Why Marxists Fight for Trans Liberation

At first glance, the struggle of the international working class to liberate themselves from their oppressors – the capitalist ruling class – may seem to have little to do with the struggles of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other queer people for sexual liberation and bodily autonomy. After all, class is primarily a matter of who produces what, who owns what, and who receives the value generated by production. What do surplus-value, over-accumulation, imperialism, and the full gamut of socialist criticisms of capitalism have to do with overcoming cisheteronormativity and violence against queer people?

There is, in fact, a long engagement of socialist thought and struggles for sexual and gender liberation. As historical materialists, Marxists see gender norms, roles, and hierarchies as both originating in, and playing an active role in, class struggle. As writers Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke have pointed out, “We cannot set capitalism on one side, as a fixed and dependable feature, with gender on the other as a ‘cultural’ set of norms and identifications. The two admix at every turn, developing and shifting more quickly than we can easily keep track.” This essay outlines Cincinnati Socialists’ position on trans liberation and attempts to put it in the context of the history of socialist practice and Marxist theory.

Socialist thought on human sexuality and identity began before the work of Marx and Engels in the 19th century with the critique of the patriarchal family unit by such thinkers as Charles Fourier in France and Robert Owen in Britain (and later the United States). Fourier in particular disdained bourgeois marriage and the hetero-patriarchal family as artificial cages suffocating the natural passions of human beings.

In Fourier’s view, rules and customs that constrained variety in sexual and gender expression served the same role as poverty, which forced the poor and working classes to dull their senses in a monotonous regime of austerity. Rather than producing virtue and solidarity, poverty debases the masses and leads them to undervalue their own lives and the common life of humanity.

Likewise, for Fourier, cishetero-normativity was contrary to the socialist project not only because it oppressed individuals, but because it was rooted in a fetish for bland similarity that is corrosive to building solidarity among people.

Marxism gives us another reason to oppose cisheteronormativity. Marx and Engels added the insight that historical conditions give rise to ideas that seem “natural” and even “scientific,” but are not accurate.

Marx argued that under class society, scientific thought—including its understanding of human sexuality and gender — is distorted by the social relations of a given stage of history. Historical materialism gives us a powerful tool to refute reactionaries and transphobes who claim that cishetero- normativity is mandated by nature. The disciplines of genetics, epigenetics, and endocrinology (among others) do not support that any human subject is “necessarily” a man or a woman purely based on gross body morphology.

However, it should be borne in mind that, for Marxists, cisheteronormativity is not merely a prescientific idea posing as a scientific one. For this claim would still beg the question: Why do some unscientific ideas persist and even present themselves as scientific? Queer artist and communist theorist Anja Weiser Flower has pointed out that one of the crucial differences between liberal trans activists and trans revolutionary socialists is that Marxists do not think that we can change the world simply by replacing bad, reactionary ideas about gender with “progressive,” reasonable, open-minded, scientific ideas.

She asserts that bad ideas do not merely lead to pathological societies, but also that the narrowly regimented conditions of pathological societies hobble the cognitive scope of the working class. Capitalism not only commodifies the product of our work, but it also encourages us as proletarians to see ourselves, our sexualities, our genders, and the whole world as standardized, abstract, inorganic objects. People who can only think in rational utilitarian terms cannot imagine themselves as revolutionary subjects.

Hence, trans workers cannot always see the need for a revolutionary socialist transformation of the world; likewise, cis people often struggle to understand how their own political emancipation depends on the liberation of their queer fellow workers. In some ways, Flower’s argument echoes that of Fourier, asserting that rigid sex roles and cisheteronormativity are a stratagem on the part of capital to deaden the lives of the working class. For Flower, the only way out of this conundrum is the rise of a proletarian revolutionary socialist movement like the one Marx advocated.

The “formation of a revolutionary proletarian class” and its movement to seize political power is key, because only this movement can address the real and seemingly disparate interests of all oppressed people, and because it will take the combined and organized strength of the masses as a whole to overthrow and abolish the “present order” and its seemingly infinite and multiform oppressive institutions. This means socialists can never be concerned with narrowly “economic” questions.

Socialism will be a foundation to build a world that fosters “your own right to explore and define who you are” because for us, socialism means the real historical defeat of every social form that hems in and suppresses this very right.