{"id":376,"date":"2021-06-08T11:23:06","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T11:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=376"},"modified":"2021-08-01T09:02:55","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T09:02:55","slug":"trans-liberation-and-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=376","title":{"rendered":"Trans Liberation and Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oppression is not a direct result of physiological features but the social role assigned in general to those who have those features, and while the gender binary oppresses us all, it particularly oppresses those for whom it is a daily prison and for whom their\/our daily transgression leads to physical and mental violence in the family, in the workplace and on the streets.\u00a0 That’s among the many arguments in this\u00a0 document on support for Trans Liberation recently agreed by the Socialist Resistance Editorial Board (and endorsed by ecosocialist.scot).\u00a0 It was originally published here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Back to basics<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Our understanding of the term gender is that it is separate from the term sex, the latter refers to physiological features, the former to a socially constructed role. To quote Simone de Beauvoir: \u2018one is not born but rather becomes a woman\u2019. This has always been the general position of Marxist feminists \u2013 oppression is not a direct result of physiological features but the social role assigned in general to those who have those features.<\/p>\n

There is obviously a whole lot of nuance available in understanding HOW the fact that MOST people with the physiological features identified with female give birth and nurture children impacted the social role of people with those same physiological (or perceived to be) features. The Fourth international 1979 resolution on\u00a0women\u2019s liberation<\/a>\u00a0does not pretend to lay out a complete picture. However it is clear that our analysis and strategic orientation is not that of what we call radical feminists, i.e. that men are the root cause of women\u2019s oppression and thus the enemy.<\/p>\n

We think neither sex nor gender are determinant in how people perceive themselves, it is possible for people to reject one or both of them and many people do to greater or lesser extent. Women\u2019s oppression does not derive from our sex or biology rather from the societies in which we live that require us to have a primary role in social reproduction which plays an important role both in paid and unpaid labour in \u2018socially necessary labour time\u2019, the labour time that is required to keep production going for profit in capitalist economies.<\/p>\n

Social reproduction is the reproduction of the labour power of the working class to serve its role in the capitalist economic system. A part of the production of socially necessary labour is done outside of the labour market in the home where it is not directly covered by wages. It is not physical reproduction only but also basic education, nursing, caring, cooking and cleaning of the family home and care, not only for children but others in our households that need support and assistance. Moreover, when women enter into the capitalist labour market, they often wind up trapped in employment which is based on traditional women\u2019s labour which is then viewed as unskilled and of little value and therefore worse paid that traditionally \u2018male\u2019 jobs.<\/p>\n

Marxist feminists do not usually use the term \u2018the patriarchy\u2019 and indeed argue against its use explaining that the term gives rise to a conception that there are two systems: patriarchy and \u2018class society\u2019 (or \u2018capitalism\u2019, depending on which Marxists from which tradition you are discussing this with). There are a number of works on the question of \u2018dual systems\u2019 theory and indeed Lise Vogel\u2019s seminal work provides one way forward, and is the root of the development of social reproduction theory, which is explicitly Marxist, and called \u2018Towards a unitary theory\u2019.<\/p>\n

This is not counterposed in any way to also adopting an intersectional approach also within a Marxist framework in which different forms of oppression coexist, reinforce and sometimes contradict each other, and in which we have a political responsibility to stand with the oppressed, working with those differences and turning them from weakness into strength.<\/p>\n

A general agreement with this analytical approach is important because it affects how we act politically. If women\u2019s oppression derives from social constructs we can organise to change them, but if they are derived from biology then our options are much more limited.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we understand it, those who call themselves \u2018gender critical\u2019 reject these positions and link the definition of woman\u00a0directly\u00a0<\/strong>to the physiological features. Note that we have not used the term \u2018Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists\u2019 (TERF) in this document, though it is used by some trans people to describe those that organise against them. The term is confusing because there are radical feminists who are trans inclusive and other feminists who would define themselves as socialist feminists who organise on the basis of \u2018sex-based rights\u2019 and are therefore trans (and intersex) exclusive. It is not helpful to use a term that people see as an insult when attempting rational discussion with those who may be influenced by these ideas.<\/p>\n

The \u2018gender critical\u2019 people also demand specific rights for those born with (or assigned as born with, if the \u2018gender critical\u2019 people even envisage that possibility that things are assigned rather than simply wired in) the physiological features judged as women\u2019s \u2013 what they call \u2018sex based rights\u2019. Such a road is dangerous \u2013 for what it would imply for other physical differences e.g. for disabled people or intersex people as well as trans people \u2013 and also completely unnecessary as we can\u2019t think of a circumstance where we would argue that rights should be granted on such a physiological basis. Furthermore, there is a hidden political trajectory in the argument of these groups, that for trans people to gain rights means taking them away from cis (non trans) women \u2013 this is like arguing for crumbs not the whole bloody bakery.<\/p>\n

Binaries and determinism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Acceptance of the gender binary \u2013 by which we mean that throughout the natural and human world there are only ever two sexes and two genders \u2013 and that the sex assigned to everyone at birth is always in line with their physiology which is assumed in itself to be always uncomplicated \u2013 would also politically limit our options. There are many reputable articles which show that there is much evidence to the contrary in the biological sciences for example: \u00a0https:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/sex-redefined-1.16943<\/a>\u00a0https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/voices\/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia\/<\/a><\/p>\n

As comrades have pointed, out there are parallels between some of the discussion in this frame and that about race and biology. It\u2019s surely inconvertible on the left that biological determinism has long been used to justify imperialism and racism. Notions of \u2018women\u2019s brains\u2019 seem to us to have terrifying parallels with the deeply reactionary notions of \u2018negroid brains\u2019 and so on. The need to think outside the binary is not only based on an understanding of biological sciences but also on the complexities of different human societies. See for example:\u00a0http:\/\/www.gendertrust.org.uk\/gender-concepts-around-the-world\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Feminism in its many forms has always questioned gender stereotypes, whether they are about the socialisation of children into pink and blue, into different types of playthings, of recreational activities or into training and work, or notions of which competences should be more valued etc.<\/p>\n

The gender binary oppresses us all, but particularly oppresses those for whom it is a daily prison and for whom their\/our daily transgression leads to physical and mental violence in the family, in the workplace and on the streets. It also leads to exclusion from services or their provision only on the basis of conformity to rules which negate individual selfhood<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A partial history<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Gender identities outside the binary have always existed. Gender identities don\u2019t necessarily have a relationship to sexuality. But the construction of sexual identities in a more fixed way under capitalism have also had an impact on trans identities. Michelle O\u2019Brien explains it like this in\u00a0Abolish The Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development<\/em>: \u2018In the prostitution and sexual subcultures of the industrializing city, people seized on new forms of gender transgression. A lexicon of cross-dressing emerged, as alongside cis sex workers other new transfeminine gender deviants walked the streets of London, Amsterdam and Paris: Mollies, Mary-Anns, he-she ladies, queens. They sold sex to the bourgeoisie on the streets, ran from police, fought in riots, held regular drag balls, and worked in one of the estimated two thousand brothels specializing in male-assigned sex workers scattered across London\u2019. Similar points have been made, perhaps in less detail, by many others.<\/p>\n

There is a complex relationship between early theories of gay and lesbian identities and trans identities in some early theories eg those of Ulrichs a very influential German writer and activist in the 1860s who described gay men as being of a third sex \u2013 \u2018Uranian\u2019 (derived from Plato\u2019s ancient discussion of that possible third category of being). Ulrichs\u2019 theories influenced Magnus Hirschfield who in 1897 founded the groundbreaking Scientific-Humanitarian Committee which campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality (and won only partial support from the German Socialist Party before the Nazis took control).<\/p>\n

These ideas had international impact, for example on English utopian socialist Edward Carpenter (1844 \u2013 1929), who himself was a collaborator with the early socialist William Morris. And while these theories focused more on gay men, Radclyffe Hall\u2019s (1929) novel\u00a0The Well of Loneliness<\/em>\u00a0also poses things in a similar framework.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0earliest recorded example<\/a>\u00a0of gender reassignment surgery is 1917. This kind of surgery became more frequent in the 1970s \u2013 with\u00a0Jan Morris<\/a>\u00a0as a prominent example \u2013 but was hugely expensive and still pathologised. The Greek model, especially amongst men, i.e. the idea that young men were always passive and effeminate, was playing out in parts of the commercial gay scene as late as the 1970s in Britain.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien talks of the particular position of trans women of colour: \u2018Among queers in major US cities from the late 1950s on, trans women of color were the most starkly visible, leaving them the most vulnerable to street harassment and violence. They served as the consistent foil representing deviant queerness for police, mainstreaming gays, and gender radicals alike. Trans women of color were almost entirely excluded from formal wage labor, instead surviving through streetbased sex work and crime. These trans women of color likely numbered in the low hundreds in many American major cities, but acted as the central figures in a broader underworld of thousands of motley lumpenproletarian queers, including other non-passing gender deviants, homeless queer people, queer drug addicts, sex workers, and gay criminals\u2019. While her account is based on the US it has much in common with developments in Britain and other advanced capitalist countries.<\/p>\n

It is important to point out that while there have often, perhaps always, been a trans presence in the LGBTIQ movement, this has been differently described, and there are significant complexities about the relationship between concepts of gender and issues of sexuality. Both\u00a0trans<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0other<\/a>\u00a0voices from the LGBT movement have pointed out that many of the tropes directed against the LGBT movement as a whole are now directed primarily against trans people particularly in terms of the denial of the rights of young people.<\/p>\n

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Assessing trans oppression<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Let us begin here by taking seriously key trans stats around mental health for trans people. Although this data is couched in terms of the mental health outcomes actually it contains information about how the actions of others are responsible for very negative impacts on trans lives.<\/p>\n