Debate: Is gender oppression real? Or just biological disadvantage?

Dear Comrade Editor

Your piece CPB Votes for Backlash, which asserts among other things “the party’s (the Communist Party of Britain) years-long habit of supporting anti-trans-rights arguments and campaigns” and this is a “shameful attack on trans rights”, really is a disgraceful smear and the opposite of the truth.

The Communist Party and the socialist daily Morning Star (which is not “controlled” by the CPB) have consistently demanded for all oppressed sections and groups in society, whether on the basis of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, culture, immigration status, language, culture, or whatever, their full rights for equality, justice, dignity, respect and freedom from discrimination and prejudice. People should be free and respected to live their lives as they choose, as long as they are not impinging on the rights of other people. This, obviously, includes people who identify as “trans”.

Counterposing the rights of (say) trans people to (say) women is crass, stupid, divisive and, as we see with current debates, utterly destructive.

Rights of course are not and cannot be absolute or completely unfettered. Everything is relative. So the Communist Party does argue that for example trans rights do not and should not extend to the “right” for biological males to enter designated women only settings and spaces. These include settings in healthcare, prisons, rape and sexual assault crisis and health centres, refuges for women at risk of abuse and exploitation. Often the settings themselves by their nature can make women additionally vulnerable (through their power structures, organisation and cultures), plus the fact many women accessing such settings are themselves already especially vulnerable.

These women-only settings and resources are generally badly funded and far too few. We should be demanding many more of these facilities and services, not less, and for them to be genuinely safe and protective spaces.

Women in modern capitalist society are, despite real advances in rights and equality over time, still an oppressed majority of the population. This oppression is against women as a biological gender and also integral to capitalist political economy and class exploitation.

Political parties claiming to be pro-working class should surely be trying to build effective alliances between different oppressed sections of the working population, the majority also exploited as different sections of the working class, to build maximum unity of the working class, and to promote class and socialist consciousness. This includes being able to produce unified and integrated demands which promote the specific interests of different sections of this potential coalition and promote much greater unity of the working people as a whole.

It should surely be obvious that the “right” of biological men to access women-only spaces would represent a gross violation of the rights and demands of women for dedicated and protected safe settings and spaces, and highly destructive to the wider cause of building working class unity and socialist consciousness.

It must surely be possible to meet the genuine needs of trans people especially for respect, dignity and equality without undermining very hard won and precarious rights for women. That is the opposite of being “anti-trans”.

With best wishes

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Reply:

It’s a pleasure to receive comrade Northall’s letter, a mere five times longer than the article it responds to. I’ve been following with – well, not interest, nor anticipation, but let’s say amusement – his recent exchange with the Weekly Worker on the same topic.

Much of his letter is verbal window dressing that doesn’t require a response. The central claim is that we are “smearing” the CPB by framing their position as anti-trans.

The reasoning for this is the same one cde Northall brings out everywhere: only true communists understand that all oppressed groups should be united in one struggle as part of the working class. True enough, as far as it goes. But why, then, did the CPB “welcome” the recent decision by the supreme court, and immediately pass policy in conjunction with it to go on the offensive against “gender ideology in the labour movement”? Why, also, have they firmly taken the side of Sandie Peggie – whose employment tribunal explicitly found her to hold transphobic views and deemed her testimony unreliable because of it – and in doing so opposed the right of trans women to change in changing rooms that match their gender? If the working class are at their best united, why try to ban trans workers from using the same toilets and changing rooms as cis workers?

The answer seems to hinge on cde Northall’s understanding that women are oppressed “as a biological gender”. I would agree that there is an initial logic rooted in biology from which women’s oppression stems – the ability to give birth and breastfeed, most centrally – but only once that biological fact has been transmuted into the broader social category of “women”, regardless of their specific biological makeup. Otherwise, a woman with no uterus would be unaffected by gendered oppression. Gender is not identical to biological sex, and the former, not the latter, is the target of women’s oppression. This is what allows for trans women to be affected by misogyny.

We would agree with cde Northall that not only are women’s services like shelters, health services and refuges important, they also need significant expansion and funding (we would disagree on women’s prisons, which we think should be vastly curtailed, alongside all other prisons). There is an obvious parallel here, too: gender affirming care in the UK now has wait times of comfortably over 5 years for an initial appointment, leading to the avoidable deaths of trans people who are denied the care they need.

I am glad to see cde Northall claim that “counterposing” the rights of trans people and women is “crass, stupid, divisive and … utterly destructive.” But we do not counterpose them – we argue, along with the majority of the feminist movement, that the fight for trans rights against the current backlash is central to the modern feminist struggle.

To exclude trans women from women’s spaces requires there to be a conflict between the rights of the two groups, and in simple terms, comrade Northall and his organisation think this conflict exists because they do not think trans women are women. To talk about trans women as “biological men accessing women-only spaces” is to deny the very existence of trans people, at best calling them mentally ill or confused (as cde Northall does quite explicitly in one of his recent letters to the Weekly Worker). This is an explicitly anti-trans argument, and it lies at the basis of the CPB’s policy. Our article was correct to say so.

There is one point from the prior article that I will readily concede was wrong: it turns out that the CPB are not, in fact, finally fighting for this policy across the trade union movement. At Unison Young Members’ Conference this November (after the CPB conference policy was passed), members of the Young Communist League not only failed to bring a motion challenging “gender ideology”, they failed to even raise their hands to speak in the debate over a motion on trans rights. They didn’t even respond to a speech from the floor directly attacking the policy of the YCL and the CPB, and given there were no opposing votes, they either voted for the motion or quietly abstained.

Comrade Northall does say in a recent letter to the Weekly Worker that when it comes to oppressed groups, “Communists […] should and do inject the politics of class and of Marxism-Leninism into all such struggles, where appropriate” (emphasis mine). Perhaps a union conference simply wasn’t the appropriate time or place to put forward the CPB’s politics. Either that, or young members of cde Northall’s organisation might not be as enthusiastic about the party line as he is himself.

Workers’ Liberty will continue campaigning for a class-struggle feminism that centres trans liberation. We shall also continue to call the Morning Star’s line exactly what it is – confused and embarrassing transphobia that has no place in the labour movement.

Will Roberts
London