13.11.2025
Communism and trans liberation
Intersectionalism has been firmly rejected, as has tailing feminism, of both the liberal and conservative varieties. Instead we have a clear working class position. Mike Macnair explains the reasoning. Below, the agreed theses
The theses below include the amendments agreed at the November 9 CPGB membership aggregate. After my original draft was published on May 1,1our May 25 aggregate agreed to continue the discussion, to give more of an opportunity for comrades to propose amendments or counter-theses.
In the event, however, few amendments were proposed and no-one put forward alternative theses. The amendments have clearly improved the theses as adopted, increasing their clarity: in particular in thesis 16, by clarifying our view of working class rule as the form of the socialist transition to communism.
We have also added at the end, on comrade Carla Roberts’ proposal, an amendment to the CPGB’s Draft programme to call for abolition of the requirement to register gender on state and public documents.
In introducing the theses to the aggregate, I focussed on the basic features of method involved. The first is that these theses are framed by our division of the party programme into a maximum element - the end goal of communism - and a minimum element - what could be done with the immediate overthrow of capitalist political rule and can be fought for under capitalist rule. We offer a way forward, not an immediate leap into the realm of freedom. But we also offer a way forward which leads in the long term to the realm of freedom.
The issue is rendered politically concrete because under capitalism a large majority is partially dependent on the family as an economic institution; and ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘austerity’ both increase this dependence, as well as increasing dependence on religious charities (not only in the form of poverty relief, but also religious schools). The result is that here is inevitably mass attachment to the family; and purity-politics no-platforming of people who hold illusions in familial politics simply fails to achieve its objective, and in fact strengthens the patriarchalist-conservative right.
Second, the theses approach the question from the standpoint of class perspective: the perspective that the working class as a class needs to unite itself, to seek power - as opposed to the capitalist class - with the goal of socialism.
This perspective is opposed to the conservative witch-hunt against trans people, which aims to create unity between the exploiters and the exploited (and disunity among the exploited) on the basis of nation and family. It is equally opposed to the liberals’ pseudo-alternatives, in which the rule-of-law constitutional state is seen as a neutral mediator between purely sectional interests (of workers, bosses, women, racial groups, regions, religious groups, and so on). This seeks to create unity between the exploiters and the exploited (and disunity among the exploited) on the basis of loyalty to the liberal constitution.
Following from this second point, the theses are also framed by the rejection of ‘intersectionalism’. Intersectionalism began with the ‘people’s front’ conception of the 7th Congress of Comintern (1935), which sought an anti-fascist alliance with liberal capitalists on the basis of the working class subordinating its particular interests; as applied to US conditions by the Communist Party of the USA, by identifying the ‘trinity’ of race, class, sex. This CPUSA approach set up the pro-Democrat trade union leaders as the ‘official representatives’ of the working class, black nationalist leaders as the ‘official representatives’ of black people, and bourgeois-liberal feminists as the ‘official representatives’ of women. The idea mutated into something closer to its present form with the influence of western ‘soft Maoism’ in the youth radicalisation of the later 1960s to early 1970s.
The ‘intersectionalist’ approach requires, in the first place, the identification of specific sectional interests, which unite the ‘section’ as such: it unites Cheryl Sandberg - former chief executive of technology company Meta Platforms and author of Lean in: women, work and the will to lead - with the women who toil on assembly lines in the far east and south, making the hardware that software runs on; it unites Rishi Sunak with UK workers of south Asian ancestry in precarious jobs; it unites Fox News commentator Caitlin Jenner with low-class trans women dependent on even more precarious modes of survival.
This project requires, secondly, the subordination of working class interests to capitalist interests; and, thirdly, the identification of something to be the ‘official leadership’ of the ‘movement of the oppressed’ - as opposed to the perspectives proposed by communists or socialists - to be the basis of an intersectional coalition.
The result is necessarily tailist politics.
On the one side, Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century - having in 2013 explained the Socialist Workers Party’s cronyism in the ‘comrade Delta’ case by insufficient feminism, rather than as the predictable consequence of bureaucratic centralism - tail-ends the liberal line of official ‘gender recognition’ on the basis of self-identification and of no-platforming ‘transphobes’.
On the other side, the Communist Party of Britain - and this paper’s letters column’s resident Stalinist, Andrew Northall, as in his letter last week (November 6) - identify separatist feminism as the ‘official leadership’ of the women’s movement, and as a result tail-end the politics of feminists who have gone over to a conservative form of feminism and become ‘useful idiots’ for the cynical scheme devised by US Republican Party political operatives to use the ‘gender question’ as an entering wedge for Christianist patriarchalism.
The 22 theses adopted by the November 9 aggregate
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, a 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 male or female, 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 problem of access to healthcare, which reflects 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 2021 killing of Sarah Everard3), 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 male or female, 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 to replace capitalist class political rule with working class political rule. During the socialist transition to communism, society will remain class-divided and still in a contradictory way partially market-based. It will be quite possible to take important steps towards the liberation of trans people at the first stages of such a regime; and it is also necessary 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 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, § 3.17).
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, § 3.9, ‘Health’.)
We stand for the separation of church and state, and the confiscation of Church of England property (Draft programme, § 3.18, ‘Religion’). 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, § 3.4, ‘Working conditions and wage workers’) and the right to work for all (Draft programme, § 3.6, ‘The unemployed’); and for a massive revival of social housing in order to end the housing shortage (Draft programme, § 3.8, ‘Housing’); 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, § 3.12, ‘Militia’). While this measure will not abolish biased policing, it will create the conditions in which it 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.
We therefore resolve to amend our Draft programme § 3.16 to add as a new, third bullet point: “Abolish the requirement to register gender on public and state documents.”
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‘Communism and trans liberation’: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1536/communism-and-trans-liberation.↩︎