“Transphobia is endemic in Britain. Gender is mercilessly policed to ensure compliance with the needs of capitalism and to enforce traditional so-called values.”

Anti*Capitalist Resistance, The Fight for Trans Liberation, 2024

The above claim is contained within that awkward but necessary word, cisheteronormativity, which points to an all-pervading ideology of conformism. Let’s be clear: the Cass Review is part and parcel of the enforcement of conformity to the status quo. Despite being couched in reasoned and measured tones, the report implies that trans people suffer from an undesirable pathological condition that needs careful monitoring if not elimination.

This is a far cry from the claims of those transitioning, who see it as an existential necessity on the rocky road to liberation. It is within the shadow of the Cass Review, an unprecedented attack on trans existence in Britain, that I wish to challenge two articles recently published in the Morning Star, which also locate trans people as a “problem”. These articles attempt to seize on the hostile environment against trans life and deepen this oppression.

The first is a book review by John McInally on 7th June, of a volume titled The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheeshed, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn. The second is about the Labour Women’s Declaration published on 28th June in response to the Labour Party Manifesto’s section on trans people. The articles chiefly deal with the defeat of the Scottish government’s attempt to introduce self-ID, orchestrated by the struggle of “grassroots women” (read astroturfed organisations) in defence of “sex-based rights” and the “confused and contradictory” proposals in the Labour Party manifesto on sex and gender.

The Attack on Trans Rights

The predictable scare stories about self-ID are all on display. It is alleged that it will enable “male” access to women’s spaces, sports, hospitals and so on, making the false assumption that trans women are inherently dangerous, with a strong implication that they are sexual predators or rapists. This is similar to the fearmongering used by all kinds of bigots to justify attacks against oppressed groups, from racialised minorities to queer people.

Moreover, in attacking trans women as a threat, this moral panic further ignores the real situation of approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men who experience rape or sexual assault in England and Wales every year, amounting to around 11 sexual offences every hour, with negligible convictions by the police. Unsurprisingly, cis people and especially cis men overwhelmingly commit these offences, and there is no evidence that trans women pose any greater threat than cis women.

Transgender and gender non-conforming people comprise 0.5% of the population according to 2021 census data. The scare stories about a tiny minority flooding women-only spaces serve to reinforce the irrationality of this position, and there is no proof of abuse from already existing shared spaces. What data indicates, especially the escalating hate crime statistics, is that trans people are overwhelmingly victims of violent crime. This makes the rhetoric a form of gaslighting.

“The scare stories about a tiny minority flooding women-only spaces serve to reinforce the irrationality of this position.”

Feminism, Capitalism, and Liberation

It seems that feminists who attack trans people are trapped in a delusional cul-de-sac, forgetting the root of women’s oppression embedded in the capitalist system. This system exploits and oppresses women as second-class citizens, treating them as unequal, expendable, and a cheap or even free source of labour. Housewives and mothers, in particular, are dispossessed of a meaningful presence in public life.

Where are the crucial demands for women’s (all women’s) liberation? For equal pay, education and job opportunities, free twenty-four-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand, financial and legal independence, an end to discrimination against lesbians and women’s right to define their own sexuality, reproductive rights, and against domestic violence, maternity leave, women’s suffrage, sexual harassment, and sexual violence? The clarion call of ‘There can be no socialism without women’s liberation, no women’s liberation without socialism’ has been abandoned in favour of attacking an oppressed minority group.

“The clarion call of ‘There can be no socialism without women’s liberation, no women’s liberation without socialism’ has been abandoned in favour of attacking an oppressed minority group.”

The bold assertion that sex is binary and immutable, which ignores intersex people, and that this fixed biological condition is the source of women’s oppression, abandons the notion of the political, social, and cultural causation of women’s oppression. This begs the question of why it is necessary in a capitalist system. No debate is seriously entertained; there is just the war cry that self-ID will be the end of women’s identity. They discount any future possibilities for radical change to gender, which is profoundly reactionary.

The twin evils of capitalism, exploitation and oppression, have been conflated by a minority of ‘left-of-centre women’ and TERFs into an obsession about trans people struggling for liberation. This is replete with fabricated concerns about ‘identity politics and anti-science gender ideology’ governed by ‘demoralising, regressive, and reactionary post-modernist queer theory.’ Well, they had to get that lot in, didn’t they?

The notion that trans people are fixated on identity politics turns things on its head by blaming the victims. Trans people face appalling social conditions. They are largely poorly paid, more likely to be unemployed, discriminated against in housing, victims of wider social oppression including physical assaults and murder, ostracised at school and the workplace, denied access to decent medical care especially when young (including in the denial of puberty blockers), and face long waits for medical care leading to anxiety and despair.

Since 2020 at least 16 young people, possibly more, have committed suicide while on the waiting list compared to one death in the previous seven years. Do TERFs Incorporated really believe that this desperate struggle against oppression by trans people and the fight for recognition is prompted by Queer Theory, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida?

The book reviewer praises the working-class, grassroots organisation of women for defeating the self-ID and Hate Crimes legislation in Scotland with the able assistance of JK Rowling. It claims this band fought against the ‘vested interests of the state, media, and corporations’. He goes on to state how the group ‘struck a blow not just for women but for materialism, democracy, and rationality.’

I wasn’t aware that any of those three institutions had a positive attitude towards trans people! Surely not the Westminster government or opposition who clearly oppose gender ID and other basic demands for trans rights, let alone liberation. Surely not a media that is world-famous for whipping up a moral panic against trans people. Surely not corporations with investments in countries that not only discriminate against queer people but lock them up and murder them?

As for the three values mentioned, it is odd that they should exclude one of the most marginalised and oppressed groups, most of whom are probably working class. Although it should be said, as revolutionary socialists, we would fight against all forms of oppression regardless of the class credentials of the people affected. What kind of socialism demands liberation along parochial and narrow lines?

The mantras ‘Stop the Boats!’, ‘Get Brexit done!’, and ‘Define Sex!’ belong together. While TERFs and their allies worry about defining gender and securing a law that will prevent self-ID and protective Hate Crimes legislation, there is a real struggle for survival out there for trans people. Conversion therapy has not been banned, the moral panic about protecting children from imagined threats in schools has given rise to a new Section 28 by the back door, toxic ‘debates’ in the media on trans ‘issues’ continue unabated, transphobic hate crimes are at a record high, poor access to healthcare, homelessness, and increasing rates of suicide define the precarious existence of trans people. There cannot be LGB without the T.

The Labour Party is backtracking on trans equality as the political landscape here and globally lurches in a more right-wing, reactionary, and nationalist direction. We must fight for solidarity, intersectionalism, and internationalism against red-brown contrarian views that use ‘class first’, anti-identity politics, and anti-wokeism to forge alliances between the left and far right/fascists.

While it may not be apparent in the two articles, the attack on an already marginalised group smacks of the hostility towards diversity and inclusion that is the hallmark of the far right. This is a fascistic condemnation of “liberalism”, not a ruthless criticism of existing social systems.

The Problem of Violence

The media and individuals have extensively highlighted the controversy surrounding alleged trans violence against gender-critical people while ignoring the much broader and ever-increasing violence against trans people. This demonstrates a complete ignorance and historically illiterate understanding of the righteous anger from those denied a voice. After many years of anti-trans propaganda from the media and public figures (such as Julie Bindel, Julie Burchill, JK Rowling, Germaine Greer, Spiked Online, the LGB Alliance, and GB News, among others) and years of neglect by the health services, with no opportunity for a right of reply or redress, this anger must be understood in its wider context and not condemned outright.

Our political demands, always under revision by the self-activity of the exploited and the oppressed, should be:

• The complete repudiation of the Cass Review
• Full and speedy access to health for trans* youth and adults. No decision about us without us
• The end of all nonconsensual and unnecessary medical interventions on intersex people and their full participation, whether trans* or or cis, in in the co-production of their healthcare
• Trans inclusive ban on conversion therapy and making care dependent on diagnoses of gender dysphoria
• CAMHS (children’s mental health services) to receive emergency funding to bring it up to standards befitting its role, and to be reformed also on a co-productive basis
• Nonbinary inclusive, universal, non-medical self-ID
• An end to Clause 28 advice for schools  

Always with the oppressed, never with the oppressor.

“There cannot be LGB without the T.”

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