Workers’ Liberty supports trans and gender-diverse (TGD) people’s rights. Some left feminists see those as threatening women’s “sex-based” rights. This is part of a series of articles attempting to thread a path within this hostility. How can left-wing activists reach more agreement here?
A previous article outlined the history and origins of gender variance. This article examines political polarisation around TGD people. Following articles will look at debates around: biological and social materiality; toilets and change rooms; sport; prisons. A summary about socialist attitudes to these debates will follow.
I use “assigned sex at birth” for biological sex characteristics, and “gender identity” for how people identify psychologically and socially. I am a researcher at a university and a gender-affirming health clinic, with an academic background in sociology of science around TGD people. I identify as a gender-non-conforming man, using he or they pronouns. I write on my own behalf and nothing here represents my employers’ stance.
Contestation of TGD people’s rights has increased greatly recently. The first modern campaigning for those rights was by left-wingers in Berlin before 1933. After a huge setback in the 1930s, there were slow changes over decades in social and medical attitudes from the 1950s. In recent years those have reached a critical mass, with TGD people demanding the right to live with respect and without harassment in their deeply-felt identities. This goes beyond the tacit acceptance of TGD people as a special subculture found in many past societies.
Some countries have seen significant changes: Japan’s top court in 2023 ruled as unconstitutional a law requiring people to undergo sterilisation to legally change gender. However, right wingers like Hungary’s Orban, Russia’s Putin, and US conservatives, are targeting TGD people within a broader anti women and anti-LGBTIQ +agenda.
Putin and Orban removed any way to change legal sex markers, even after gender-affirming genital surgery; and restricted “LGBT propaganda”. Russian right wingers mobilised fears about “LGBT Nazis” in propaganda against Ukraine, and say that pro LGBTIQ “gender ideology” threatens their reactionary “traditional religious values” (i.e. what feminists previously called gender ideology). At the Trumpite CPAC in 2023, Michael Knowles said: “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”.
The same people want to limit abortion rights. In conservative US states, often the same clinics provided abortions, gender affirming hormones (GAH) to adults and teenagers, and puberty blockers to adolescents. Now the clinics are barred from providing abortions and gender-affirming services to anyone under 18, and GAH and abortion access for adults is increasingly difficult. In Australia, right-wing religious forces have increasingly focused on TGD people. In the UK, all provision of puberty blockers and GAH for young people has been blocked, and EHRC guidelines due soon may block TGD people’s access to public toilets.
Historically, feminist and TGD activists have often worked together against patriarchal ideology. The successful campaign to legalise abortion in Argentina in 2020 had strong involvement by TGD activists for decades.
But in some countries now, especially Britain, some of the most vocal pushback comes from left-wingers and feminists who say TGD demands, especially trans women’s demands, threaten “women’s sex-based rights”. They often describe themselves as Gender Critical Feminists (GCF). Other feminists reject that, arguing that all feminists criticise gendered stereotypes. Equally, GCFs reject the term “trans exclusionary radical feminists” as derogatory. To avoid seeming to prejudge all the arguments just by initial choice of terms, I’ll use “sex-based rights activists” (SBRA).
The space for discussion has become limited, with hostility on social media and elsewhere. Many SBRAs use language that is hurtful to TGD people, e.g. calling trans women “men in skirts”, refusing to use chosen names and pronouns, campaigning against trans women being in “women’s spaces”, and citing fear of assault. Some seem willing to criticise TGD people gratuitously in ways that are certain to cause offence, though some SBRAs insist that they never misgender, and Ruth Serwotka has denounced groups like the US Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and their alliances with the right, instead demanding “protections for transgender people in the US against the Trumpian right”. Some TGD people respond intemperately, with calls to cancel talks by SBRAs on grounds they will increase hostility towards TGD people.
Many SBRAs oppose access to puberty blockers and GAH for people under 18, arguing they lack ability to make these decisions, even if their parents agree. Yet no-one seems to dispute the use of puberty blockers for non-TGD girls going through early puberty, though early puberty is not life-threatening. SBRAs often point to potential effects on later fertility. Yet most strongly support the right of young adolescents to access contraception and abortion, without parental knowledge — I agree.
There is a large contradiction: do these young people have agency and the right to control their sexed bodies in general, or only within the confines of the SBRA onlooker’s viewpoint? Both decisions have a life-long effect: giving birth means you are already a parent as a teenager, while puberty blockers plus hormones may lead to loss of fertility later in life (sometimes avoidable by preserving embryos or sperm).
WoLF
WoLF in a 2020 court case supported the sacking of a trans woman funeral worker for wearing women’s clothing. But it is no threat to anyone if workers can wear clothing socially coded as male or female, regardless of their sex assigned at birth or gender identity. That is what left activists need to support.
When US states have blocked access to both abortion medications and puberty blockers, some SBRAs have accepted that as a lesser evil. Despite talk of trans women threatening “sex-based rights”, I know of no case of trans women being a force against abortion rights, maternity leave and maternity pay, equal pay, or equal access to jobs.
UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka Posie Parker) has toured the world organising “let women speak” rallies to oppose access to “women’s spaces” by trans women. She regularly worked with right wing forces, illustrated by open Nazis “gate-crashing” in support of her 2023 Melbourne rally, with SBRA speakers like Melbourne’s Holly Lawson-Smith. Subsequent rallies in Melbourne have had far-right activists advertising them and supplying sound systems.
Pink-washing
Some SBRAs argue that support for TGD rights involves “pink-washing” by large corporations; and that Big Pharma sees GAH as a lucrative market. Clearly pink-washing is real — multinational behemoths try to shroud their super-exploitation of Third World workers and anti-union attacks by parading progressive policies for TGD people, LGB people and women. I ask SBRAs — would you rather they had anti-discrimination policies than not?
Big Pharma hormone sales to TGD people are miniscule compared to sales to non-TGD people. The Australian government a few years back required GPs prescribing testosterone to refer to an endocrinologist. But that requirement was not about trans men. Rather, it was about testosterone being pushed to middle-aged non-TGD men, supposedly to renew vitality and sex drive. TGD people often face shortages for preferred hormone preparations.
There often seems to be a disconnect in these debates. TGD people (like non-TGD women) are not warriors for the ruling class, or sycophants for woke professors. They are an oppressed group that needs support from the working class, in line with Lenin’s idea that the working class needs to be a tribune for all the oppressed. That principle will inform future articles.
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