09.03.2023

Tailism cannot deliver

By clearing away misconceptions and starting from our common class interests we can produce a workable approach. Mike Macnair concludes his series

This is the sixth and final article in my series on ‘trans rights issues’. Here I move from the general idea of collective action, and its implications for trans rights, to more specific ideas. The starting point is the principle of solidarity.

“An injury to one is an injury to all”. This is an elementary principle of the workers’ movement. Trans people are injured practically every day: by queer-bashing hate attacks, which is both the most striking form and the one which is understandably most emphasised by trans rights activists; by explicit state discrimination on the basis of gender-policing arrangements; and by private discrimination in all the usual forms - housing, employment, and so on. (Discrimination by the medical profession is a special case because of the medical needs of trans people who seek hormone treatment and/or surgery, or who have already begun such treatment).

This circumstance needs the workers’ movement, if it is to maintain its own elementary principle of solidarity, to oppose the oppression of trans people and to make proposals to do away with it - or mitigate it, so far as it cannot immediately be done away with.

Thus far, the trans rights activists within the labour movement are absolutely right. But the fact of oppression and the requirement of solidarity does not require the movement to agree to everything that is proposed as policy by organisations or activists of the oppressed. For example, it would be fatuous to say that workers and trade unionists were not oppressed in the US ‘Gilded Age’ - the era of the development of ‘common law’ anti-union laws, and the era of the use of ‘Pinkerton men’ armed strike-breakers, and so on. Nonetheless, when US trade unionists argued for immigration controls, socialists opposed this.¹ Similarly, though socialists in Britain advocated women’s suffrage (the crank Ernest Belfort Bax apart), they did not back the preponderant demand of the feminists for women’s suffrage on the same terms as men: that is, the vote for property-owning women only.

The idea that solidarity means ‘siding with the oppressed’, and therefore supporting what ‘the oppressed’ choose to promote, was used by the Socialist Workers Party in the period of Respect to prettify the rightwing politics of Islamist political trends backed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as those of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The latter was and is certainly ‘the oppressed’ relative to the USA and the USA’s vassal states, which are conducting siege warfare against it with ‘sanctions’. But it is not ‘the oppressed’ relative to Iranian workers and women. At this point the logic of ‘siding with the oppressed’ becomes completely useless.

Gender recognition reform at first sight looks like an idea which could overcome the oppression of trans people. But the problem with it is not only that - as I argued at the end of the last article - it is undeliverable because of the dynamics of the mass politics involved. It is also because of the nature of the demand.

Under gender recognition reform, the state is to give formal recognition of the requested destination gender. This can directly prevent the immediate discrimination of the state, by failing to supply official documents in the requested destination gender. But it does not in itself prevent either queer-bashing or private discrimination (including discrimination by the medical profession). To go further in this direction, the state recognition has to be enforced against private individuals and non-state associations. How successful this state enforcement will be may be guessed from the fact that women’s pay is still radically less than men’s 53 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970.

Trans people will only cease to be queer-bashed and privately discriminated against if either (a) the underlying social dynamics which drive queer-bashing are undermined or (b) it becomes impossible to distinguish trans men from ‘cis’ men, trans women from ‘cis’ women. It is this second option which is the ground of proposed rules against ‘dead-naming’ (meaning, in effect, ‘outing’ people as trans) - and associated rules against ‘transphobic’ speech. But to introduce such rules is, of course, to introduce policing of speech; in the first place within the left and the labour movement, but rapidly more widely (notably in universities).

Conservatives generally do not want to abolish the oppression of trans people: this oppression is a side-effect of their ‘normal selling point’ of a politics based on nation, order and “family values”.² Liberals may want to abolish it, but cannot, because their anti-discrimination methodology, and their commitment to the institutions of political corruption, naturally issue in conservative victory. The workers’ movement should want to abolish it - but not at the price of losing freedom of speech and communication - which in any case, as I pointed out earlier, is self-defeating, because no-platforming merely prepares the ground for conservative censorship.

Mitigation

Communists can potentially abolish the oppression of trans people, through overthrowing capitalist rule and transcending class society and its particular capitalist form, along with the oppression of women - these provide the underlying dynamics which drive witch-hunting, queer-bashing and discrimination. And through overthrowing the current capitalist bureaucratic-coercive state and its obsessive classificatory schemes to control the lower orders, and pushing towards the withering away of the state altogether. But this is unavoidably not immediate: it is part of the communist maximum, not minimum, programme.

If we cannot immediately abolish the oppression of trans people, we can nonetheless mitigate it. And that needs in the first place the rejection of the ‘gender recognition’ paradigm, and instead the acceptance that trans people are - as I argued in my February 23 article - a natural human minority, like redheads or high-grade athletes.³ Pre-capitalist societies routinely made space for this minority. There is no reason, apart from the interests of the moral entrepreneurs and the state bureaucracy, why modern society should not also make such a space.

The obvious case here is of official documents. Why are official documents required to state that the holder is ‘male’ or ‘female’? The reason is simply the aspiration of the state bureaucracy to be the lidless eye of Sauron. Here the demand to recognise personal choice works radically better than the demand that there should be official and universal recognition of the trans person as either male or female. Third, or more, options would work fine. International agreements already permit the ‘third option’, ‘X’. It is merely the UK government which, for Tory party-political reasons, refuses.⁴ ‘Gender recognition’ preserves the state bureaucracy’s insistence on binarism at the expense of both intersex people and gender-fluid/non-binary people. It is thus adapted to single-issue alliance with the liberals. ‘Third option’ in contrast, is a solidaristic demand.

Beyond this point, it is necessary to disaggregate the issues. Why this should be necessary is visible from - for example - the case of medical treatment. ‘Gender recognition’ is perfectly useless in relation to this issue. A trans man who has taken medical treatment has different medical needs to a ‘cis’ man - most obviously, needing continued access to hormone supplies, but also in other respects (for example, being very much less likely to develop prostate cancer⁵); trans women who have taken medical treatment similarly need continued access to hormone supplies (and are much less likely to develop breast cancer⁶). Health services and individual medics therefore plainly need to know origin sex and trans status, as well as self-declared gender.

The consequence of this is that what follows is addressed to specific example issues. I do not think that there is a single general approach which will mitigate all forms of the oppression of trans people, and I have neither the space, time nor information to go exhaustively through the issues.

As simple as the case of official documents, though substantially more expensive, is the issue of toilets. I cited in my February 2 article the research which showed that the provision of more public toilets for men than for women was a product of conservative efforts to keep women close to the home. It is not the product of an effort to create safe spaces for women, and ‘cis’ men do, in fact, sometimes invade women’s toilets in order to commit rape (though there are also efforts to create a fear campaign about trans women in toilets and about non-gendered public toilets: the method is the usual one of over-reporting small numbers).⁷ Creating non-gendered public toilets really requires merely building more public toilets.

I partially addressed prisons in the first article in this series: given the specific dynamics of the prison system, simple self-identification gender recognition reform is not a defensible immediate political line in this context. I did point out that the numbers involved are extremely small, and grossly exaggerated by the Tory press, while, on the other hand, single-sex prisons are not ‘safe spaces’; but I did not note there that the rules before the press furore and Dominic Raab’s spin-overkill announcement already required an elaborate ‘risk assessment’ before trans women prisoners were placed in women’s prisons - another aspect of Tory press dishonesty. I also did not make the fundamental point, which is in the CPGB’s Draft programme, to radically reduce the use of imprisonment in general.⁸ This is not an ‘after the revolution’ speculation: the UK is an outlier in western Europe in its excessive use of imprisonment.⁹

Several other aspects can only practically be tackled by reforms which do not single out the trans question. Existing equalities legislation has not eliminated employment and housing discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexuality; only reduced overt forms of discrimination and produced various forms of ‘performative anti-discrimination’. Practical change will involve reducing the power of the employer and landlord to discriminate in general.

The abuse of police powers (as in the greater likelihood of trans men being prosecuted for obtaining sex by deception) is the identical issue to that posed by Black Lives Matter, to the police recruitment and retention of characters like Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, and so on. The political culture of the professional police force produces these results. We have argued in this paper that the right approach to this problem is to abolish the police force and replace it with a citizens’ militia (reforms short of this, but in the same direction - to reduce police autonomy - could help). Certainly, any proposal to increase police powers should be met with reminders of how the police have used their existing powers.

Hannah Barnes’ just-published book, Time to think: the inside story of the collapse of the Tavistock’s gender service for children, is promoted by the Tory press as part of its culture-war witch-hunt about gender. But the story that it actually tells is one of doctors prescribing drugs (in this case puberty-blockers) as a first response to mental distress about gender among young people, due to the pressure of waiting lists and throughput on staff making in-depth psychiatric evaluation unfeasible. It is marketisation through ‘cost-centre’ regimes that is incentivising this policy. And it is managerial hierarchy and ‘cover your arse’ responses that squash internal dissent and lead dissentients to ‘go public’, and so into the hands of the Tory press. Both the fact that this was a child clinic, so that 18-year-olds had to be passed on to adult services, and the general lack of resources meant that, when questions started to be raised, there were no figures from outcome studies which could be used to defend (or to correct) the policy. These are all common features of the effects of neoliberal ‘public service reforms’ - and in particular of what has happened to NHS mental health services generally.

The book also reports an ideological aspect: pressure from the ‘Mermaids’ parental support group; and some evidence of belief by some children and parents, shared by some staff, that a trans outcome for the children involved would be preferable to self-acceptance as gay or lesbian - which seems similar to the Iranian regime’s claim that sex reassignment surgery overcomes the ‘problem’ of homosexuality.¹⁰ Part of the background is that the clinic was in 1994 moved into the Tavistock and Portland Trust, which was mainly a Freudian institution - a discipline which has foundational sexist and heterosexist commitments and was heavily involved in the abuse of psychiatry for social control in the 1950s-70s; and among whose staff were several critics of sex change. It is understandable that some of the gender unit staff should have reacted against this structural subordination with both radically ‘pro-trans’ theoretical commitments and seeking support from the ‘client community’.

Trans rights activists have identified doctors ‘gatekeeping’ access to drugs and surgery as an aspect of their oppression. But self-diagnosis is not always the right answer. And if - as Barnes’s book and several medical papers available online suggest - puberty-blockers cause osteoporosis and may increase the difficulty of genital reconstruction surgery for those who do elect to accept this option, a substantial cohort of people (not just in the UK) may have cause to complain of being injured by a medical fad, in which doctors were not sufficiently careful gatekeepers of drugs.

But in Barnes’ account the ideological aspect is plainly secondary to the cuts and public-sector management issues. The problem will not be solved without NHS reform which results in proper planning and resourcing, and gets rid of the incentive regimes of ‘internal markets’ and managerialism. Again, it turns out that reform in the interests of trans people requires reform which is in the interests of the working class more generally.

Mouse?

The Roman poet, Horace, famously wrote that “parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” (‘the mountains will go into labour, and a ridiculous mouse will be born’). I am conscious that to come to the rather limited reform proposals I have reached, after writing over 20,000 words, may seem like an example of this.

What I have in fact been doing is approaching the question of what can be proposed - and approaching, more generally, the point that the left needs to avoid being pulled into tail-ending whatever moves (which means, in practice tailending either liberals, as in the case of ‘gender recognition’, or conservatives, as in ‘Lexit’). And we should also be careful not to over-claim about what can be done immediately - which will inevitably lead to demoralisation.

In the first article I was mainly concerned with the ability of the Tories to exploit the Scottish National Party’s decision to tailend Theresa May on ‘gender recognition reform’, in order to repeal the Scotland Act 1998 by ministerial order and reduce the Scots government to a puppet of Whitehall.

In the second I was engaged in ‘clearing the ground’ of a body of arguments which are routinely used by right and left and by feminists around the ‘trans question’, and which I argue are to be rejected on grounds wholly independent of the ‘trans question’, so that they need to be got out of the way before beginning to approach this issue.

In the third and fourth articles I attempted to approach the issue within the framework of historical materialism: starting with the biological sex binary as a sub-sub-substructure and gender as a cultural form built on that, and then progressing to the oppression of women as sub-substructure, the social institution of class and its implications for policing those below and gender-policing as a part of that as substructure, and finally the specific dynamics of capitalism as such and its bureaucratic-coercive state in relation to gender and gender-policing as the immediate structure of oppression built on these lower foundations.

In the process, I identified trans people as a natural minority which has existed a long way back into history and probably into prehistory; and which had space for existence as such in pre-capitalist societies - space which the dynamics of capitalism have tended to take away. The oppression of trans people grows out of gender-policing as a mode of control of the lower orders, through ruling class support for moral entrepreneurs: episodic and local in pre-capitalist societies, systematised under capitalism; and in capitalism from queer-bashing as a mode of performance of competitive heterosexual masculinity.

In the fifth article I addressed the question of general principles for collective decision-making, which we (humans; the workers’ movement; the left) need to develop for the collective action we urgently need, in order to confront pressing problems. I argued that these principles - voice, vote and freedom of association, but no vetoes or special statuses - have direct implications both for ‘no-platforming’ and for the status of ‘caucuses’ of the oppressed.

This article has moved to the principle of solidarity and what it does and does not require. I argued that the overthrow of the capitalist order can undermine the foundations of the oppression of trans people, while conservatives do not seek this result and liberals cannot achieve it. The more specific proposals for immediate policy are then proposals to mitigate this oppression under capitalist rule; and it emerges that concrete reforms to mitigate the oppression of trans people under capitalism largely involve reforms which are in the general interests of the working class.

I think that there is enough political ‘meat’ here to be more than a mouse. But I repeat yet again that this is no more than a hypothesis of a possible approach, on which I hope to be corrected as far as is necessary; and that the line of this series is merely my individual responsibility - not a CPGB (or CPGB’s PCC) position.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

1. ‘Reactionary by nature’ Weekly Worker November 9 2019 (www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1274/reactionary-by-nature); see also D Musters, ‘Internationalism, protectionism, xenophobia: the Second International’s migration debate (1889-1914)’ International Review of Social History (‘first view’), 2022.↩︎

2. As I discussed in the first article in this series: ‘Devolution non-recognition’, February 2 (www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1428/devolution-non-recognition), Theresa May’s proposals were probably honestly intended, but nonetheless in conflict with the underlying ideas of her party.↩︎

3. I choose these examples because, while redheads may be genetic, henna has been used to dye hair red since ancient Egyptian times; and athletic performance, while it may again be affected by genetics, is also heavily dependent on practice. So that by ‘natural’ I do not mean ‘genetic’, but merely that this minority has existed for a long time in history, and capitalist efforts to eradicate it have failed.↩︎

4. Third option: www.migrationpolicy.org/article/x-marker-trans-nonbinary-travelers. British government: R (Elan-Cane) v Home Secretary [2021] UKSC 56. More than three: compare SG Davies Challenging gender norms: five genders among Bugis in Indonesia Belmost CA 2007.↩︎

5. flo.health/menstrual-cycle/health/symptoms-and-diseases/do-women-have-prostates (there are 0.003% of female genital cancers, as opposed to 12.5% of ‘cis’ men getting prostate cancer).↩︎

6. Men have a 1% risk of breast cancer (www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/breast-cancer/stages-types-grades/types/male-breast-cancer), ‘cis’ women around 12.5% (www.nhs.uk/conditions/breast-cancer). The risk to trans women is increased relative to ‘cis’ men, but remains much lower than ‘cis’ women (www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-shows-increased-risk-of-breast-cancer-in-transgender-women, May 14 2019).↩︎

7. There are these examples relating to rape in toilets, taken from the first couple of pages of a Google search: ‘Cobham public toilet rape arrest, as man, 20, taken into custody’ Surrey Live August 20 2019; ‘American tourist raped in public toilet in central Paris’ The Guardian August 10 2022; ‘Newbury shopping centre rape sees woman targeted in disabled toilet’ Berkshire Live November 29 2022. As for inflation, it is discussed, for instance, by B Colliver and A Coyle in ‘“Risk of sexual violence against women and girls” in the construction of “gender-neutral toilets”’; see also ‘A discourse analysis of comments on YouTube videos’ Journal of Gender-Based Violence 2020.↩︎

8. communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/3-immediate-demands, section 3.17.↩︎

9. prisonreformtrust.org.uk/england-and-wales-send-more-people-to-prison-each-year-than-anywhere-else-in-western-europe.↩︎

10. Googling produces masses of web references, but for a journalistic account see qz.com/889548/everyone-treated-me-like-a-saint-in-iran-theres-only-one-way-to-survive-as-a-transgender-person.↩︎