16.02.2023

Moving towards the positive

Tory culture wars have deep roots and deadly consequences. Mike Macnair digs down into history and links the oppression of women and trans people

This is the third article in a series triggered by the Tory veto of the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.¹

It appears shortly after the murder of trans teenager Brianna Ghey, which the police now say (after initial denials) may have been a hate crime.² At one level, if this is true, we might say that her blood is on the hands of the Tory leadership and their press arm, who cynically decided to use culture wars around the trans issue to ‘do’ the opposition. The promotion of hate crimes is the natural and probable consequence of this sort of culture-wars witch-hunting - on race as much as on gender. At another level (again if it is true that it is a hate crime), this is very far from being the first hate crime against trans people, so it is not only the press witch-hunting which drives such crimes.

In my February 2 article, I argued that the ‘gender recognition’ approach is a political trap, because it invites support from broad masses for Tory witch-hunting and does not provide any political levers for combatting this problem. I concluded that escaping the political trap that is the ‘gender recognition’ approach requires us to go a level below what was discussed in that article, in order to try to work out what might be a positive programmatic line in the interests of the working class and socialism on ‘trans questions’. I said that it would “have to be one that is not grounded on ‘trans’ as an independent single issue and/or on the politics of anti-discrimination and ‘rights’”.

In the February 9 article, I argued against a series of common assumptions made both for and against trans rights, which tend to disable any emancipatory politics. This article tries to move towards the positive.

This is no more than a hypothesis of a possible approach. I hope to be corrected as necessary by people who are better biologists or anthropologists than I am, or who have looked at a wider range of the historical sources and literature. The line of this article is merely my individual responsibility.

In the first article I posed the question: what is it that underlies the ability of the Tories to make their fraudulent culture-wars campaign on the ‘trans issue’ work, that is, obtain mass support? At an immediate level, I argued, the problem was that the ‘gender recognition reform’ approach of the Scots bill was a trap, in that it posed itself in a way which automatically set up a conflict between trans women and ‘cis’ women for scraps of ‘recognition’ supplied by the bureaucratic-coercive state. The Tories could then exploit this conflict by the method of fraudulently exaggerating numbers, which they already routinely use in relation to false rape allegations, fraudulent asylum claims, and so on.

But what lies below the trap is the fact that the existing Gender Recognition Act 2004, requiring medically-supervised living as a member of the changed gender, and so on, before recognition, opens the way to discrimination by doctors, and by setting up conflict between life and documentation, opens the way to anti-trans hate attacks. The case of trans prisoners only poses the issue in a particularly sharp form.

But then the question raised is: what lies below the regulatory regime which insists that everyone must be identified as male or female? And what lies below the phenomenon of hate attacks against trans people? To give the answer, ‘transphobia’, as a psychiatric disorder is, I argued in the second article, to enter into commitments which are inconsistent with political democracy.

We necessarily start with the question of biology, because, on the one hand, the Christian right grounds arguments on the ‘unnatural’ quality of trans, and a significant body of Terf argument starts from the proposition that a sex-change operation does not create a ‘real’ woman; then, on the other hand, a lot of left trans rights arguments rely on the idea that the biology is ‘socially constructed’ in the first place - which, as I argued at the end of the last article, is politically disabling.

Biology

However, though the biology has immediate moral and political implications, in terms of the phenomenon of systematic oppression of trans people, it is a sub-sub-substructure on which is built the oppression of women, which is an important component in the oppression of trans people. On the basis of the oppression of women develops the social institution of class. And on the basis of the social institution of class develops its particular capitalist form, which is expressed in today’s dynamics - in particular by producing both the ‘equalities’ or anti-discrimination delusion and the mass anxieties which are played on by the Tories’ media witch-hunting operations.

I begin where I ended the last article. The sex binary in its rough sense is a common feature of human biology: the large majority of human beings - around 85% - are fertile men or women.³ The human species is mammalian and reproduces sexually. It is then evolutionarily unsurprising that well over 90% of the population are - in the terms used in the recent past - ‘cis’ and ‘heterosexual’ or ‘bisexual’.

In the last article I ended on the point that ‘biology is not destiny’: we do not live like our hunter-gatherer ancestors and cannot go back to doing so. Hence arguments directly from biology against trans rights are unsound.

Nonetheless, the biology and what flows from it is important. We do not live in a science-fiction ‘posthuman’ or ‘transhuman’ world, and we are not on the verge of doing so. If we did, politics would be posed in utterly different ways, and trans - along with not just gender, but also the sexes and human needs in general - would disappear altogether, and all moral/ethical and political claims would be completely transformed. The ‘virtual lives’ of people who today spend large amounts of time online remain dependent on eating, drinking, sleeping, and so on, in the world of “practical, human-sensuous activity” (Marx).⁴

Along with these activities we remain mortal: we are born helpless and dependent on our parents, grow up to independence from parents, but remain dependent on the larger society; many of us become in our turn responsible for dependent children; we decline into an old age in which we become dependent on those younger than ourselves, before dying. If we as a society cease to produce children we will die off (and more immediately, there may no longer be enough young to care for the old).⁵

This is not in fact likely, because very many humans want children (and the ‘demographic transition’ to a low-fertility regime, which happens with high industrialisation and is now taking place in China, need not matter, as long as the economic model is not unduly dependent on population growth).⁶ The fact that most people are willing to engage in heterosexual relations during at least part of their lives would, at any time before modern contraception, normally have produced enough pregnancies. ‘Most people are willing’ can reasonably be supposed to be an outcome of natural selection (if most people were not willing, the species would have died out long before now ...).

Going beyond this, it is to be expected on the basis of evolutionary theory, and is to some extent supported by evidence, that humans, like other mammals, do ‘sexual signalling’ - that is, signalling potential willingness to be a sex partner for the right person. It is just a good deal more subtle and fluid - and hence more debatable - than the sexual signals of other mammals.⁷ This sexual signalling is a part of the very diverse gender-appearance conventions of various human societies: other things apart, by adopting masculine forms of dress and appearance, a person can signal that they may be available for sex with women, and vice versa. In our not-too-distant past, men could signal that they were available for sex with other men by dressing ‘in drag’, women could signal that they were available for sex with women by dressing butch, without this being ‘trans’ in either case.⁸

As I have stated, around 85% of people are fertile men or women. But this fertility has profoundly different implications for men and women, since the woman’s individual investment in the reproduction of a single child (through pregnancy) is biologically vastly greater than the man’s (through the supply of sperm). The evidence of physical anthropology is that the distinction is profoundly significant for social ordering - already in the mammals generally, then in the primates, and all the more so in humans, where there is particularly heavy investment in ‘encephalisation’.⁹ The evidence of social anthropology as well as of history is that, probably partly as a result, there are in most societies highly elaborate bodies of social rules regulating relations between men and women - irrespective of whether the societies are class-divided or characterised by the oppression of women.¹⁰

There are, then, material biological foundations to the cultural phenomenon of gender binary. But it is also necessary to be clear that these foundations operate as laws of tendency, not fixed laws. The fact that around 85% of humans are fertile males or females means that around 15% are not fertile, so that a rigorous sex binarism, which took fertility to be part of its test for identifying sex, would clearly provide no conceptual space for infertile people and might (by fetishising fertility) be actually oppressive towards them - for example, the Roman emperor, Augustus, passed legislation which penalised the unmarried and the childless.¹¹

In this context, there is also a population affected by various genetic or unexplained developmental variations which produce ‘intersex’ conditions - estimated between 0.02% and 1.7% of the population.¹² Intersex people have certainly suffered from ill-conceived brutal medical intervention in infancy to ‘normalise’ their bodies.¹³

Beyond the substantial minority of the biologically infertile, and the much smaller minority of intersex people, there is a small but significant minority who identify as other than heterosexual: in the 2021 UK census, 1.54% gay or lesbian, 1.28% bisexual, 0.3% ‘other sexual orientation’, 0.23% pansexual, 0.06% asexual, 0.03% queer (totalling 3.44%).¹⁴ These figures are probably under-counted: as with trans, the percentages are higher in the US.¹⁵ It is important to be aware that homosexual behaviour is not unique to humans, as Bruce Bagemihl showed in his 1999 book Biological exuberance. Some societies have also had significant percentages of religious celibates, though numbers are radically down in modern capitalism.¹⁶

Religious purity politics regarded and regards all of these phenomena except biological infertility and religious celibacy as objectionable, and biological infertility as at least regrettable. Darwinian evolution undermined the argument from creationist teleology on these fronts. But 19th-20th century medical and ‘scientistic’ ideologies reconstituted the purity politics as variants on eugenics, on the basis that ‘survival of the fittest’ should be aided to avoid ‘race degeneration’, and therefore categorised all the variations as ‘disorders’ (that were hopefully ‘treatable’).

This reasoning profoundly misunderstood evolution, as Bagemihl argued and as Stephen Jay Gould also stated in his 2002 book, The structure of evolutionary theory. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is a law of tendency, not a rigid law. And it is possible because genetic copying is inexact and produces variations. Without the inexactitude and the variations, the trend towards adaptation could not work. And, in addition, a ‘purified’ genetic monoculture would be severely vulnerable to the routine evolutionary arms race between bodies and diseases. The existence of non-reproductive variations is then a necessary side consequence of the mechanisms that make evolution work and that protect the species from being wiped out by some new disease.

The fact that we are mortal and hence, as a species, have to reproduce means that the large majority who are fertile - and in particular fertile women, who have the burden of pregnancy - have a legitimate moral claim on society as a whole. Hence (for example) the US ‘Pump act’, discussed in Daniel Lazare’s article in this paper on January 19, is not unwarranted discrimination in favour of nursing mothers; and nor are differential rights to maternity leave unwarranted discrimination; just as the public provision of nurseries and schools is not unwarranted discrimination in favour of parents or “childminding on the rates”.¹⁷ The defence of women’s rights to contraception and to abortion provided at public expense is again a discrimination in favour of fertile women, but a justified one.

These are, indeed, discrimination against the infertile and the childless; but they are justified discrimination. Just as maximum working hours are justified discrimination against those who would prefer to work more hours, compulsory education is justified discrimination against children who would prefer to go to work, and compulsory retirement ages are justified discrimination against those who would prefer to go on working until death or absolute disability.

But this legitimate moral claim to justified discrimination does not extend to Augustus-style explicit penalties for the childless, nor to a refusal to allow space in the social order for the infertile minorities. The reason for this I have just given: neither Thomistic creationist religious teleology¹⁸ nor rigid-natural-selection (impliedly eugenic) teleology actually explains the order of human biological nature. In consequence, these arguments against full social acceptance of the non-fertile minorities cannot function as valid moral or political arguments from our common humanity. On the contrary: recognising our common humanity means recognising that there will be people who do not fit neatly into a sex binary based on reproductive characteristics, but they are still people and entitled to a full part in social and political life.

Women

The next level up is the oppression of women. Somewhere around the transition to the Neolithic, but only approximately associated with it, is what Engels called the “world-historical defeat of the female sex”. There seem to be a variety of routes into this defeat, but the common element is the atomisation of women through the shift from matrilocal marriage to patrilocal/virilocal/neolocal.¹⁹ As a result, the husband appropriates the labour, fertility and sexual capability of his wife - as he does also of his animals or his land. This then forms the model for the appropriation of the labour of war captives as slaves, which lies at the foundations of early class order.

It is perfectly possible to imagine a private-property society which is matrilineal and matrilocal, but nonetheless has substantial economic inequality; and indeed such societies exist on a small scale.²⁰ But the overwhelming bulk of actually existing class societies today and in history have the man’s appropriation of the woman’s capacities at their root.

And it is a delusion to suppose that the emancipation of women could take the form of a ‘return’ to matrilineal/matrilocal society while keeping class intact, because it is not ‘male aggression’, but the dynamics of class and capitalism as such, which today threaten the world with destruction. The real meaning of ‘emancipation of women’ within the framework of maintaining class society is the form imaged by Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean in: the emancipation of a few managerial women, at the expense of thousands of women drudging on the tech assembly lines of east Asia and the discarded millions of victims of de-industrialisations around the world.

In addition, the form of the oppression of women also varies with the form of class society. In Roman antiquity, the wife was not strictly the husband’s property, but in the conception of marriage he may buy her from her father (coemptio) or ‘usucape’ manus, an analogue of his potestas or power over his children and slaves, over her by ‘possessing’ her for a year (as he might similarly acquire a slave or a cow). In medieval England the law of ‘baron and feme’ (husband and wife) analogised the wife to a ‘villein’: the husband might not kill or maim his wife, but her moveable property all became his, and he might use ‘lawful correction’ on her, including imprisonment; if she killed him, she committed ‘petty treason’ and would be burned to death; her subordination was to him personally, not to men in general.²¹

In fully developed capitalist modernity, the employer does not own their individual employees; but the proletarians as a class are owned by the capitalist class collectively - a phenomenon reflected in the right of capitalists to take their employees’ limbs and health as long as they act with “reasonable care”, enforced by the sale and denial of justice through the free market in legal services.²²

As capitalism has developed to its full form, the relation between men and women begins to take the form of the proletarianisation of women: they are not owned by or ‘villein’ to an individual husband, but it begins to be conceptualised that women as a class should be available to men as a class. This is most explicitly ideologised by the ‘right to sex’ claims of incels and similar types. But it is institutionally present in the form (among others) of ‘rape impunity’, created by a combination of the fraudulent exaggeration of the frequency of false rape claims by the advertising-funded press with the sale and denial of justice by the free market in legal services (in this aspect the same mechanism as the capitalist expropriation of proletarians’ health).

‘Rape impunity’ in turn creates ‘rape anxiety’ among large numbers of women - also promoted by the same advertising-funded media. But what these media will not promote is ‘God created men and women; Colonel Colt made them equal’²³ - that is, the reversal of the 19th-20th century pacification of women to which I referred in my first article, but using modern tech to equalise the sexes in a fight. On the contrary, they are prime promoters of the pacification of women. And this is also produced extensively in the schooling of children, with girls rewarded for being quiet and well-behaved, and boys rewarded (with attention) for talking.²⁴

Trans

I have discussed these issues at some length because they are in fact both directly and indirectly relevant to the oppression of trans people. The most obvious directly is that trans women are in principle subject to quite a lot of the ways in which women in general are oppressed. If hired as a woman, as opposed to continuing an established career after transitioning, they will be likely to be paid less and less likely to be promoted than an equivalent man. Other aspects do not apply: issues about abortion and contraception, for example - but then these also do not apply to the much larger group of women who are biologically infertile. Trans women can be raped and are subject to the rape impunity regime; but men can also be raped (for example, in jail) and are subject to the rape impunity regime, though the numbers raped are very radically lower than those of women.

This last point actually leads into the second, which is that the oppression of women directly generates some specific victimisation of trans people. I say ‘the oppression of women’ because the point applies to a considerable extent to pre-capitalist societies. Thus in classical antiquity a man’s choice of sexual object was rather uncontroversial. But a choice to play the female role, by being voluntarily penetrated, or to act ‘femme’, attracted opprobrium and possibly assault.²⁵ It is a betrayal of the male solidarity which supposedly keeps ‘civilisation’ from collapsing into the horrors of female rule. In this context, trans women may not escape by virtue of hormone treatment or sex-change operation from being ‘queers’ for the purpose of being ‘queer-bashed’.

Conversely, trans men are massively more likely to be prosecuted than trans women for obtaining sexual relations by deception as to their gender.²⁶ Why is this so much more likely? The answer fairly clearly is that the trans man is usurping the male prerogative; and hence becomes subject to the same abuse of policing (and so on) discretion which produced the impunity of Wayne Couzens or David Carrick until their final downfall.

The clearest indirect effects are seen precisely in the Tories’ ability to mobilise rape anxiety against trans women - when they themselves have already done the same by promoting rape impunity, by their fraudulent exaggeration of the number of false rape claims.

The consequence of all this is that it is practically impossible for trans people to be emancipated without women also being emancipated. The oppression of women is not the whole ground of the dynamics of the oppression of trans people; but it is a very large part of it, and any amount of ‘reform’ in favour of trans people which leaves the oppression of women intact is likely to be merely cosmetic.

This, of course, is not the whole story: in the next article we will go on to the role of ruling class management of the lower orders, capitalist dynamics and the modern state, before arriving at some more concrete programmatic proposals.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

1. The first two are: ‘Devolution non-recognition’ Weekly Worker February 2: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1428/devolution-non-recognition; and ‘Clearing the ground’ Weekly Worker February 9: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1429/clearing-the-ground.↩︎

2. ‘Stabbing of trans girl Brianna Ghey may have been a hate crime, say police’ The Daily Telegraph February 14.↩︎

3. 85%: eg, www.who.int/health-topics/infertility; www.singlecare.com/blog/news/infertility-statistics. The NHS has 84%: www.nhs.uk/conditions/infertility.↩︎

4. Theses on Feuerbach No5: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.↩︎

5. A certain undue worry about this possibility is promoted in order to justify raising retirement ages so as to raise the overall rate of exploitation, (eg, www.gov.uk/government/consultations/second-state-pension-age-review-independent-report-call-for-evidence) or as part of US doom-stories about China: eg, ‘China’s population falls, heralding a demographic crisis’ The New York Times January 16.↩︎

6. thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/05/23/china-demographic-crisis.↩︎

7. See, for instance, C Power, ‘Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: why they should be reversed’ in R Botha and C Knight (eds) The cradle of language Oxford 2009, chapter 14. For some examples of complexities in using the idea in more modern evidence, see JA Seaman, ‘The Peahen’s tale, or dressing our parts at work’ Duke Law Journal Vol 14 (2007); SJ Lennon et al, ‘Dress and sex: a review of empirical research involving human participants and published in refereed journals’ Fashion and Textiles Vol 4, item 14 (2017); JR Daniels, ‘Sex-differentiated attire’s impact on individual action and mate selection’ Sexes Vol 2 (2021).↩︎

8. Drag: eg, R Norton Mother Clap’s molly house London 1992, which was still important at the time of the Stonewall ‘riot’ in 1969.↩︎

9. SB Hrdy Mothers and others Cambridge MA 2011. Recent related literature on this issue is cited in S Shultz and RIM Dunbar, ‘Socioecological complexity in primate groups and its cognitive correlates’ Transactions of the Royal Society B September 26 2022; TA Monson et al, ‘Teeth, prenatal growth rates, and the evolution of human-like pregnancy in later Homo’ (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2200689119, October 3 2022).↩︎

10. This is a commonplace. See C Knight Blood relations New Haven 1995. A recent study of gender in children’s play, beginning with the observation of gender divisions of labour in forager societies, is S Lew-Levy et al ‘Gender-typed and gender-segregated play among Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka hunter-gatherer children and adolescents’ Child development Vol 91 (2020).↩︎

11. A recent interesting discussion appears in G Liveley and R Shaw, ‘Marriage plots: a new narratological approach to the Augustan marriage laws’ Law and Humanities Vol 14 (2020).↩︎

12. Lower figure: L Sax, ‘How common is intersex? a response to Anne Fausto-Sterling’ Journal of Sex Research Vol 39 (2002); upper figure: A Fausto-Sterling Sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality New York 2000; M Blackless et al, ‘How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis’ American Journal of Human Biology Vol 12 (2000). The difference between the figures depends entirely on what is to count as intersex.↩︎

13. AD Dreger Hermaphrodites and the medical invention of sex (Cambridge MA 1998) discusses the history at length. For a recent discussion, see M Carpenter, ‘Intersex variations, human rights and the international classification of diseases’ Health Human Rights Vol 20 (2018).↩︎

14. 7.5% of respondents did not answer the question at all. See www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/sexualorientationenglandandwales/census2021.↩︎

15. Wikipedia, ‘LGBT demographics of the United States’.↩︎

16. See the interesting discussion in AJC Micheletti et al, ‘Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits’: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.2022.0965 (2022).↩︎

17. ‘Not equality to compete’ Weekly Worker January 19 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1426/not-equality-to-compete); ‘Amending our programme’ Weekly Worker November 25 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1373/amending-our-programme); and ‘Women, wages and reproduction’ June 16 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1399/women-wages-and-reproduction). For “childminding on the rates” from a Tory candidate in the 1970s, see Larry Sanders’ interview The Guardian October 19 2016. And for some corroboration of 1970s currency see ‘Abortion: a right to choose’ The Worker October 25 1979 (www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/worker-uk/41-79.pdf).↩︎

18. From Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Thomistic moral theology gained a new influence in the late 20th-early 21st century, and SCOTUS Justice Neil Gorsuch is a proponent. On the neo-Thomists and sex and gender, see N Bamforth and DAJ Richards Patriarchal religion, sexuality and gender: a critique of new natural law Cambridge 2008. The ‘teleological’ argument was also elaborated influentially by William Paley (1743-1805).↩︎

19. Origin of the family, private property and the state (1884) MECW Vol 26, p165. Compare also L Sims, ‘The ‘solarization’ of the moon: manipulated knowledge at Stonehenge’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal Vol 16 (2006), and the ‘popular’ version: ‘Stonehenge and the Neolithic counterrevolution’ Weekly Worker October 8 2008 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/740/stonehenge-and-the-neolithic-counter-revolution); J Conrad, ‘When all the crap began’ Weekly Worker supplement February 24 2011 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/854/when-all-the-crap-began-supplement-part-2). A different angle can be found in S Bloodworth, ‘The origins of women’s oppression - a defence of Engels and a new departure’ (2018): marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-origins-of-womens-oppression-a-defence-of-engels-and-a-new-departure. A wide range of literature is linked at the Radical Anthropology Group website: radicalanthropologygroup.org.↩︎

20. Imagine: see, for example, SS Tepper The gate to women’s country London 1990. For a real small-scale matrilineal social group in uplands China, there is a popular account in C Waihong The kingdom of women London 2020.↩︎

21. There is a vast quantity of literature both on Roman and medieval marriage.↩︎

22. More on the history of this can be found in ‘“Speaking bitterness” and Left Unity’ Weekly Worker June 19 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1015/speaking-bitterness-and-left-unity).↩︎

23. It is not clear what the origin of this tag was. It was already being used by Libertarians in the 1970s.↩︎

24. A Jule Gender, participation and silence in the language classroom: sh-shushing the girls Basingstoke 2004; see also courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-educationalpsychology/chapter/gender-differences-in-the-classroom.↩︎

25. See the discussion, for instance, in A Richlin The garden of Priapus New Haven 1983.↩︎

26. A Sharpe, ‘The dark truth behind the convictions for “gender fraud”’ New Statesman December 16 2015; www.lbc.co.uk/news/trans-man-sexual-assault-tricking-women-fake-penis (May 26 2022); Transforming Futures report (www.transformingfuturespartnership.co.uk/criminal-justice).↩︎