This text was written as part of the LSC Pamphlet Program. It reflects only the opinions of the author(s) and not the consensus of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

by Asarlaiocht S, Charlotte D, Eliza L

Transfeminism occupies an increasingly prominent position within socialist and queer spaces. With the ever-increasing restrictions on bodily autonomy and persecution of queer people, the question of how to liberate gender non-conforming folks is ever-important amid a generational spike in transphobia. As socialists, we must consider the relation of these questions to the class struggle as well. How do we organize trans workers against their own oppression and capitalism? Why are so many trans folks drawn to alternatives to capitalism? What is transphobia’s relationship to capital and the state?

Transphobia and the State

To begin with the fundamentals, while the state ultimately exists as a product of the material conditions it exists in, it nonetheless actively reinforces those conditions. Patriarchy, capitalism, and racism all ultimately seep into the state’s attitude toward its subjects, and in turn, the state focuses its power on controlling those deemed as underclasses within our society. The main goal of this control is usually to divide working-class communities and to further their exploitation by the capitalist class. The underclass, in the present form of our state, is anyone who isn’t a cisallohet white capitalist.

While patriarchy exists more generally in the culture, it can be exercised through the state’s various institutions by the dominant socio-economic elite in various ways. Examples of this control might include controlling access to contraceptives, levying “pink taxes”, restricting access to hormone replacement treatment options, passing and enforcing anti-sex work legislation, restricting property rights to women or queer folks, abortion bans-- the list goes on.

Unfortunately, queer people are all too used to these methods of state-sanctioned intimidation and control. The reinforcement of patriarchal ideology and attitudes in society only adds a further dimension to the oppression queer folks experience from the state. We see this occur primarily through normalizing and categorizing gender-normative behavior while condemning non-conforming behaviors, such as enforcing gendered interests upon children,, raising male children with toxic masculine attitudes, placing certain expectations around children based on their birth gender, etc. Patriarchy is reinforced passively on multiple levels within our culture, finding purchase in arenas ranging from architecture to spoken language. The omnipresence of patriarchy and toxic masculine attitudes is a key reason for many feminists who have built their careers around analyzing media. Patriarchy, too, extends its influence into the very character of capitalist culture: despite feminist advances, waged labor is still primarily seen as a masculine domain, while women are still expected to freely provide the reproductive labor– namely child-rearing and domestic work– to grease the wheels of the capitalist machine.

For trans folks more specifically: we keenly feel the boot of our oppressors on our necks. We see it everywhere in the scorn from our neighbors and the misgendering we so commonly suffer, but we also see it in the legal difficulties we have with finding medicine, with the constant struggles to have our names changed and seek self-identification, our higher rates of poverty, drug overdose, and death at the hands of police, the general societal view of our burlesqueness, the abuses lobbed upon us by strangers and families alike, the manipulation and mistreatment by medical professionals trying to ‘fix’ us, etc. We see both the passive and active oppression laid before us, stemming directly from the challenges our existence poses to the existing regime of gender that undergirds patriarchy. The discomfort our existence elicits is not to be unexpected, if something perceived as “immutable” as gender is malleable and fluid then all else becomes questionable. Morality, class, nationality, race, etc. all come into question. If people are not inherently supposed to act in a certain way, dress a certain way, or engage in certain activity, then neither are they limited in their capacity or worth. In doing so, exploitation on the basis of sex or gender becomes harder to justify and thus does patriarchy itself become more difficult, if not abjectly nonviable, to maintain.

We recognize that the state, as it exists, is inherently tied to patriarchy and by extension transphobia. If we view the state as having a toolbox to use on behalf of capital, we might then view the various institutions of oppression as multitools in said box. As mentioned above, transphobia derives from patriarchy and expresses itself in various forms.

Transphobia and Its Many Tendrils

Moya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the treatment of black women (both trans and cis) at the intersection of two different forms of oppression: patriarchy and racism. Taking this idea further, we can start to see other forms of interlocking oppressions and their unique dynamics. Coloniality, in part, relates to how imposed gender roles have affected indigenous people and other colonized communities, transmisogyny is used to underline the stigma experienced by trans women especially, transmisia defines the dismissal of genderqueer identities, and anti-transmasculinity characterizes the oppression faced by trans men.

It’s important to recognize that when talking about any of these forms of patriarchy that we do our best not to mark one as the origin point of the other, or view one form of oppression as more horrible than the other. Comparing different forms of oppression is good insofar as it helps us understand how oppression operates and expresses itself, but comparing the impacts of these different forms of patriarchy is ultimately an apples to oranges discussion. Each form of transphobia requires a unique and direct approach from the transfeminist lens, where we can draw comprehensive analysis without placing the lived experience of one oppressed individual above another. This is not to say that the interactions and interplay between trans identities shouldn’t be evaluated within their own silos, but rather to view each identity from a unique perspective in conversation with the others and with transphobia as a whole. A trans man, for example, is a form of marginalized man, often infantilized and mourned over to a greater extent than, say, a trans woman. Instead of letting ourselves fall in line with standard, reductionist cisfeminist discourse, which might dictate that a trans man is a man and is thus an equal player in the oppression of all women, we must not ignore his fundamental relationship to transness in our analysis.

How Do We Fight It?

Trans resistance has existed for as long as trans people have. We form communities around our shared identity, bulwarks against the horrors of patriarchy, and safe havens for us to take reprieve and understand who we are and where we come from. Trans spaces are fundamentally important to trans people, not just as a means to escape the persecution to which we’re so often accustomed, but also as a means to organize and discuss our existence with people who share similar experiences. Trans spaces are a seed of a new world waiting to be born. These communities, many of which are online, provide many trans people, closeted or otherwise, the same opportunity as gay and lesbian bars for our predecessors. They represent places where traditional norms around behavior, discussion, and (even familial) relationship structures break down and start to form the vague outline of a revolutionary, and potentially abolitionist approach to modern capitalist and patriarchal structures.

These spaces also serve as a means of radicalizing ourselves. How many of us have sat in voice calls or chat rooms and heard the brutality inflicted upon our brothers and sisters? How many of us have heard, or experienced, the horror of being denied healthcare, or the need to share medications with a partner? How many of us have heard or felt the horror of being harassed, or even forced upon, in public spaces? These stories are a reminder of the dangers we face. Yet these places are a reminder of our triumphs! Who among us doesn’t remember when a trans therian made the no-fly list? Or when we won the right to self identification in Spain? Or our victories over reactionary bills across the country? Our first time shopping for clothes that didn’t make our skin itch, our first time getting HRT, when we first learned the words “heat from fire, fire from heat!” Our victories, large and small, are all possible because of our cooperation.

Trans people recognize keenly how important it is for us to work together, to cooperate separate from state control, because that state and the majority of people are against us. We are a small community who so often are abused or disowned by our own families, so in turn we make our own families. For us, cooperation and self reliance is not a virtue of character; it is a reality necessary for our survival. We have already dedicated much of our community to DIY HRT, educating ourselves on trans history and activism, and much of that work springs from these communities. We as socialists have a duty to help expand and support these communities. They present to us something almost akin to dual power, though much more decentralized than that term implies in popular imagination. Found families and self-made communities are the seeds from which a true socialist trans movement can blossom, where we may fight for our rights and liberation beyond what pittances are provided by the cisgender patriarchy.

One of the things we as anarchists should do is support these communities so as to allow them to flourish. We in Horizon-LSC generally hold to the idea of social insertion; in other words, we want to introduce anarchist ideas to these liberatory spaces, notably by fostering mutual cooperation between members and encouraging these spaces, these communities, to be rank-and-file oriented. Most gender non-conforming folks already trend towards not liking the status quo, yet for many, it’s hard to get involved. For some the issue may be as simple as being unaware of the resources and latent potential in their spaces, while others may experience a desire to avoid broader political circles, and for others the reason may just be due to a sense of powerlessness. Part of the project of tranarchist organization is in trying to help our siblings to recognize their personal power and realize that by taking back their spaces from corporate sponsors, city councils and elitist collaborators.

Further, we want to advocate beyond mere “anarcho-entryism”, but to make clear that ideology should remain subordinate to broader social movements. Instead of constantly creating a scene in your local campus pride group by arguing that the only way trans women can be liberated is through violent insurrection, you could instead advocate, for instance, for a member-run, rank-and-file approach to group decision-making, fostering a desire for more tangible and lasting mutual aid, or turning away from carceral punishments within the group. Gradually, people tend to support whatever works best, and this helps inoculate our communities from liberal sycophants who implore us to get on our knees and beg that our cisallohet white overlords save us from ourselves!

The True Anarchy is the Friends We Made Along the Way

From a certain perspective, perhaps this sounds silly. “What, political revolution comes from me and my friends just working to help each other out? Me and my neighbors can just do whatever to protect each other from fascists and horrid laws?” The answer is, yeah! We acknowledge so clearly how terrifying the world is right now. In France the far-right was only barely defeated by a far-left coalition, Reform UK has threatened to flip the United Kingdom to a far-right government the likes of which has never been seen in the country before, Labour under Keir Starmer has positioned itself with the Right on Trans Issues (he has continuously said transwomen do not belong in women’s spaces”), and in the US we’re stuck watching a senile old man feebly stumble his way on live television while his political opponents have prepared his successor to become a dictator with absolute immunity.

However, these developments present nothing new for us. Queers have long known the feeling of the gendarme’s boot on their neck. Our forebears were thrown in jails, tortured, and deprived. Our scars are still visible within our communities, where we have all experienced loss from state violence. Each time a new name, each time a new victim. This will only continue unless we fight back! Our international infrastructure already exists, and is merely waiting to be harnessed! From Seattle to Moscow, all of us have some connection to each other crossing lines of connection the capitalists and xenophobes fear with increasing trepidation, that’s why they keep trying to make us invisible online. We don’t care for duty, loyalty or whatever else, this is fundamentally a fight for survival! So let this be a rallying cry! Let us fight! Fight for those we have lost, for those we can yet still save!

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