Stephen Miller runs a new RWNJ lobbying group for the voter suppression agenda at the state level. It features some of the usual grifting suspects from the Trump administration.
Lots of expertise with the customized large-member-toilet patent guy and Trump’s major domo who knows a lot about overthrowing an election. Sadly, hate-attacks on one of America’s smallest LGBTQ minorities is somehow the face of voter suppression. Worse is preying on toilet fears.
... Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press) responds to the current global crises facing trans lives and rights with a radical collection of ‘transmarxist’ essays that analyse trans survival under capitalism. Featuring writing by a mixture of trans academics, activists, and survivors, the collection charts the relationship between transness and class struggle, including how trans people survive hostile workplaces, state violence, inaccessible healthcare, and the nuclear family.
Huck spoke to the book’s editors, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, about the role of trans people in revolutionary organising, the value of publishing trans theory in a mass-marketed book, and the importance of trans Marxism in challenging the rise of the far-right.
In the book, you say that transgender people are unexpectedly prominent in revolutionary organising and subversive circles. Why do you think transgender people are often at the forefront of political organising?
Gleeson: The simple answer is that trans people are often exposed to the worst of the world. Many of us face down long-term unemployment, and the industries we are well known for working within are also notoriously resistant to labour organising. But it’s not quite as simple as ‘trans people are often impoverished proles and therefore against class society’ (true as that is!). Beyond the typical drain of exploitation, trans people have a specific experience of capitalism.
Our experiences of transition often force us to confront the ways that much of what gets presented to us as ‘natural’ and inevitable are actually flexible and can shift more than people realise. We’re only a century or so into informed human investigations into the endocrine system (i.e. the body’s constant regulation of itself with hormones). Trans people today enjoy the fruits of that discovery in ways that threaten a wider expected order of sexed bodies. It’s an order that is now having to justify itself, at our expense.
O’Rourke: It would be facile, and wrong, to attempt to construct some revolutionary potential out of transition as such. But transition is a deeply personal and intimate practice, one that often requires a significant rupture with much that came before, because it touches nearly every single aspect of social life. You have to come towards a new orientation with yourself, your family, your doctors, your school, your employers, and with the state.
Even those [trans people] whose class background affords them an easier time than most can find a life plan quickly thrown off course. This can often bring with it a renewed and distinct understanding of social exploitation, a keener appreciation for the politics of bodily autonomy, and a desire to commune with those who also wish to change it. As Kate Doyle Griffiths put it: “The left is not only unusually ‘tolerant’ of queers and trans people: it also consists of us.”
Do you think transness has historically been seen as incompatible with Marxism?
Gleeson: That viewpoint still exists today, but I find it very boring. A lot of what we wanted to achieve with this book was helping our movements shift out of contrasting ‘material conditions’ and ‘identity politics’. There’s already a lot of Marxist thinking helping us get out of that dead-end: from the last few years, Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity and Ashley Bohrer’s Marxism & Intersectionality spring to mind. Our collection shows how this same point holds for trans people: whatever we identify as is forged by class society, while often leading us into struggles that are as much about resisting exploitation as anything else.
O’Rourke: The relationship between Marxism and trans issues has often been not so much an ‘unhappy marriage’ but a yawning gulf of indifference. But arguments that wish to cast Marxism as fundamentally incompatible with certain ‘social issues’ (gender, race, sexuality, anti-imperialism and the struggle for decolonisation) would have to dissolve an apparent contradiction: that Marxism is, by far, the most well-travelled social theory of the 20th century, bar none.
Marx has been read by people of all social positions, circumstances, national origins and contexts over the past two hundred years as generations of radicals have, time and again, turned to Marxism and found not just a means of understanding their conditions, but – with a certain amount of creative adaptation – a means to change them. If others see an indissoluble incompatibility, so much worse for them.
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If we look at the world today, we cannot deny that LGBTQ+ realities have been transformed in an unprecedented way compared to heterosexual lives. LGBTQ+ identities were born and developed as a result of the possibilities opened by capitalism, as John D’Emilio explains in his article “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” through free-trade labor, the separation of families from feudal production, material conditions to build communities of women and men outside traditional gender and sexual roles. Members of these identities found, within a few years, huge limits on their ability to effectively concretize this possibility.
This is because, despite the possibilities enabled by the profound social transformations, the church has never stopped considering us sinners, and the capitalist states have used laws and medicine to determine which identities and sexualities are “normal” and which are “deviant.” Despite this, we have achieved, through decades of struggles, including the Stonewall uprising, and the subsequent LGBTQ+ Pride parades around the world, an unprecedented visibility. We appear in movies, TV shows, discographies, and even in top positions in governments and financial institutions; homophobia and transphobia themselves have been acknowledged in many countries, and laws to guarantee rights for LGBTQ+ community have been promised.
This process, which has been underway very recently, could lead to an idea that capitalism is “settling accounts” with the non-realization of the possibilities suggested by its birth. But civil rights for LGBTQ+ and our increasing representation and have not occurred without contradictions or by coexisting peacefully with marginality and repression of non-heterosexual sexualities and non-cisgender genders. More than 70 countries still criminalize love between two people of the same gender and/or trans identities, for example. Nor do these reforms offer a real response to our emancipatory demands: many of the laws approved did not mean equality in life, and neoliberalism took advantage of the conquests we won through mobilization and confrontation against the state to develop a queer industry. This kind of “McDonald’s of Pleasures” sought to frame sex and desire in a consumer market, imprisoning them under capitalism and looking to promote a new social consensus — one of progressive multiculturalism, which accompanies a decadent neoliberalism that attacks the masses, especially the working class, which has become increasingly female, Latin American, LGBTQ+, and Black.
www.leftvoice.org/...