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When it comes to anti-trans legislation: form communist leagues
As of late, reaction in the United States has focused its efforts predominantly on curtailing the very existence of transgender people. Legislators attempt to pass every law they can with the clear end-goal being re-institutionalising the marginal status of trans individuals as it existed in the 1980s. They seek to render it illegal for trans people to exist in public at all. A particular piece of legislation proposed this January in West Virginia, SB 252, de-facto bans transgender individuals from going out during daylight by forbidding “transgender exposure” to children - being trans will now be considered an obscenity throughout the whole state, and transgender people will be forbidden from coming within 762 metres of a school.
The reasons behind this surge in persecution are clear: the wave against trans people is concurrent with a broader reaction targeting all women and sexual minorities, made clear through the repealing of Roe v. Wade, but also through bills targeting all gender, sexual and romantic minorities, and through the organisation and resurgence of reactionary figures.
Capitalism has a continuous necessity: that of replacing an ageing population of labourers and soldiers at its service. The United States is growing particularly desperate, as birth rates in the country have been declining ever since the 80s, and with every recession, they go even lower. In light of such a situation, fractions of the bourgeoisie become anxious to enforce the nuclear family and the sex-slavery of women. And in turn, parts of the population which cannot reproduce (or whose reproduction will not result in ideal workers) become the “useless eaters” of capital.
Transgender people are a group with a relative inability to procreate, as hormone replacement therapy tends to make those who take it sterile. Combine this with the general disgust bourgeois society already has for them (as they are already seen as outcasts of the nuclear family), and you get an easy target.
Over the past few years, the attacks on the existence of the transgender community have shifted from general disgust into an organised doctrine, which takes advantage of pre-existing prejudice and social backwardness by framing itself as opposing “sterilisation” and “castration”. Of course, as with most reactionary whining, these glorified hangmen cry about the “poor children”, wailing about how medical treatment will make them lose their fertility, all the while calling the adults that oppose their insanity “paedophiles”. Of course, when those trans children turn into trans adults, everything possible is done to push them into suicide or to push others to kill them, lest capital have to withstand the weight of another “useless eater”.
The organised reactionary media blitz also serves the purpose of distraction; the bourgeoisie selects a marginalised group to which they can redirect attention to, in order to diverge the attention of the majority from the harm which they have inflicted upon the proletariat at a time in which it becomes most glaringly obvious. Simultaneously, directing this attack on queer people in general, and trans people in particular, also serves to reinforce the division of labour between men and women, and thus to preserve the patriarchal dominance of capitalist society. Thus, the attack on trans and other queer people directly serves as an attack upon the nascent class consciousness of the proletariat through its misdirection of hatred away from the bourgeoisie and towards one of the most marginalised groups in society.
The opposition to this calamity has not surpassed disorganised backlash. Over the years, the voices of “opposition” to reaction have been mostly passive, adhering to the delusions of social-democracy (and on its fringes, adhering to the equivalent positions of leftists/non-communists) that dominate the so-called “political left” within the United States (and all over the world). Those delusions depart from a central thesis: the belief that a struggle must be fought for “getting voices heard”, and that by merely bringing attention to trans issues and garnering the “allyship” of atomized individuals, the transgender movement will be able to conciliate with the most rotten of bourgeois legislators.
Even if this useless manifestation of leftism earns a political victory, which is unlikely, what will their victory consist of? Well, there’s a simple answer: their “freedoms” will merely consist of legalistic drivel vomited onto a paper. Trans people will go from being denied healthcare to being charged outrageous prices for life-saving medicine, they will go from being killed for their gender presentation to being killed for being in misery. Finally - trans women will have the “freedom” to not only be exploited like the common worker, but also have their pay inequality be the same as the one of a cis woman! Needless to say, the ideal scenario for the leftists in the US is a scenario where trans people die from a different, more insidious form of violence.
This political scenario that now reeks of rotten carcasses has only one solution. We must unite the whole of the working class into communist leagues, and then into the Communist Party. History has shown that social progress walks in step with the level of political maturity of the working class: when the class realises it has a common enemy, space is created to educate and inform others without hatred. Furthermore, communism is against the infantile idea of the “dictatorship of the majority” posed by other petty-bourgeois socialisms, which means that communism can, through scientific observation, arrive at an ultimately correct and binding conclusion. We must realise that a bourgeois-populist perspective has done us no good.
The experiment of the Black Panther Party, flawed as it was, and fraught with counter-revolutionary rethoric since the beginning, taught us that the first task of a revolutionary communist league composed by a minority demographic is to act in self-defense. “Self-defense” does not mean idly sitting by waiting for another person to be the victim of violence, instead, it is about building up an apparatus that can conduct many forms of struggle - propaganda, relief, intelligence gathering and boots-on-the-ground militancy - and make use of that apparatus to contain the wrath of the most reactionary fractions of capital, to require political calculations to be continuously more precise for what were once run-of-the-mill repressive measures.
So, our ultimate proposal is: create communist leagues and organise into the Communist Party, abandon the illusions of the liberal-democratic methods.