To strive for trans liberation is to embrace a world where trans joy is no longer a form of resistance, but a mundane part of everyday reality. It requires us to move past imagining better worlds and integrate within ourselves that trans liberation is not imaginary, but an imminently attainable reality. Integrating with this is to abandon any attachment to our present world and the hierarchical structures within it—whether jobs, rights, margins or prestige—as acceptable spaces for us to exist. 

Half a decade ago, it was clear that transgender existence – the solidarity, culture and self-understanding that emerged around the lives of those outside the policed limits of cisness – was under existential threat.

A moral panic took shape in a new hate cult, the Gender Critical movement, a loose association of often Twitter fascists, stagnant currents in defeated sections of the feminist movement, atomised conspiracy theorists and outright grifters. This human dust had gained the ear of the powerful, leveraging the same reactionary tropes about “grooming”, human nature, and civilizational collapse that have always given a pseudo-pretext to queerphobia. 

The response of socialists is mixed. Some even joined the bandwagon of gender critical fascism, lured by the certainties and mainstream legitimacy of prejudice. Others fell into an alienated pattern of allyship, indistinguishable from liberal appeals to progress and toleration.

Anti*Capitalist Resistance fights for a different approach, based on the unity of oppressions and oriented towards the complete liberation of every transgender person as the precondition for socialism. This liberation is not done on behalf of transgender people, but in solidarity, with a lived understanding that my freedom is always also your freedom and vice versa. 

It was Black trans women who shaped transgender consciousness in their early struggles in the United States; it has been disabled trans people who illuminated the shared barriers of a disableist culture; it has been trans people in the postcolonial world who have shown us the ways imperialism reinforces the gender binary internationally as a tool of control. 

The attack on trans people traded on the ever-present muck of other prejudices. Of racism, misogyny and disableism in class society. On the last, it undermines bodily autonomy, whether the right to access transition services, to have or not have children; it thrives in pathologising human desires and erecting barriers to public spaces by forcing trans people from gender appropriate facilities. 

Furthermore, this attack encourages separatism as a solution for unsafety or unfairness, insidiously reinforcing in our minds that the threat of harm is an innate and unchangeable part of reality. We reject this notion: Unsafety is always a choice by those given power over others by society. It is neither innate nor unchangeable. 

The overlaps of marginalisation are not accidental; they occur because transphobia is one part of a system of class power and control. It is the system itself that must be destroyed. That requires a revolutionary strategy, which we openly advocate. But it does not imply that trans people should idly await the salvation of some distant utopia.

Trans survival, trans joy, trans freedom now, are revolutionary. The revolution is imminent in all our day-to-day struggles, as we understand the world in our quest to change it. And every gain, even every minor reform that makes trans life just a bit more liveable, can have a revolutionary character. 

However, it is not revolutionary if we merely settle for tolerance, for the logic of assimilation into class society – so that some (invariably those who best fit the white, disableist, wealthy social ideal) are given a space of exceptionalism in which to subsist. It can only be revolutionary if we demand freedom for everyone.  

That is why we say, to paraphrase a slogan from the feminist tradition:

There can be no socialism without transgender liberation, 

And no transgender liberation without socialism!

Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government Conservative Party COVID-19 EcoSocialism Elections Europe Fascism Film Film Review France Gaza Imperialism Israel Italy Keir Starmer Labour Party Long Read Marxism Marxist Theory Palestine pandemic Protest Russia Solidarity Statement Trade Unionism Ukraine United States of America War