Letters

Trans women

As an American communist, I found Mike Macnair’s April 20 Online Communist Forum talk about the recent UK Supreme Court ruling enlightening as to the legal basis - and lack of legal sense - of the ruling. However, as a transgender communist, I found Mike’s general ignorance on the subject disappointing, but unfortunately characteristic.

I say ‘characteristic’, because it is similar to his previous work on the subject (‘Trans liberation and Marxism’, August 11 2024), which proclaimed what we call self-ID (that is, the updating of the gender marker on legal documents on demand) a boon for various bad actors - a favourite hypothesis of anti-trans activists, but one that is easily shown to be false, as many jurisdictions - including several US states and Ireland - have had self-ID for years now (including, in some jurisdictions, the neuter X marker) with no such incident.

I take issue with several parts.

First is the repeated use of “post-operative” to qualify which trans people might be entitled to equality. The gender recognition certificate (GRC) process has never required any surgical intervention; neither does any other guarantee of equality (indeed the guarantees offered by the Equality Act until this ruling required neither medical intervention of any kind nor a GRC).

One place this comes up - “Do you really think that post-operative trans women ought to be placed in men’s prisons?” - is particularly concerning. I have to ask in response - does Mike really think that V-coding is something exclusively done to “post-operative” trans women?

Second is the dichotomy of socialists and “trans activists”, calling certain socialists “useful idiots” for … It’s a little unclear. Mike seems to take exception to the use of the term, ‘transphobia’, ignoring (or perhaps ignorant of) the way that ‘transphobic’ is used - by analogy to ‘homophobic’, as a broad term meaning ‘anti-trans’. But there is also a rejection of this case and ruling as specifically anti-trans. While it is true this is ultimately in the service of separate-spaces politics, the sharp edge is nonetheless an anti-trans campaign. The stated goals of the American conservatives (and UK conservatives, notably JK Rowling), who are in part driving it, are specifically against trans people.

Part and parcel of this is ‘trans activists’ as a floating signifier for some segment of trans people whose goals and methods the speaker disagrees with. The use of ‘trans rights activist’ this way is quite a common thing among anti-trans activists in the form of ‘I’m not anti-trans people, just TRAs’, and, while I do not particularly wish to accuse Mike of being a useful idiot of this sort, his use of it echoes that - loudly.

Third is the rejection of ‘Trans women are women’. The basis given - that there are differences in medical needs and prevalence of certain disorders - has no bearing on it as a political statement and the demand for equality. One could, on the same basis, say that disabled women are not women “for some purposes” or (based on the higher prevalence of skin cancer) that red-haired women are not women “for some purposes”. Or nearly any other adjective.

‘Trans women are women’ is the alternative, solidaristic politics that Mike so longs for. Trans rights are women’s rights and are workers’ rights. Most of us, activist or not, are well aware that our oppression is grounded in the oppression of women broadly. And, although liberal identity politics is prevalent in trans activism, as it is in any other contemporary liberation movement, to equate the two and then accuse our supporters of being Clintonite useful idiots requires frankly deliberate ignorance.

By, the way, as a transgender woman myself, the claim that trans women are much less likely than cis women to get breast cancer did come as a surprise to me, because most medical risks are very similar (as one might reasonably expect). In fact studies differ on this (see ‘Screening for breast cancer in transgender women’ UCSF Transgender Care), and as a result screening guidelines for trans women are much the same as they are for cis women.

Amy Wilhelm
email

Irreconcilable

Andrew Northall writes: “Raising immediate demands, which are driven by what working people actually need, proceeds from where the class is now, but also challenges and potentially breaks the current artificial restrictions imposed by bourgeois society, also providing a real glimpse of what a socialist and future communist society can actually be like” (Letters, April 17).

But how does it do that, Andrew? As you are aware, a future communist (aka socialist) society (at least as Marxists envisage it) will be one in which we voluntarily contribute to society according to our abilities and freely take according to our needs without any quid-pro-quo transaction being involved at all. In other words, a moneyless, wageless, classless and stateless alternative to all forms of capitalism. I honestly cannot see how “raising immediate demands” affords us a glimpse into such a society, as Andrew claims.

He also writes: “It ought to be a fundamental principle for the labour movement that work should not only pay, but that anyone who works physically and mentally hard for 40 hours a week should earn enough to cover not only all basic living costs, but sufficient to fully participate in society.”

Presumably, this is an example of what Andrew means by an “immediate demand”, but I am puzzled as to how exactly the demand to be better paid under capitalism in itself allows us to better envisage a possible future in which we will no longer have to sell our working abilities to a parasite class for a wage or salary - in which we will no longer need to be ‘paid’.

It seems to me that imagining a communist future amounts to a paradigm shift or, if you like, a leap of the imagination - a discontinuous break with the present. This was, I think, the point that Marx and Engels were getting at in the Communist manifesto: “The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”

Of course, workers have to fight for their interests in the day-to-day class struggle. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain fully support the principle that workers should militantly and democratically organise themselves in the industrial field to effectively wage class war. The real issue is how we should organise as a class on the political front. On what basis should we organise politically - on a programme of reforms (or immediate demands) or on a revolutionary programme of fundamentally transforming society?

The fact of the matter is that these two different kinds of programmes are fundamentally irreconcilable. You cannot simultaneously strive to mend capitalism and also claim to want to end capitalism. I have yet to come across a remotely plausible explanation of how this could be possible.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There is the (in)famous example of the German Social Democratic Party in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, which succumbed to the temptation of prioritising the minimum programme as a way of opportunistically attracting working class support. This inevitably led to the abandonment of its revolutionary maximum programme and the transformation of the SDP into a fully capitalist entity.

There is no other way of running a capitalist society except in the interests of capital and therefore against the interests of wage labour. That is what a programme of reforms will lead to. Administering capitalism as a supposed working class government will soon enough compel you to betray the trust of your working class electorate in the name of ‘economic realism’. We have seen this happen over and over again.

You can only achieve a post-capitalist society if and when a majority of workers want it and understand what it entails. You cannot trick or coerce them into such a society. And it will not magically manifest itself as the materialisation of some quasi-mystical-cum-mechanical process of social evolution. It has to be explicitly advocated and sought after.

This quote from The German ideology would seem particularly apt here: “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary - an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement: a revolution. This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

Robin Cox
SPGB

Hamas out

Ian Spencer’s article about recent events in Gaza is filled with important details concerning the total death toll (51,000), the number of dead children (17,492), the number of wounded (111,588), etc (‘White coats, red blood’, April 17). Clearly, he has done his homework. So how is it that he fails to mention the most important political development since the war began some 18 months ago: ie, the eruption of mass anti-Hamas protests, beginning in late March?

Even notorious Hamas apologists like Drop Site News and The Electronic Intifada have reported on the demonstrations, even while downplaying their significance. But Spencer goes one better by ignoring them altogether. While otherwise wide-ranging and informative, his report airbrushes them out of history the way Stalin once airbrushed Trotsky.

Why? The answer is obvious. The protests do not accord with the CPGB’s nationalist viewpoint, which dismisses the importance of political conflict inside the Palestinian camp. Since Palestinians are victims of Israeli oppression, they must support the resistance. And, since they support the resistance, they must support Hamas, since the CPGB sees them as one and the same. The fact that Palestinians are furious with Hamas for bringing death and destruction down upon them is a complication that does not compute, as far as the CPGB is concerned. So the protests must not exist.

Yet they look very much like the first stirrings of a Palestinian spring. Just as Tunis, Cairo and other Arab capitals once resounded with demonstrators chanting, “The people want the government to fall”, Gaza, despite brutal Hamas repression, is now filled with crowds crying, “Barra, barra” (‘Out, out’), as they demand the fall of the Hamas government as well.

Who can blame them? Hamas did not consult them before launching its criminal assault on October 7 2023. It didn’t ask if they wanted to become “a nation of martyrs”, as a top Hamas official named Ghazi Hamad described them on Beirut TV two weeks after the launch of the so-called ‘Al Aqsa Flood’. When Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar assured a colleague that Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour”, no-one asked them whether they agreed with such perverse logic, in which death equals life and defeat somehow adds up to victory. Like most people on earth, they want peace, work and democracy and are therefore sick and tired of a party that stands for the opposite.

As one Gaza resident put it recently in a message to Hamas, “Why did you allow the building of malls, restaurants, the corniche, the beautification of streets, and the planting of trees? Why did you give us permits to build our homes and licences to run our businesses? Why did you allow Gaza to be beautiful if you hated it? Why did you let us dream of a future if you despised life?”

These are questions that demand answers, yet the CPGB refuses to hold Hamas to account. Spencer assails Keir Starmer for his hypocrisy in protesting against Israeli atrocities, while continuing to back the slaughter. But he should really look to his own hypocrisy as well. Like Jack Conrad, I’m a big fan of Jesus, particularly his statement in Matthew 7: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?” Such words are as relevant now as they were 2,000 years ago.

Daniel Lazare
New York

Valued comrade

It is with a terrific sense of loss that I report the death on April 10 of comrade Anne Scargill, the former wife of ex-president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill.

For the last few years Anne had been a shadow of herself, having been struck down by Alzheimer’s disease, which robbed her of so much in her final years. But she died aged 83 surrounded by family and comrades. She was a truly lovely human being - a most extraordinary ‘ordinary’ working class woman. Kindness, warmth and humanity shone from her body.

Drafted in at the start of the mass Women Against Pit Closures movement, she - along with the indomitable Betty Heathfield, the wife of former NUM general secretary Peter Heathfield - were rapidly put in place to exercise some control over the volatile rank-and-file spontaneous women’s groups during the 1984-85 Great Strike. The women had moved rapidly as a wing of the strike movement, and showed no sign of becoming simply ‘kitchen staff’. Although their role was vital, they faced determination to keep them very much subsidiary and out of any involvement in the policy direction of the NUM or the strike.

As soon became apparent, neither Betty nor Anne had any intention of controlling the enthusiasm of the miners’ wives, daughters and girlfriends, and welcomed the advent of women’s pickets. These were at first forcibly condemned and frozen out of official structures set up by the NUM. There was quite a battle for hearts and souls between the national office (including Peter and Arthur) and the majority of the area fiefdoms, especially Yorkshire. The women - and Anne to her great credit - showed they would not wait for democratic structures to emerge or entrenched male-chauvinist union bureaucrats to change, and simply did what they had to do anyway.

We thought we had won that fight after the strike, when Arthur put forward a visionary plan to absorb the women into a formal part of the NUM, which would have formalised the link and bond between the pit community and the union, and had the potential to take the NUM beyond simple trade unionism. But it was not to be: despite everything those women had endured - especially, but not exclusively in this strike - the big areas, not least Yorkshire, voted it down.

Anne’s dedication and commitment during the strike is well known. She and others toured the world, raising money, speaking in support of solidarity action, organising women’s pickets. But it was during the final move to industrial genocide under John Major in 1992-93 that the women as an independent force for the industry and union came into its own. Thatcher’s vision of a still large, highly profitable, non-union coal industry, with about a third of the less profitable ‘deadwood’ cut off and the NUM driven out by 1986, had failed decisively, following a national ballot for strike action which returned a 76% ‘yes’ vote. Premier John Major responded with a scorched-earth policy of killing the industry dead.

By the time the new offensive came in 1992, there was little belly for a fight. Jackboot management, victimisations and the offer of more money in terms of redundancy packages than the men had seen in a lifetime - all ate into the miners’ resolve. New laws were being enforced, which prevented us picketing any mines other than our own. The union was hogtied with injunctions and court orders, so Anne and the women swept into action. They deployed a wide range of civil disobedience (not all of it very ‘civil’). There were occupations of underground, then strategic surface, buildings. There were pickets of government premises, including the department for trade and industry, the digging up of environment secretary Michael Heseltine’s front lawn with an earth mover and - most poignant - the Women’s Pit Camps. By this time the old Betty had left us and the new one was Betty Cook - a lifelong comrade, who stood with Anne until the very end.

Anne Scargill was a guest at countless universities and miners’ welfare events, and spoke to fellow pit women in various parts of the world - in a language only they understood, passed on from mother to daughter: the grief of injury, death and disaster, and the injustice under state ownership and management, as well as the whole capitalist system. It should be noted that Anne was not politically myopic: her passion was just as deep on Ireland and Palestine, as well as other workers’ struggles.

She and Arthur parted company some time ago, but it never altered her commitment to the union, the industry and the battle for justice for our communities. Nor did it alter her standing among those communities and militants she served so loyally.

Her homely voice, her personable character and the plain honesty of the women she led was almost unique. She was a character without affectation - one of solid granite, which will stand on its own, so long as we live. Anne, it was great privilege to have fought alongside you, and sat and sung in your company. You were a giant of the mining unions.

David Douglass
South Shields

Great man

Following the critique by Paul Demarty of Owen Jones’s exposition of a singular form of ‘great man’ leftwing leadership, which focussed upon former Rail, Maritime and Transport union general secretary Mick Lynch (‘Socialism and star power’. April 17), readers of the Weekly Worker may wish to know of my socio-biographical study of Lynch.

Readers should also note that Jones was not the only one to push such an idea. Polly Smythe, labour correspondent for Novara Media, did so in The Guardian in early January this year, in an article entitled ‘Mick Lynch, you’re a legend - and the unapologetic working class leader the left is missing’, upon the occasion of the announcement of his retirement.

Published in January 2024 by Manchester University Press and called Mick Lynch: the making of a working class hero, my book broadly concurs on the issues of Lynch’s public performative prowess. This is why people started calling him a ‘working class hero’, hence the subtitle of the book. But it is not a term I would choose to use to describe him myself. The book tells the tale of how he operated within the RMT and his adherence to Labourism and the Labour Party, despite no longer being a member and leading a union that disaffiliated over 20 years ago.

Quite apart from being in his early 60s now, his modus operandi and worldview do not make him a suitable candidate for the kind of position Jones and Smythe urge - even if that was seen as being desirable in the first place.

The book currently has a 50% discount on it (so just £10) if bought from the publisher’s website.

Gregor Gall
Glasgow