to say ‘end violence against women and girls.’ - Ellie from Derby

“Nottingham is getting a bad reputation for not being safe for women and girls. I’m so pleased that RtN has been resurrected by a group of grassroots women and recreated as near to the original of 1977 as possible: a march for women (females) to highlight male violence against women and girls” - Cindy from Nottingham

It’s been wonderful to organise, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. But we are grassroots in all our scrappy glory: completely independent, with no public or corporate funding. Trans activists peddle the wacky conspiracy theory that women’s sex-based rights groups are lavishly funded, a myth shamefully repeated by Nadia Whittome, MP for Nottingham East, who claimed LWS are “doing the bidding of multi-millionaires and oligarchs”. RtN Notts 2026 is funded entirely from our own pockets. We’re working women decorating signs at our kitchen tables and holding Zoom meetings while making dinner.

We’re proud to reclaim Reclaim the Night for Nottingham’s women and girls when they need it most, as organisations set up for women double down on ideological messages and deny women safe, sex-based spaces.

Women are warmly invited to join us in Nottingham on Saturday 7 November 2026. We’ll gather at 6.45pm at Sneinton Market before marching through the city, voices loud and banners aloft. See you there!

Reclaim the Night - Sneinton Market, Nottingham - 6.45pm on Saturday 7th November