01.05.2025
Communism and trans liberation
Judges at the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law - an integral part of the conservative backlash against trans people. In response Mike Macnair was delegated to produce a set of draft theses
The CPGB has agreed that in the light of the continuing witch-hunt against trans people it was desirable that we should adopt theses on communism and trans liberation. The context is also the criticisms which have been made of the CPGB for failing to adopt formal positions beyond the sentence in our Draft programme, § 3.16 - “Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, etc have often been scapegoated or persecuted. They are portrayed as threats to timeless religious values, sexual norms and the nuclear family - the basic economic unit of capitalist society” - and comrade Carla Roberts’ proposal to amend the Draft programme.1
The Provisional Central Committee delegated me to produce draft theses on the issue for discussion at the next party aggregate. The draft that follows has not been discussed by the PCC - we decided at our meeting on Sunday April 27 that it would be better to publish my initial draft as soon as possible for open discussion.
These are draft theses, I emphasise. There will no doubt be formulations which could be improved or are simply wrong, and gaps which ought to be filled. The draft theses are, however, framed by intentional absences. The framework idea is that it is possible to stand unequivocally against the fraudulent rightwing witch-hunt of trans people, and to campaign for the liberation of trans people from their present-day oppression, without accepting the framework of ‘intersectionalist’ tail-endist politics, which necessarily leads to ‘Vote Harris, get Trump’ and to ‘Vote Sturgeon, get the UK Supreme Court’s Christianist definition of ‘woman’’.
Equally, and connected to this, it is not necessary to commit to arguments for the social construction of biology, which logically entail the truth of subjective marginal utility economics (and thus that unemployment is caused by workers’ unreasonable refusal to accept below-subsistence wages). Nor is it necessary to believe that gender non-conformity is in itself revolutionary. Nor to commit to the psycho-babble language of ‘transphobia’ (or homophobia or Islamophobia), which, precisely by their over-psychiatrising character, destroy the space for rational disagreement. Nor to imagine that no platforming ‘terfs’ is a productive policy.
I. Witch-hunt
1. Since the later 2010s trans people have been subjected to an accelerating witch-hunt by the conservative right, its media and related political institutions. This witch-hunt is characterised by the systematic, fraudulent exaggeration of the very occasional cases where purported ‘transition’ is dishonestly used for personal advantage, and of equally rare cases of ‘detransitioning’ and ‘transition regret’.
This method is exactly parallel to the same conservatives’ and their media’s exaggeration of the numbers of false rape claims, in order to promote rape impunity by leading jurors to be unduly suspicious of complainants’ evidence.
2. This witch-hunt is, in fact, a dishonest ‘entering wedge’ for the imposition by law of the Protestant-fundamentalist and Catholic-integralist doctrine that “male and female created he them” (Genesis 1.17) and the ideas of separate spheres of male and female, and permissible sexual relations to be limited to procreation, that are built on this verse: in fact, male-supremacist doctrine.
This is reflected also in the conservatives’ promotion of ‘tradwives’ and in the Trump administration’s (February 2025) support for the Tate brothers being free to travel to the US, while on bail for alleged sexual assaults. In this context, non-conservative feminists who have lent their support to the conservatives’ anti-trans witch-hunt play the role merely of useful idiots for Christianist male-supremacism.
3. The witch-hunt against trans people is part of the general turn of the capitalist class away from securing the consent of the lower orders through unity with the upper classes round free trade, liberalism and anti-discrimination, and towards securing the consent of the lower orders through unity with the upper classes around nation, patriarchal family and tradition. This turn reflects the underlying duality of capitalist politics, in which liberalism grows out of market freedom, conservatism out of the authority relations in the workplace (especially the small workplace).
It also reflects the fact that marginal-utility general equilibrium economic theory is merely false in the same way as flat-earthism, with the result that marketisation and financialisation produces for the poor increased dependence on the family as an economic institution, and on religious charities. And it reflects the consequent failure of liberalism to deliver for broad masses, and hence liberalism’s currently declining ability to produce consent. In this aspect it is similar to the 1970s turn to liberalism and anti-discrimination, away from 1950s-60s ‘New Deal’, social-democrat and Christian-democrat forms of ‘managed society’, which reflected the declining ability to produce consent of that 1950s-60s regime.
4. In the very short term, the dominant tendency among trans rights activists made themselves specifically vulnerable to this sort of attack by committing themselves to ‘intersectional’ unity with capitalist liberals, and thereby identifying themselves both with ‘human resource departments’ managerialism, and with free-market financial globalism.
The form of this identification has most visibly two elements: the demand for official recognition as a member of the destination sex/gender, within the implied framework of accepting gender as a strict binary; and no-platforming ‘transphobes’. Behind both lay the anti-materialist theoretical commitment to the social (meaning ideological) construction of gender. This inherently implied that both official recognition and the no-platforming of ‘transphobes’ were central tasks for the liberation of trans people; and conversely ones on which there could be a single-issue united front with the liberals and HR managers.
This theoretical commitment also directly counterposed the claims of trans rights activists who pursued this policy to the lived experience of the majority of women, in which the oppression of women is an embodied experience inescapably linked to the ways in which the class order exploits human biology.
5. Communists have to fight this witch-hunt. The primary means of doing so has to be the exposure of the fraudulent character of the witch-hunters’ claims. Second, and alongside this, it is necessary to put forward proposals for the liberation of trans people which do not depend on the Eurocommunist delusion that this can be delivered by unity with the liberals on the basis of anti-materialist arguments, for state controls of speech, etc.
II. Oppression
6. The oppression of trans people is commonly treated as an aspect of the more general oppression of ‘LGBT+’ or ‘queer’ people. The present witch-hunt makes it impossible to approach ‘LGBT+’ as a single, oppressed ‘community’. This is, on the one hand, because the witch-hunt specifically targets trans people (and has been supported by some lesbian-separatist feminists). On the other hand, ‘LGBT+’ people do not form a class on which their oppressors are dependent (unlike workers or peasants). The problem of constructing solidarity to defeat the witch-hunt is therefore a problem of constructing solidarity of the working class as such, not of constructing solidarity either of trans or of LGBT+ people as a distinct group.
Apart from the current witch-hunt, the oppression of trans people under capitalist rule involves (a) (i) elements which are specific to trans people, and (ii) elements which are common to oppressed groups more generally and in some cases to the ‘undeserving poor’ more generally; and (b) (i) elements which are derived from the specific operations of the current state order and its political-ideological representatives, and (ii) elements which grow out of capitalism as a class order and as a market order. These differences bear on the appropriate communist policy for the liberation of trans people from this oppression.
7. The core element of the oppression of trans people is the phenomenon displayed as politics in the witch-hunt: the insistence that everyone must be either man or woman, and be publicly identified as such.
This has immediate forms in relation to official documents; but also in the physical built environment, in male-only and female-only public spaces, which are largely an invention of capitalism. One particular instance - the provision of men’s and women’s public toilets - originates as an effort of 19th century conservatives to keep women in the home and continues to discriminate against women by differential provision.
The liberals offered to evade this issue in relation to trans people as a specific group (as distinct from both intersex people, and butch lesbians, femme gay men, non-binary people, etc) by offering legal sex change within the framework of the compulsory binary. This project has failed by way of the conservative witch-hunt - but more fundamentally, because of the underlying ground of the political purchase of the conservative witch-hunt.
That is, that the approximate sex binary has biological grounds in human reproductive biology; its transformation into a fetish (competitive heterosexuality) is given by the market order of relationship formation in capitalism; and capitalism also throws up the radical intensification of the policing operations of the bureaucratic-coercive state. The result is that the narrow version of gender recognition offered by the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and similar legislation is oppressive to trans people by requiring a period of being neither one nor the other (while both the state, and social expectations growing out of competitive heterosexuality, require being one or the other); while self-identification versions (as in Theresa May’s proposals and their defeated Scottish version), because they imply both over-claims and extensive policing of speech, appear as a threat to the very large majority who remain cis and heterosexual.
8. Immediately linked to this is the difficulty in obtaining gender-affirming care in health systems. This has two aspects. On the one hand, it reflects ideological gatekeeping by doctors and health administrators animated by religious and other forms of conservative politics. This is specific to trans people, but shared in different ways in various aspects of women’s healthcare, and in racism in healthcare.
The second aspect is the general problems of access to healthcare, which reflect the inherent features of market- and insurance-based systems and the general squeeze on public expenditure as affecting public-funding-based systems. Long waits for diagnosis and treatment are common to trans people - and to pretty much everyone in need of treatment except the seriously rich.
9. Gender nonconformity (whether in the form of trans or other forms) is met with discrimination in employment, housing and other services. This is theoretically subject to policing by the Equality Act in the UK (different rules apply elsewhere) but actual practical enforcement of anti-discrimination rules is variable, and more available to the small minority who can afford effective legal representation. The phenomenon is, obviously enough, not limited to trans people, but affects also lesbians and gay men, women and ethnic minorities.
In addition, there is a more general issue of the ‘rationing’ of jobs and housing driven by market dynamics. The ‘housing crisis’, meaning chronic problems of under-supply of housing driven by landlord and property-speculator interests, is a permanent feature of capitalism - only temporarily alleviated by public housing supply in the 20th century. The tendency of capitalism to produce standing unemployment and precarity of employment was similarly mitigated in the ‘front-line states’ in the cold war period, but has returned with a vengeance.
10. Trans people are subject to direct violence in the form of queer-bashing, up to and including being killed (a prominent recent example is the 2023 killing of Brianna Ghey2). The phenomenon is at root driven by the performance of competitive heterosexuality; it affects gay men and lesbians as well as trans people. It is arguable that the same dynamics affect the much more widespread phenomenon of male violence against women, and also non-state racist violence.
In this context, lawyers have constructed a specific form of oppression which is the ‘trans panic defence’ or ‘LGBT panic defence’ (once called the ‘gay panic defence’).
11. Trans people are subjected to discriminatory policing. This reflects the general dynamic in which ‘professional’ police forces are dominated by conservatives (a feature of Soviet Russia from the early stages of the rise of Stalinism onwards as well as of capitalist countries generally). The result is that not only trans people, but also women (as in the recent Sarah Everard case3), ethnic minorities and the working class more generally, are subject to discriminatory policing.
In this context, a specific form of oppression is that trans men are far more likely to be prosecuted for obtaining sexual relations by fraud (by ‘pretending to be men’) than anyone else is for this offence.
III. Communism
12. The aim of communism is a society without classes, state or dependence on the family as an economic institution. It is a society whose distributional principle is “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and whose aim is maximising human possibilities - “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” - not to maximise profit or output.
13. Such a society will probably have the resources to enable a ‘full’ biological transition - one which produces self-generated hormones and fertility in the destination gender. Certainly, it will have no need to repress lesser forms of body modification (note, the present size of the global cosmetic surgery and procedures industry is valued at $69.4 billion).
14. More fundamentally, such a society will have no need to insist that everyone must be either man or woman, and be publicly identified as such.
15. We can no more predict the modes of formation of sexual relationships in fully developed communism than 15th century people could predict the fully-developed competitive sexual marketplace of the later 19th to 21st centuries. (This is not to say that the transition will take 500 years; merely that the stage of the transition out of capitalism that we are at is analogous to the stage of the transition out of feudalism that was the European dominance of monarchism after the failure of the Italian city republics and before the Netherlands and Britain showed a better capitalist alternative.) But we can be confident that the competitive sexual marketplace - which is clearly a product of capitalism as such - will wither away, as market relations wither away. With this withering away, so will the dynamics which produce queer-bashing, and so on.
IV. Immediate
16. Our immediate programme is working class political rule over a society which remains class-divided and is still in a contradictory way partially market-based. It is still possible to take important steps to the liberation of trans people at the first stages of such a regime, and to fight for them as immediate demands before the overthrow of capitalist political rule.
17. We fight for the immediate abolition of the requirement to state sex on public documents.
18. We fight for an increase in the availability of sex-neutral facilities, moving towards the replacement of single-sex facilities with these on the basis of an increased total number. This applies, for example, both to toilets (which should be WCs with wash basin in the same room, directly accessible from public spaces) and changing rooms (which should be provided as individual rooms accessible from public spaces, not semi-public changing spaces).
In relation to the issue of single-sex prisons, we stand for the radical reduction of the use of imprisonment as a penalty: prison should be a last resort. The prison regime needs to be radically transformed (Draft programme, § 3.16).
19. We fight for the defence, restoration and radical improvement of public healthcare, including gender-affirming care; including public ownership of the pharmaceutical industry, and cancellation of the odious debts incurred by public health services as a result of the financialisation frauds since the 1970s. (More in Draft programme, § 3.8.)
We stand for the separation of church and state, and the confiscation of Church of England property (Draft programme, § 3.17). The pursuit of Christianist and other conservative policing agendas by doctors and medical administrators (whether in relation to women’s reproductive health issues, or in relation to gender issues) should be treated as gross misconduct.
20. We fight against discrimination against trans people - as against all forms of discrimination - in employment, housing and other services. We stand for radical reductions in working hours (Draft programme, § 3.3) and the right to work for all (Draft programme, § 3.5); and for a massive revival of social housing in order to end the housing shortage (Draft programme, § 3.7); getting rid of shortages reduces the scope of discrimination.
21. We fight for clear legislation to abolish the ‘LGBT panic defence’.
22. We stand for the abolition of the professional police force, along with the standing army, and its replacement with a conscript people’s militia (Draft programme, § 3.11). While this measure will not abolish biased policing, it will create the conditions in which biased policing can be effectively combatted, by striking against the aspect of biased policing that arises out of the social dynamics of the professional police force as such.
-
See Brünnhilde Olding’s letters (Weekly Worker July 25, August 22, September 5, September 26, November 14 2024); Carla Roberts’ letter Weekly Worker November 7 2024) and her article, ‘Two meetings and many possibilities’, February 13 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1525/two-meetings-and-many-possibilities).↩︎