Marxism and Transgender Liberation: Confronting Transphobia in the British Left

by Red Fightback

Marxism and Transgender Confronting Transphobia in the British Left is the response to transphobia that we need in this vital moment in the struggle for transgender liberation. This pamphlet thoroughly exposes the analytical incoherency and moral deficiency within so much of this sup-posed left; their position, which is plainly morally corrupt, is proved to also be analytically impossible.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Queer, Feminism, LGBT, Gender

120 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2020

Reviews

[AHW · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what happens when you throw out the bathwater - the open transphobia of Harpal Brar’s CPGB(ML) sect - in order to save the baby - Harpal Brar’s structurally transphobic politics.

It has the appearance of a communist approach to liberation from trans people’s oppression, but under the hood there hums an engine of pure anticommunist social-democracy-with-red-flags-and-guns, as one would expect from an ML sect. Features cute tricks like handwaving away the structural trans-oppression inherent in Stalinism by saying that Stalinism doesn’t exist, and extolling Cuba’s very recent pro-LGBT reforms without mentioning that Fidel Castro threw the queer & trans people in reeducation camps. Completely accepts nonprofits and professional activists as representative substitutes for the oppressed-group sections of the proletariat, which makes sense because it also completely accepts ML parties as representative substitutes for the proletariat as a whole.

Does contain quite a bit of interesting historical material on indigenous and non-class societies’ relationships to gender, and quite a bit of horrifying detail on the anti-trans campaigning among UK MLs, (post-)Trots, Labour Party, and nonprofit industry.

[(⁠๑⁠•⁠﹏⁠•⁠) · Rating 4 out of 5]

except for the second to last chapter (which uncritically appraises Cuba and Venezuela), this is a very good text that explains the basic pillars of transphobia on the 'left' and in trans-exclusionary feminism

[Real Betis Balompie · Rating 4 out of 5]

El mejor análisis sobre la cuestion trans que he leído

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very decent. Elucidates concrete examples of transphobia on the British left (and internationally, to a lesser extent) and examines the interlinked capitalist interests funding the line they end up pedaling rather than the vast amount of Marxist feminist literature providing an analysis of gender incompatible with transphobia. The most useful chapter was the first, which essentially summarized key arguments from Engel's "Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State" and updated it with recent advancements in anthropology; this chapter really illuminated how class society gave birth to a gendered division of labor, and with it patriarchy and gender norms, while also deconstructing the idea of a "biological" man or woman as unscientific and un-dialectical. The one thing I feel the work really fails at, and it's a fairly major oversight, is in really providing a Marxist account of transgender existence; it does demonstrate the links between gender and class society and how transgender people are acutely affected by capitalist relations, but I was hoping for an analysis on how gender is constructed within an individual in a manner different from what is assigned to them at birth. Basically: what makes someone trans or non-binary? That said, a lack of exploration of gender ontologically does not prevent a Marxist approach to understanding transgender people sociologically, and this is still a great work on the failings of anti-trans Marxism and what the left needs to do going forward.