The attack on transgender people forms a central pillar of the reactionary wave gripping politics in the anglosphere and elsewhere. For transphobes, this attack is borne of a purported conflict of rights, a notion that arises out of the liberal, small ‘c’ conservative tendency to naturalise social oppression and see liberation as a zero sum game. For revolutionary marxists, to understand the reality we need to look beneath surface appearances.

The “conflict of rights” argument fabricates a threat trans people, especially trans women in aggregate, are alleged to pose to cisgendered women in aggregate. This is an instance of the trope wherein the defence of “our” women, the “right kind” of women, against a perceived sauce of corruption, is invoked to mobilise mass anger; generally examples of the threat comes differently from queerness or a racialised other, or some combination.

So why are trans people attacked? Why are trans men belittled and treated as incapable of agency over their bodies and minds? Why do trans women additionally face the pressure of transmisogyny and are treated as both inherently predatory, but simultaneously as sexual commodities with no rights to refuse (cis) male advances?

The reality is that trans people disrupt the idea of the gender binary as an immutable reality borne of biology. The binary and the repressive restrictions it places on our lives is said to be driven by human nature rather than the social organisation of class societies (and in particular, presently, of capitalist class society).

Trans people thereby threaten the existing order of social reproduction. That order depends on the naturalisation of chiefly women’s subordination in uncompensated social reproductive labour. Trans people as a social phenomenon are a radical reminder of the failure of systems of gendered oppression. Moreover, trans people in their particular social existences are therefore rendered highly marginalised, making us both tempting and easy prey for demagogues and petty bigots alike.

Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR) has always maintained this broad analysis. And we can see in the latest, now most vulgar forms of the transphobic and transmisogynistic reaction that our analysis is accurate. It is apparent in the actions of those who would condemn trans people to social exclusion, escalating hate crime, the denial of medical services, workplace discrimination and more.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), riding on an awful judgement from the Supreme Court,  quickly offered a code of practice that advises service providers to police single-sexed spaces in the only way they can be: by appearance. This opened the door to the simple, straightforward enforcement of gender norms against trans and cis people alike, although make no mistake trans people, and trans women, are the foremost victims.

Anybody who stands for women’s liberation as a whole must see the meaning of such a recommendation. Biology as destiny, discrimination as policy, and enforcement to be left up to a case by case basis. This will not only hurt everyone, but because of its flagrantly uneven framing, it will especially impact the most impoverished, multiply oppressed members of the trans community, those already least positioned to defend their place in society.

In September  the EHRC handed over the responsibility for the guidelines to the Minister for Women and Equalities who needs to approve or amend the code and bring it to Parliament for approval. Nothing Bridget Philipson, for this is her lesser known role, or any other Cabinet member in Starmer’s government gives any hope that the result will be any better for trans people.  With more than a hint of frustration at the lack of action from the government, on 15 October the EHRC  removed its draft guidelines from the website.

Socialist solidarity demands that we stand with trans humanity against this code of practice, and that we work urgently to reverse all of the injustices perpetrated against trans people in the last decade or more. Trans people are a part of the working class, and an attack against us is an attack on the whole of the class. It demoralises the case for a universal humanity that is the bedrock of the socialist vision, and emboldens fascists and political opportunists.

The fight back must be taken to the EHRC itself. It has become a vehicle for the politics of hate, whether that it aimed at attacks on Muslims, bolstering established politics or denigrating trans life. But the fight back must also happen in our communities, our socialist organisations and parties, our unions and families. A viable tradition of solidarity with trans people has failed to emerge from British socialist politics, and the failure at this point represents a damning crisis of our tradition. We should never have gotten to the point where our enemies felt so emboldened. We should certainly not allow that to persist.