by AnarchyNouveau
We all know the UK is transphobic, but what can transgender workers do about it?
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” – Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
In an interesting turn of events everybody’s favourite 4th international sect (the Sparticist League) has made a completely spot on take in their outlet The Worker’s Hammer, with no complaints from this reader. The Cass Review – A review on NHS medical services for trans people in the UK – Has recently been making the rounds among our colonial overlords in the British upper classes and parliament. This “expert” review is the latest in a long trend of medical justifications for transphobic bullshit (The classics include Ray Blanchard’s psychoanalytic projection that coined the term “autogynephilia” in order to claim that genital dysphoria is just a fetish[1]), and has been picked up from our dear leaders from across the political spectrum as justification for foaming at the mouth at the thought of abusing transgender children by denying them HRT. Much in the same way Europeans love to foam at the mouth at a passing mention of the existence of ethnic minorities such as the Romani and Sinti peoples.
Dr Hillary Cass associates the mental health conditions that trans kids face with the fact that they started HRT in the first place. This is to justify making it even more difficult to acquire HRT in the UK until an arbitrary cutoff age of 25, beyond the many year waiting lists for trans NHS patients that already exist. Which is of course utter bullshit. These poor children are mentally ill because they live in the UK, not because they’re trans. With all the paternalism of a country filled to the brim with nanny state oedipal complexes and apparently (according to pornhub’s 2023 statistics) a hard-on for lesbians, step mothers and MILFs[2], british cissies have been spreading this shit around fanatically like it is the word of God or something.
Our comrades from the Worker’s Hammer[3] make an incredibly good point about letting trans kids decide for themselves when it comes to starting hormone therapy. There’s no debate here, anything else is just abusive. WH state that:
“What is needed is to attack the pillar of the anti-trans crusade and of the Cass report, which is the idea that teenagers are too stupid to make decisions about their own lives and that it is the state, the NHS and parents which must dictate what they can and cannot do — in the name of “protecting” them!”
Yes yes, this is all well and good comrades, but what can we trans people actually do to stand up for ourselves and build our movement? Having been organising on this front lately I figured it would be good to chime in on the situation. Lately more and more takes such as “trans rights is a class issue” have been floating around the left[4]. As reassuring as it is to not be called a slur and to be seen as human by comrades… trans people and the revolutionary left as a whole need to focus on what can be done to get the working class behind our fight; engaging our entire community via social organising in between mobilising for protests and demonstrations.
First of all, we can organise to make our struggle a union fight, so that our colleagues and comrades in the union movement demand to enshrine real wins materially such as the right toward Transition leave on par with cis people’s fight for Paternity leave. Most unions have some kind of rank and file group, and it is vital that trans comrades worldwide try and get involved in these and where they don’t currently exist to organise in order to form them. Despite the neoliberalisation and defanging of many unions in the west, the original conception of unions was one where workers weren’t provided services by paid employees, but rather made decisions and took militant action together. This means that in order for unions to fight for us today, we have to rebuild the neglected workers movement and fight to bring them under our directly democratic control from below. Bringing feminist issues into the rank and file is a great way to connect with your union. Not only would we be screwed without feminist unionists having won and fought battles for queer and women’s rights in order to scrape out what little concessions currently exist, it’s also important as a way to build solidarity between cis unionists and the trans community so that transphobia can be combated en masse where we have the collective power to do something about it as a class. Fighting transphobia is more than just something we can do by trying to mobilise our friends and community out onto the streets in order to beg cis people in the public to give a shit.
This is unfortunately still the dominant method of engaging in feminist struggle within the trans community. People are angry, scared for their friends and loved ones experiencing the erosion of rights worldwide… but there is no collective power, sustained motivation and a cultural memory of organising to do something about it.
There is precedent here from activists within so-called Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union, who have fought and won the right to “transition leave” at the university of Sydney. While international readers will need to do a little extra work to adapt this to their relevant union, there is a resource pack which you can look at here in order to organise on this basis.[5]
Beyond Transition Leave, there are other demands that can be brought up within the union (if you’re in the medical industry and can organise to set a precedent to make trans surgeries cheaper, you’d achieve a lot for trans rights, for instance. I would also love to see being a TERF classified as a mental illness). I’d encourage readers to get creative, and to address whichever issues are relevant to their locality and industry.
Outside of the unions, trans workers can organise within our communities towards seizing the institutions supposedly there to help us, bringing them under democratic community control. Take the Mardi Gras pride festival in Sydney, for instance, which activists from the feminist organisation Pride in Protest[6] have an excellent record organising within. In “Australia” at least, legalised entities like this have requirements by law to have some semblance of “democracy” within them (even if that is as pathetic as literally one opportunity to vote for the board members per year). In other parts of the world, this won’t be the case, but so long as there is some means for people to meet up, talk and have their say within an organisation, and so long as it isn’t as evil as something like the facebook groups out there for landlords, it probably has working class people within it you can organise. After all, if you’re paying an annual or monthly fee for something as hefty as a Mardi Gras membership ($50AUD! You could DIY hormones for a year with dues like that), you and your community should at least get your damn money’s worth. PiP’s work building feminist power through grassroots organising has snagged reforms for Sydney’s pride movement to disempower and remove the police from the event, support First Nations sovereignty, as well as building internationalist solidarity with Palestinians and against Israel’s pinkwashing of genocide.
Finally, something that all of us radical trans people can do is working to build autonomy (from parasites such as cis people, politicians and landlords) and organisation into our local trans and queer communities. There is a very pressing need for us to engage in community struggle with directly democratic practices toward taking collective action, while we build social structure in order to fight informal hierarchy, grifting and predatory bullshit. The specifics will differ depending on your region and the most immediate needs of you and your community, but if there is anything resembling a local meetup that brings trans people together, it’s the perfect place for organising to spread essential information and bring people together on topics such as: Consent, safe sex, workplace harassment, unionising, anti-fascism, makeup tips, fighting landlords, addressing racism within the community, organising against workfare, solidarity with asylum seekers and migrant workers, prison abolition & solidarity with trans prisoners, mobilising for upcoming feminist protests, fighting the presence of predators and rapists within the community, self-defence classes, etc. The best sort of community to be in is one that fights collectively for its own interests with direct action, and the only way we can have that as trans workers is by organising it for ourselves. All this while we also work to make the wider working class fight alongside us against the global onslaught of TERFy and transphobic ideas, institutions, organisations and government policies.
What we as transgender workers of the world need is not to convince cis leftists that our lives matter (left-wing transphobes have used theoretical jargon to justify it to themselves ages ago anyway) but to structurally, socially and culturally spread the means for our community at a local and international level to liberate itself; in solidarity with intersex and cisgendered workers also struggling against patriarchal bullshit. We have to break out of the stagnation of “equality” within liberal democracy which is constantly being eroded anyway, crossing the lines drawn by idpol between our assigned sexes at birth and kicking out the assholes crossing red lines (small time landlords, serial rapists, etc) within our communities. Only by being organised can we make an active effort toward addressing the proliferation of abusers hopping from one community space to another, and the social abuse we face under systemic transphobia. This way we can thrive by fighting the everyday violence inflicted upon us (poverty, transphobia, racism, etc) before we end up in crisis, and before relying on trans community couchsurfing or dipping in and out of sex work for survival. Build feminist power! Touch one, touch all!
“By definition, a broad feminist movement will not fully represent our politics. Instead, it will serve as an avenue to challenge and advance feminism where it is being made: on the streets, in our homes, at our jobs, in the media, and through our intricate and overlapping social networks. Pushing anarchist feminism out of our small collective spaces and into the social arena means that we are willing to struggle for relevance within the movements of the working class. Our politics are more than just useful tools for managing our personal lives; they represent the blueprints for a world worth fighting and dying for.” – Bree Busk & Romina Akemi, “Breaking The Waves”
Footnotes:
[1] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard’s_transsexualism_typology
Blanchard is a continual thorn in the side of trans women worldwide (it says a lot that he has such a bias for trans women specifically). He should hurry up and transition already so he can prove his point.
[2] – https://www.pornhub.com/insights/united-kingdom-divided
I knew this would be cursed when I looked it up but I didn’t consider that I would be confronted with the dread of “british chav” just barely being a more popular search term than “Indian”. White people are on thin ice enough as it is, so the least that white British people could do is to not sexualise colonialism while they yearn to restore the glory of empire. Its reassuring that “posh” doesn’t even make the cut for the most popular searches, at least.
[3] – https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/252/trans
[4] – https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/danny-la-rogue-trans-rights-is-a-class-issue
The ACG and comrade La Rogue certainly were not wrong to say this, but not a single trans person I have shown the article to was impressed to read what they already knew but didn’t have the means and support from the revolutionary left to act upon.
[5] – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mTPhFRnZWBVKMnnZtxDTxNYm2–Cykpf/view?usp=sharing
[6] – PiP’s website is here: https://linktr.ee/PrideInProtest
Readers should also check out Mutiny, the publication for the anarchist-communist group “Black Flag Sydney” who have been organising within PiP and contributing to the global revival of organised anarchist-feminism: https://blackflagsydney.com/