14.11.2024

Trans liberation and Marxism

Ranging from sci-fi thought experiments to the latest theoretical disputes, Mike Macnair explains why class and building solidarity is vital

This was intended to be a discussion with Roxy Hall, but she found herself at short notice unable to attend. Nonetheless, we decided to go ahead with just me and reschedule another date with her. The original plan affects my talk. This tries not to repeat what I have already written on the issue¹ so much as to address questions that intersect with comrade Hall’s Ten theses on the gender question, a revised version which was published in June this year, on which I wrote some comments in August.²

One of the issues raised was the question of the maximum programme. I am going to address why we should be for trans liberation in this context; secondly, why we have to address the question of trans liberation primarily in terms of the maximum programme rather than primarily in terms of the minimum programme; thirdly, I will give brief reasons for rejecting some theoretical arguments commonly used on the issue.

Possible future

I begin, perhaps oddly, with a science fiction story. Lois McMaster Bujold is an author who, among other things, writes space opera that plays with new reproductive and life technologies. The space opera background uses the very common science-fictional trope of the lost colony that has reverted to some sort of feudalism and is now reintegrating itself in a modernist, galactic civilisation. In the episode in question, in the book A civil campaign,³ Lord Ivan goes to the spaceport to meet, as he thinks, his old flame, Lady Donna. But it turns out that Lady Donna has gone off planet to have a sex change operation, and the person who arrives is Lord Dono. For the purposes of the plot it is essential to Lord Dono inheriting from his brother that he should be male, and, moreover, that he should be a fully fertile, male. The idea is to keep their cousin (who is thought to have persecuted the brother until such time that the brother died under dubious circumstances) from inheriting.

So Lady Donna/Lord Dono has to inherit, and in order to inherit, he has to have, and does have, a sex-change operation that is going to give him fully functional genitals, including fertility. The mechanism is that the off-planet doctors grow a set of male genitals for Lord Dono in vitro, using Lady Donna’s genes plus genetic engineering using a Y chromosome from tissue samples from her deceased brother.

The question that is posed by this story as a thought experiment, is: would the anti-trans campaigners who say ‘trans women are not women’ and ‘trans men are not men’ still say of the character, Lord Dono, in Bujold’s book, that Lord Dono is not a man, in spite of the fact that he has a perfectly functional set of genitals, and is capable of fathering children? We can equally imagine the gender reversed. In Samuel R Delany’s 1976 book Triton, set in an early 22nd century in which humans have colonised the solar system, the central character, Bron Helstrom, has a fully effective sex-change from man to woman; but Delany, unlike Bujold, does not directly address the question of fertility.

These thought experiments are not mere fantasy, in spite of the fact that Bujold sets her story centuries in the future. In fact, growing organs outside of the body for transplantation purposes is present-day science. Fallopian tubes have been grown in miniature, as have testicles for research purposes. Vaginal tissue has been grown for transplantation purposes for women who have some sort of medical problem. Harvard researchers claim that they can grow ovaries. The Guardian reported 10 years ago that researchers were growing penises in vitro.⁴ Meanwhile, genetic engineering continues to advance rapidly.⁵ The techniques discussed by Bujold are not just longue durée future speculations, but probably decades rather than centuries away.

As to the question I posed, to be honest, I think that in reality the so-called ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’ (Terfs), or alternatively gender-critical feminists, would still regard that as being problematic, in spite of the fact that, if the technology gets there, the result is going to be somebody who is fully functional for reproductive purposes, as well as for sexual purposes.

To the extent that there would still be a problem with ‘Trans women are women’ from the point of view of feminism, it is the problem identified by Naomi Scheman when in 1997 she coined the expression, “perinatally pinked”, referring to the fact that there is extensive oppression of people identified as women from birth that is not shared by people who grow up as boys: boys are not taught to be quiet or neat and tidy, to be fearful, and so on.⁶ This is a real political issue. But from the point of view of the communist maximum programme, it says merely that the oppression of trans people will not be overcome without overcoming the oppression of women.⁷

It is a strength, it seems to me, of comrade Hall’s theses on the gender question, and of the Marxist Unity Group’s trans liberation statement, which I discussed in my August article, that they addressed that sense of possibility. It will practically be possible to have what would in reality be a fully effective sex change, including fertility in the destination sex. I do not think there would be any satisfactory justification for denying that a person who was turned from a woman into a man or vice versa by such means was not a man or a woman. Such arguments ultimately rest on religious commitments: Genesis chapter 5, verse 2 - “male and female created he them”; or in a dilute form, a retro naturalism, a politics of nostalgia. The argument that what is involved is an unjustified use of medical resources plainly assumes ‘austerity’ in health services: that is, acceptance of the dictatorship of capital.

Binary?

There is a logic that follows from the thought experiment. Suppose that when we say a man, we prima facie mean a person who has male genitals, including functional testicles and the ability to engender children. And when we say we mean a woman, we mean somebody who has a vagina, ovaries and womb, and so on, capable of becoming pregnant and bearing children.

This approach is politically defensible, because in reality a lot of the discrimination that women face arises out of the risk of pregnancy and out of the primary responsibility of women for children in infancy. It is the moment at which there are children when, in the patterns of behaviour, there is a tendency for the housework, as well as for the childcare, etc to fall on the woman: the presence of children changes egalitarian male-female heterosexual relations to inegalitarian ones. And the pregnancy ‘risk’ is a routine ground of employment discrimination against women.

If, however, we take this approach to the sex binary, we have to recognise that this is not a rigorous binary, because around 15% of people are biologically infertile.⁸ This is a much larger number than the 1.4% of the population in the USA who identify as trans or the 0.5% in the UK.⁹ Between 0.02% and 1.7% of the population are intersex - that is, either genetically XXY or have this or that developmental condition that results in bodily unclarity of genetic sex at birth.¹⁰ In the 2021 UK census, 1.54% identified as gay or lesbian (as distinct from 1.28% bisexual, and much smaller numbers for a variety of other options).¹¹ All these forms are - as things stand - prima facie non-reproductive.

That is not to say that there is no biological sex binary. But it is something that exists in connection with fertility, and is in this respect fairly radically imperfect.

And the gender binary (along with other gender constructs) is a cultural outgrowth on the basis of the sex binary, and in some cases actually involves an inversion of the sex binary, as Camilla Power and Ian Watts argued in 1999.¹²

I started with the possible future, and arrived at the point that there is a serious problem with rigorous biological binarism. The other side of this story is the pre-capitalist past and the period leading to capitalism. Take, for example, Dr James Barry (c1789-1865), who could be called a trans man - in the sense that Barry was a woman who lived as a man in order to attend medical school, who rose to the career height of being Inspector General of Hospitals, and was only discovered to be a woman at the point of death. Conversely, the Chevalier d’Eon (1728-1810) was a biological man who at least for a large part of their life lived as a woman. The background was d’Eon’s complicated political relationships with the French state, but cannot have been just that. D’Eon was argued to be hermaphrodite, but when autopsied after death proved to be biologically male.¹³

And these are people who are existing in very late feudalism, overlapping with early capitalism in the late 18th century. We can guess that the means of discovering that people were living in the opposite gender to their birth sex was more readily available than it would have been earlier. Eleanor (aka John) Rykener was busted for prostitution in London in the 1390s, and revealed on interrogation a substantial career as a sex worker, embroiderer and barmaid in London, Oxford and Burford. There are various saints’ lives and other stories of people living as the opposite gender to their birth sex in medieval Byzantium, discussed in Roland Betancourt’s 2020 book Byzantine intersectionality.¹⁴

On the one hand, the potential future pushes at the issue of the biological sex binary as determinative, since the technology is moving quite rapidly towards the possibility of full transition, including fertility and self-generated hormones, which at the moment do not exist. And the other hand, if we go back into the past before the all-seeing eye of Sauron in the shape of the capitalist state, it is really quite likely that there are significant numbers of people who just live under the radar as members of the opposite sex, and are not discovered.

On what grounds would communists wish to prohibit either? From the starting point of the maximum programme, it seems that the underlying grounds of the oppression of trans people can be made to evaporate under conditions of communism, because we get rid of both the family as an economic institution and the state as a bureaucratic and policing power standing over the society and aspiring to the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the gatekeeper of access to all sorts of benefits. Both are major drivers of the oppression of trans people.

Transition

I am not saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat can immediately solve this problem. Why not? The minimum programme is a programme for the seizure of power by the proletariat, and its class rule over the middle classes and the state. This will open up what will probably be a quite rapid process of socialisation at first (as 1688 opened a very rapid period of transition to capitalism), but nonetheless a prolonged transition to communism.

The reason why that is prolonged is because humanity has tested to destruction in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, Cuba and China the idea of forced collectivisation of peasant property - and for that matter of small businesses. Hence, if the working class takes over political power, it will boot the capitalist class out of the means of its current means of having political power. But there will continue to be a mixed economy with a substantial market sector and a substantial petty bourgeoisie.

As Evgeny Preobrazhensky argued in the 1920s, and as Hillel Ticktin has argued more recently, this period will be intensely contradictory. The economy and society will not at once be wonderful. The partial socialisation dislocates the capitalist system of incentives; but because it is partial, a fully communist system of incentives does not instantaneously spring into being. So it will be a complex, conflictual and fairly prolonged process of change.

The theory of general market equilibrium is false. This is true not just of marginalist theory, but also of Adam Smith, and before him Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the bees. The more ‘perfect’ the market, the more it leads to instability, which we can see every day in the wild gyrations and fluctuations of stock markets, money markets, commodity futures markets, and so on. Capitalism, therefore, automatically involves both market institutions and their opposites: at one end, the strong state; at the other, the family.

It is perfectly clear that the bureaucratic-coercive state under capitalism is massively more extensive and invasive of people’s personal lives than was the case of any feudal political regime, including the church or, for that matter, the Roman empire or the ancient Chinese. The necessity of the strong state appears, however, as the nation - because states represent themselves as nation-states. Under capitalism, nationalism is therefore liberalism’s necessary ‘other’ - and associated with purity politics and its aspiration to possess the all-seeing eye of Sauron.

The market’s second necessary ‘other’ is the family. It is merely false that humans can comfortably live solely on the basis of market interactions - though there is greater possibility of doing that under capitalism than there is in pre-capitalist societies. Even the working singleton is in difficulty when they fall ill with something not serious enough for A&E, but for which they need practical help. Where children are involved, the problem is more acute. The family in market society - as in pre-capitalist societies - is just as significant as an economic institution as the state, and for exactly the same reason: the necessary limits of the market.

If the necessity of the strong state appears in politics as nationalism, the necessity of the family appears as traditionalist-patriarchalist politics. It does so because liberalism, with its false claims for the market, reduces state welfare provision, and in doing so increases dependence on the family. This logic means that liberal anti-family measures (or anti-discrimination measures that appear to undermine the family) inevitably appear as an attack on the needs of the large majority of the population (and especially the relatively poor) and strengthen the political weight of traditionalist-patriarchalists.

If we turn to the dynamics of family formation in capitalism, we lose the arranged marriage system, which is characteristic of both classical antiquity and the middle ages, and in those societies extends all the way down to the peasantry and the artisan classes. In capitalism, we lose the arranged marriage system and get instead a ‘marriage mart’ - a marriage marketplace, basically in the form of heterosexual cruising grounds: dance-halls, discos, clubs, dating sites … This is a competitive marketplace. In this context appears modern competitive heterosexuality. It is the competitive formation of heterosexuality, driven by the formation of heterosexual relations through market processes, which also drives a whole variety of different forms of negations of heterosexuality. It also drives the phenomenon of queer-bashing, which is a form of the performance of heterosexual masculinity. Queer-bashing is one of the main forms of the victimisation of trans people.

I said that the bureaucratic-coercive state expands dramatically under capitalism. The fact that this happens creates the eye of Sauron trying to look at everyone and identify which gender they are, and so on. It also creates the roles of doctors and social workers as state gatekeepers, controlling access to sex/gender transition - insofar as people do not have the money to pay for private treatment, but also by way of state regulatory operations.

These dynamics are driven by market society. They are already evident in the late medieval Italian city-states, early modern Netherlands and England, long before steam-driven industry. The point this poses is that the oppression of trans people is largely created by the dynamics of market society - producing both changed family dynamics and the strong state. Under the (global) dictatorship of the proletariat, the dynamics of market society will persist, but over time be overcome and wither away - as will the state.

It is for this reason that we need the maximum programme. But trans liberation is not the only reason we need it: the point is equally true of women’s and LGB liberation. I refer to these, as distinct from other issues, merely because of the immediate connection to trans liberation. It is not good enough to have a minimum programme on its own: we need both the minimum and the maximum programme.

Minimum

I have much less to say on the minimum programme. I have argued elsewhere that the method of approach for this purpose needs to be to try to construct solidarity round commonalities of experience, as ‘Lesbians and Gays support the Miners’ in 1984 constructed solidarity round the common experience of oppression by the police.¹⁵ I have argued previously that we could usefully add to the minimum programme “Abolition of legal recognition of gender with regard to government documentation”, which the Revolutionary Communist Organisation in Australia comrades propose; and building more non-gendered public toilets.¹⁶

A great many of the ‘minimum programme’ issues that affect trans people are shared with everybody else. Thus, for example, in relation to trans healthcare, including transition care, we want decent health services, publicly funded and controlled, free at the point of need. This, of course, poses the question of doctors as ideological gatekeepers; but it should be remembered that doctors also function as ideological gatekeepers in relation to women’s health issues and as controllers to ration access to healthcare for the poor. Overcoming this problem is a matter of the ideological struggle with traditionalism-patriarchalism.

Moving onto that terrain, we want to get rid of the witch-hunting operations of the capitalist media. It is no good trying to imagine that you could overcome them in relation to trans people, while leaving them intact in relation to the fake anti-Semitism smear campaign, and any of the other such operations. The witch-hunting character of the capitalist media exists because it is an institutional arrangement under which the voice of the proprietor is amplified by advertising funding and applied for his political purposes.

The oppression of trans people in the prison system - perfectly real - is at the end of the day a branch of the generally oppressive character of the prison system, and our Draft programme calls for radical reduction of the use of imprisonment. These are examples.

Not useful for the minimum programme is legal gender recognition. The reality is that legal gender recognition fails. It fails to deal with the medical aspect, but it also inherently sets up the flat conflict that the gender-critical feminists exploit because of the nature of legal gender recognition. Either trans people have to go through a whole series of hoops in order to get their gender recognition, which is violently oppressive to trans people, or alternatively there are no requirements and then it becomes a toy for the dishonest and provocateurs to play with. The problem is that the idea is premised on accepting the rigid gender binary, in an attempt to get unity on trans as a single issue with the liberals. The result is that you go down with the liberals, as happened to the Scottish National Party over gender recognition.

Theory

This brings me to three issues of general theory, very much in outline.

The first is against intersectionality, whose problem is that it is anti-class. It is an ultra-theorisation of the people’s front policy, in the form of the Communist Party USA’s version of the people’s front: the race-class-gender ‘trinity’. This supposed that ‘class’ is represented by the pro-Democrat leadership of the trade unions, but you cannot raise race or gender issues in the trade unions, because that would be disturbing the class front. Gender is represented by the liberal leadership of the single-issue women’s movement, and you cannot raise class or race issues there because that would disturb the unity of the women’s movement. Race is represented by whatever mountebanks hold themselves out as the representatives of the black community or of the particular ethnic minority sub-group. The upshot, as I argued in 2018, is ‘Vote Clinton, get Trump’, which is so self-defeating (like this year’s ‘Vote Harris, get Trump’). Rejecting the method of intersectionality is a necessary first step.

Secondly, reject the arguments of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and so on. These are essentially idealistic theories, according to which we are to reject Marxist materialism, as far as it relates to sexuality (Foucault in the 1970s), or as far as it relates to gender (Butler in the 1990s, since adopted by very many left writers on trans liberation). The reality is that you cannot corral the rejection of materialism into the space of gender and not reject materialism, as far as the dynamics of the economy is concerned. If Foucault (followed by Butler and others) is right, then Marx’s claims about the economy and about historical materialism and so on are wrong.

In reality, I think it is clear from the historical work that has been done since Foucault wrote that he was wrong. His historical argument for the primacy of theory and the struggle for power over untheorised practices depended on looking at French and German ‘Enlightenment’ developments and ignoring their untheorised Italian city-state, Netherlands and English precursors. His argument for the primacy of power grew out of the New Left’s revulsion from bureaucracy and, as Daniel Zamora’s Foucault and neoliberalism shows, moved into the neoliberal movement of critique of Marxism. These theories were to explain the marginalisation of the politics of class. But after its supposed marginalisation, class returns to political salience, but in an unpleasant form: the left having abandoned it, class becomes a trope for the nationalist and patriarchalist-traditionalist right.

Finally, let me deal with the limits of social reproduction theory, for which a significant amount of left trans liberation writing has argued. Now, social reproduction theory is essentially a theory constructed in the 1970s on the basis of how things were in the 60s: the theory being that capitalism as such separates social reproduction processes from production processes - and production is masculine, while reproduction is feminine.

The empirically visible problem with this is, since the theory was constructed, we have seen a radical feminisation of the workforce - not just in the advanced capitalist countries, but globally. So a great deal of production on any terms is feminine. Going along with this development, the ideological forms have shifted. At least in the United States and Britain there is a shift from the 1950s ideological Athenian conception of femininity (in which women ought to be in the house, not outside the house, and white and soft) to an early 21st century Spartan ideological conception, in which women exercise - in the gym, running, and so on. This is a very superficial ideological form, but it reflects in an indirect way the general phenomenon of the feminisation of the workforce.

There are more fundamental problems with the theory. For Marx in Capital, reproduction is the element of production that is necessary for society to carry on. What goes beyond reproduction is the social surplus-producing element of production. So that reproduction is not just what women do in the home in connection with kids and housework, in the traditional family ideology: it is also the people who are digging holes in the road in order to mend water mains, who are repairing and rebuilding houses, even those who are manufacturing cars, so far as they are to replace old and busted cars. And so on across the whole of the economy.

Behind these problems, social reproduction theory was trying to give an explanation of the oppression of women in its 1950s-60s form that was not vulnerable to the academic, radical feminist, and Eurocommunist critiques of Engels. In the 1970s some Marxist feminists continued to promote Engels’ narrative of the emergence of the oppression of women together with that of class. This was criticised by academic anthropologists (originally for transparently political conservative reasons).

The radical feminists argued that the oppression of women is substructural to class, which may well be true. The problem this poses is like the construction firm trying to replace the railway bridge at Oxford station, who have severe difficulties because they cannot effectively get at the substructure of the bridge without removing the bridge itself, which would involve them shutting the railway down. Analogously, to get effectively at the substructural oppression of women it is first necessary to take down the superstructural capitalist state and, below that, the order of class as such. The Eurocommunists adopted the academic and radical-feminist critiques of ‘Engelsism’ because these were useful sticks with which to beat the anti-revisionists, Trotskyists and so on, who kept insisting on class.

Social reproduction theory was, then, part of a larger movement to try to construct a theory of the oppression of women that would not fall into ‘Engelsism’, because it would not engage historical materialism, but would instead grow immediately out of the internal dynamics of capitalism as such.

The result is two problems. On the one hand, the theory places the oppression of women insufficiently deep in the structure of class society. On the other hand, it places it too deep in the structure of capitalist society, so that the ability of capitalism as such to move radically in relation to the socialisation of family production, the proportion of women employed in formal employment, etc, is radically understated. The theory makes capitalism seem to need more conservatism than it actually does. The flipside of this is that feminism as such, but equally gender resistance as such, appears to strike more radical blows against the capitalist system than is, in fact, the case.

This is an edited version of the talk given to the November 3 Online Communist Forum. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV2FxKaqC54

A six-part series was published in February-March 2023: ‘Devolution non-recognition’ Weekly Worker February 2 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1428/devolution-non-recognition); ‘Clearing the ground’, February 9 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1429/clearing-the-ground); ‘Moving towards the positive’, February 16 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1430/moving-towards-the-positive); ‘Gender, class and capitalism’, February 23 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1431/gender-class-and-capitalism); ‘Effective collectivity is key’, March 2 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1432/effective-collectivity-is-key); ‘Tailism cannot deliver’, March 9 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1433/tailism-cannot-deliver). And ‘Yet more lies’, April 13 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1438/yet-more-lies).↩︎
R Hall, ‘Ten theses on the gender question’: thepartyist.com/2024/06/02/ten-theses-on-the-gender-question-revisited. See also my comment on this and the arguments of the Marxist Unity Group, Brunnhilde Olding and the Australian Revolutionary Communist Organisation: ‘Solidarity, not sectionalism’ Weekly Worker August 29 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1504/solidarity-not-sectionalism).↩︎
L McMaster Bujold A civil campaign London 2000, pp128-41.↩︎
www.livescience.com/59675-body-parts-grown-in-lab.html; www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/harvard-researchers-help-create-technology-to-grow-living-human-ovaries; www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/05/laboratory-penises-test-on-men.↩︎
www.who.int/health-topics/human-genome-editing; news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/perspectives-on-gene-editing; R Tamurai and M Toda , ‘Historic overview of genetic engineering technologies for human gene therapy’ Neurol Med Chir (Tokyo) 2020 Sep 8;60(10):483-491.↩︎
N Scheman, ‘Queering the center by centering the queer: reflections on transsexuals and secular Jews’ (1997 - reprinted in Shifting ground: knowledge and reality, transgression and trustworthiness (Oxford 2011)).↩︎
I made this latter point for other reasons in ‘Moving towards the positive’ Weekly Worker February 16 2023 (see note 1 above).↩︎
Eg, www.who.int/health-topics/infertility; www.singlecare.com/blog/news/infertility-statistics. The NHS has 84%: www.nhs.uk/conditions/infertility.↩︎
williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states (June 2022); www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/genderidentity/bulletins/genderidentityenglandandwales/census2021.↩︎
For the lower figure see L Sax, ‘How common is intersex? a response to Anne Fausto-Sterling’ Journal of Sex Research Vol 39 (2002); as for the 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.↩︎
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/sexualorientationenglandandwales/census2021.↩︎
‘First gender, wrong sex’ in HL Moore, T Sanders and B Kaare (eds) Those who play with fire: gender, fertility and transformation in east and southern Africa London 1999.↩︎
Conveniently accessible references at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon) and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalière_d’Éon.↩︎
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John/Eleanor_Rykener is well referenced; R Betancourt Byzantine intersectionality Princeton NJ 2020, chapter 3.↩︎
See ‘Clearing the ground’ (note 1 above ), and ‘Solidarity, not sectionalism’ (note 2).↩︎
‘Tailism cannot deliver’ (note 1); ‘Solidarity, not sectionalism’ (note 2).↩︎