Hypocrisy about ‘rights’ (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) recently moved to secure a High Court injunction banning peaceful protest outside its Vauxhall offices. The aim was clear, to halt a Trans Kids Deserve Better protest encampment calling out the Commission’s anti-trans guidance. Instead, the court firmly rejected the move.

On 3 June 2025, Justice Sheldon dismissed the application, stating the EHRC’s landlord failed to prove a ‘strong probability’ of future trespass or encampment. Campaigners celebrated the decision:

‘Simon Natas of ITN Solicitors, representing campaigners, warned that such so-called “persons unknown” injunctions: “have become increasingly common … their impacts on freedoms of speech and assembly are far-reaching”’.

The EHRC’s website proclaims that ‘Article 11 protects your right to protest’. Now, as Good Law Project points out:

‘The EHRC was created to protect our rights. Now it’s trying to quash peaceful demonstrations.’ It’s hypocrisy laid bare.

This is arguably alarming given that the protest highlighted the EHRC’s recent interim guidance, issued hastily after the UK Supreme Court’s April ruling defining womanhood and EHRC Commissioner Akua Reindorf’s call for a ‘period of correction’ for trans people, believing they had ‘been misled for years’.

The backlash was immediate: the interim guidance prompted Labour to scrap its national women’s conference for the next two years and extend consultations, forcing the EHRC to delay updates to its code of practice.

Last month, ‘thousands’ rallied in London and Edinburgh to oppose the guidance. In Glasgow, activists scaled the EHRC building, displaying a banner reading ‘End Segregation, Trans Liberation’ — a direct challenge to its policies.

This affair lays bare a telling reality: the EHRC, ostensibly set up to be a rights champion, now resorts to court injunctions to silence criticism, specifically from the trans community. Claims of institutional independence crumble when it attempts to suppress dissent aimed directly at itself.

Rights under capitalism are conditional. The EHRC’s failed injunction is significant, not because it defends protest, but because it pushed legal limits on dissent and lost. Socialists can never trust courts or quangos. Genuine rights including freedom of assembly, equality, and dignity, rest only with mass collective working-class control. The EHRC’s attempt to ban protest is an attack on that principle. Fortunately, this time they failed.

A.T.

Pathfinders: Without distinction of race or sex (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the USA, Trump’s MAGA gang is ruthlessly savaging everything they don’t like, including climate science, Ivy League universities which they see as being hotbeds of radical leftism, and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). Their DEI bête noire is what’s called ‘affirmative action’, which they take to mean promoting ethnic candidates over more talented white ones, in defiance of the principle of meritocracy.

This presupposes that a white-dominated ‘meritocracy’ is ever genuinely capable of being ‘colour blind’, in the sense that it doesn’t notice whether a person is white or black. Critical race theory, which the MAGA gang also loath, mocks this self-serving pretension and argues that disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced into the mix. As things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates.

Logically speaking, discrimination is not in the interests of employers, if through their own prejudice they are reducing the pool of talent they can draw from. But prejudice is not logical. Moreover, economically disadvantaged whites may not see or admit that there is a racism problem in the first place. To them, any positive discrimination in favour of other disadvantaged groups, together with talk of ‘white privilege’, will seem like a wholesale liberal attack on their ‘rights’. Populists like Trump are experts in exploiting such concerns.

During the USA’s infamous Jim Crow era, segregation required race-defining laws to determine who was black and who was white. The concept of ‘race’ has no scientific basis, so the laws were inevitably arbitrary, leaving some white-appearing people designated black, and vice versa. This legal nonsense imposed an artificial binary categorisation on what in reality is a spectrum, in order to enforce an iniquitous social oppression.

Constitutional lawyers teach that ‘parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman’. In its judgement last month the UK Supreme Court seemed to agree but they were making a purely legal ruling. They were not seeking to reflect the scientific view which is much more nuanced.

‘Most traits ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum that has two peaks. One is the average for females. The other is the average for males […] But almost nobody fits in the peak for their sex on all of those measures.’.

As molecular evolutionary biologist Nathan Lents puts it, ‘How we define sex really depends on what we’re talking about. We want this to be a nice, neat, two-bucket category system where there’s no grey area, but unfortunately biology doesn’t traffic in binaries very often’. He describes a huge range of sex-related cardiovascular functions, hormone levels, blood, liver and brain conditions and disease dispositions, which don’t necessarily correspond to the external visible anatomy, or what’s called the phenotype. ‘While it’s very understandable to want to collapse all of this diversity into very simple categories, it really misses a lot of important biology. Life is complicated, life is messy, life is multi-dimensional’ .

He goes on: ‘We have anatomy all throughout our body that shows sex differences, but those differences are overlapping, and the variation within the sexes is larger than the difference between them’.

He concludes: ‘We’ve invented categories such as male and female, we invented these words, we invented these labels and we created the definitions, which means that they’re not necessarily a biological reality’.

For instance, women typically have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y chromosome. But this is far from being universal. Around 1.7 percent of babies are born as ‘intersex’ or as having ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they have traits of both sexes. This is about the same proportion as those who have red hair, or globally, around 110 million people. 1 in 650 newborns assigned male at birth have two or more X chromosomes and one Y (Klinefelter syndrome). 1 in 1000 newborns assigned female have just one X chromosome (Trisomy). In some cases, the SRY gene, important for male sex development, jumps out of the Y chromosome and bonds to an X instead. In others, X and Y have genes which prevent bodies from responding to testosterone and other male sex hormones (androgens), so that their bodies develop as female while having testes inside their abdomens.

Stigma surrounding such conditions often led to surgery at birth that was kept secret by the child’s parents, leading to severe mental health problems for the child later in life, in particular gender dysphoria, in which the person’s perceived gender does not align with their assigned sex.

Some of us may have mismatched sexual traits and not even know about it. In 2014, a 70-year-old father of four seeking treatment for a ‘hernia’ turned out to have a uterus with fallopian tubes (youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4).

The Supreme Court ruling is likely to have heartrending repercussions for transgender women, and will no doubt be contested. It’s a political ruling that will allow one large oppressed group to feel a measure of protection at the cost of another, far smaller one. But it is not based on science, which has nothing to say on wider questions about sports or hospital beds or prisons. And it allows politicians to ‘dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age’.

In socialism, ‘legal’ definitions will be irrelevant. Equality doesn’t mean we all have to look or be the same. What it does mean is that we will cooperate, practically, ethically, and creatively, to build a post-capitalist society of common ownership for the emancipation of the whole of humanity, in the words of clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, ‘without distinction of race or sex’.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: King Capital’s plunder of the Congo (2025)

The Material World column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

King Capital’s plunder of the Congo

The brutal conflict in the ‘Democratic Republic’ of Congo is not an ethnic struggle, a failure of governance, or an unfortunate accident. It is the direct consequence of capitalism’s relentless pursuit for profit. The plunder of the Congo’s vast mineral wealth is not a by-product of war, but the reason for it.

Despite being endowed with vast natural resources, the Congo remains one of the most impoverished and most exploited countries in the world. The cause of this paradox lies in the legacy of colonialism combined with modern rulers of capital and the ongoing plunder facilitated by the master class.

‘The colonised can see right away that the coloniser is a thief, a liar, a fraud, a murderer, a torturer, and a hypocrite…’ (Frantz Fanon, the well-known psychiatrist and revolutionary, on the Congo).

Towards the end of the 19th century, King Leopold II of Belgium transformed the Congo into his personal property. He subjected millions of Congolese to forced labour in the extraction of rubber and other resources. Under Leopold’s rule, appalling atrocities were committed with millions dying from violence, starvation, and disease. After international condemnation, Belgium formally took control of the Congo in 1908, continuing the exploitation of its resources while not investing in the country’s infrastructure or development.

Eventually Congo gained independence in 1960, under a rigged system that ensured foreign control over its wealth. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister, sought to assert national sovereignty. For this affront to King Capital, Lumumba was overthrown and assassinated by Belgian and US interests. The installation of the dictator Mobutu ensured that the Congo’s resources would continue to be funnelled to corporations while the population withered.

Today, Congo remains trapped in a cycle of exploitation. Minerals like coltan, cobalt, and copper, essential to Tesla, iPhones and solar panels continue to benefit capital rather than the Congolese. Neighbouring Rwanda has become a key exploiter.

The European Union’s special representative for Africa’s Great Lakes region, Johan Borgstram, accused Rwanda of violating Congolese territory. Borgstram urged a political solution to the conflict in eastern Congo, noting that Rwanda’s support for the M23 (March 23) rebel group and the presence of its military on Congolese territory constituted a violation of Congolese sovereignty. The M23 movement, which has seized key territories in eastern Congo, claims to be defending the interests of Congolese Tutsis. It has committed horrendous acts including mass killings, sexual violence, and the displacement of civilians, particularly in eastern Congo.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has cited security concerns, pointing to the Congolese government’s alleged lack of political will. M23’s territorial control has caused nearly 80,000 people to flee, many seeking refuge in neighbouring countries like Burundi.

This ongoing cycle of extraction and conflict is not an accident; it is the result of the global capitalist system that continues to exploit Congo’s resources for the benefit of foreign elites, whether they are in the West or in Rwanda. The wealth generated from Congo’s vast resources is largely funnelled to multinational corporations, with little benefit to the local population.

Don’t imagine this is some accidental lapse on capitalism’s part. It is exactly how capitalism functions. The Socialist Party has always argued that capitalism cannot be reformed to serve the majority. It is a system built on exploitation, where wealth is continually extracted, and power remains concentrated in the hands of few. The wars in Congo, like the wars before them, are not by accident or the result of mismanagement; they are the natural outcome of the economic system that demands the subjugation of entire nations for the benefit of King Capital.

Digital book burnings in Trump’s America

When viewing history through the lens of analysis socialists understand that attacks on marginalised groups are likely an early indication of rising authoritarianism. A century ago, the Nazi party of Germany targeted transgender people and the scientists who were pioneers of sexual research, raiding Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, one of the world’s first centres dedicated to the study and care of queer and trans people. The Nazi Party raided the clinic, terrorised the workers, and burned thousands of books, papers and research materials in a public spectacle of hate that foreshadowed the grim horrors to come. Now, today, a modern version of this erasure is also underway. This time, the flames are in the form of a trash folder, as it is a digital erasure, and this horror is unfolding in the United States under the directorship of Donald Trump.

Since his return to political power, the Marmalade Mussolini and his collaborators have systematically erased the existence of trans people from official records. Under his administration, the term ‘transgender’ is being removed from government websites, crucial health data scrubbed, and even references to historical trans activists such as Marsha P Johnson at the Stonewall National Monument eradicated.

Charities and institutions that receive federal funding are being overtly pressured to follow suit, ensuring that the trans community is transported out of public life. The speed and efficiency of this erasure would have made the Nazis envious.

These moves are not happening in isolation. They come after a build up over years of false moral panic stoked by the capitalist press, where trans people are being unjustly smeared as a threat to children, just as Hirschfeld was accused of ‘grooming’ youth in the pages of the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. The narrative is chillingly familiar: demonisation, exclusion, and then elimination.

The implications however extend beyond just trans rights. Fascist parties who seized the reins of democracy under the gaze of capital would test the boundaries by attacking the most vulnerable, seeing how much liberals of all shades would tolerate. As they succeed today in digitally erasing trans people, they will move on to the next targets. Already, Trump and his axis of tech billionaires have floated the idea of defying court rulings, openly challenging judicial authority in their efforts to strip rights from minorities. The broader working class must recognise that an attack on one group’s liberties is an attack on all.

Just as socialists oppose divisions and discriminations over race and colour, so we commit to solidarity with those workers under the LGBTQIA banner being victimised by this explicitly nasty face of capital.

Socialists are keenly aware that oppression is the tool of the master class, used to divide and distract workers while capitalists consolidate capital. The erasure of transgender people is not only a symptom of this alt-right culture war but is a warning sign of the increasingly authoritarian aspect of the capitalist political order. Socialists that seek to build a truly free, wholly democratic and equal society will not accept these digital book burnings and Trump’s wider assault on humanity. Marx teaches us to look on history scientifically to understand the present condition and in doing so what we are witnessing unfolding under raw capitalism in the US must concern us all.

A.T.

Billionaires behaving badly (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, has decidedly and publicly embraced right-wing ideologies. Not only does he wield significant influence in media, but he now owns Twitter, which he has skewed to the right. He reactivated several right-wing accounts, such as those of Tommy Robinson, and even before purchasing Twitter, Musk publicly stated that he would reinstate Donald Trump’s account.

One of Musk’s more baffling decisions was to ban the use of the biological term ‘cisgender’ as hate speech while simultaneously allowing a surge of actual hate speech on the platform. This coincided with his dismantling of the reporting system, which had functioned relatively well before the media platform acquisition.

Musk’s shift to the right has become increasingly overt. He recently hosted a chaotic Twitter rally for Trump, where the two billionaires discussed various topics, with Musk noticeably struggling with the very technology he paid $44 billion for. From this semi-candid discussion, socialists can discern the deepening ties between these two cheerleaders of capital.

Trump’s attacks on trans people have escalated, as seen in his comments during a rally in Bozeman, Montana. in his usual stilted delivery he made slights about transgender athletes in the Olympics and pledged to strip funding from any school that promotes critical race theory or ‘transgender insanity.’ Trans media commentator Erin from Erin in the Morning noted that Trump is ‘doubling down’ on his anti-trans rhetoric.

Musk’s alignment with right-wing politics wasn’t a road to Damascus revelation. While dating Grimes, mother of his trans daughter Vivian, Elon would espouse his trans-humanist ideas, a kind of utopian technocrat dream. Grimes herself, famously photographed with the Communist Manifesto, claimed to subscribe to ‘Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism’ while Elon described himself in the vaguest of terms as an anarchist despite the anarchists denouncing his claim at the time, citing his emerald mine owning and anti-union activities.

It was by May 2020 that Musk signalled his alignment with alt-right ideas and their misinformation by tweeting, ‘Take the red pill.’ This phrase, from the film The Matrix, has been adopted by reactionary groups as a metaphor for rejecting leftist views in favour of alt-right narratives.

Vivian Wilson describes her father as ‘[throwing] me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life’. Vivian herself made tongue-in-cheek posts in response to Musk’s comments, where he described her as ‘killed’ and ‘dead.’ She wrote, ‘Last time I checked I am, indeed, not dead,’ and ‘I look pretty good for a dead b**ch’. Vivian publicly refuted Musk’s claims that she was influenced by a ‘woke mind virus,’ highlighting his absenteeism and criticising his need for validation from ‘red-pilled’ right-wing supporters.

Musk is more interested in mining space gold and creating an off-planet capitalist fiefdom than in solving the pressing ecological problems we are facing on Earth. His silence on climate change during his Twitter conversation with Trump is very telling. Instead of addressing these challenges head-on, Musk seems to believe that becoming a MAGA technocrat wizard priest is the path to becoming the first Martian king.

As socialists we understand that what snake-oil Musk is selling is the extension of capitalism into space but we advocate for a society where all individuals, regardless of their gender identity, are treated with dignity and respect. It is imperative to challenge the harmful ideologies perpetuated by those in power. We stand in solidarity with Vivian and transgender individuals facing similar struggles, while emphasising the urgent need for a socialist revolution and a society free from the capitalist magnifying glass that uses misogyny as a tool to fracture our class.

A. T.

Transgender issues and capitalism (2022)

From the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s an issue causing much aggravation in the UK, the ‘issue’ of transgender people. You will find it in parliament and being talked about in all corners of the country. So, what do transgender people and their supporters argue? Many put a soft-left liberal case against discrimination and for tolerance but there is also a ‘gender socialist’ theory, based on a part of Marx’s analysis of society. This part of Marx’s theory to is found in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where Marx divided society into two parts, the base and superstructure; the base is the economic mode of production that creates and informs the superstructure of a society, while the latter is the social, legal and political apparatus that reinforces the mode of production while also influencing it; the base makes and changes the superstructure but the superstructure can also react on the base.

Analysis of prior modes of production and the many superstructural features arising from them implies that Marx’s theory was correct: settled agriculture created patriarchy, feudalism created the divine right of kings and capitalism created individualism. None of those societies existed in isolation from one another, and every mode of production so far has retained elements of the society that it displaced. These may be primarily cosmetic features, such as the UK’s constitutional monarchy, or they may be more deeply systemic, such as patriarchy. Capitalism too has incorporated superstructural features from prior societies, and just like all prior societies, it may be incapable of ending these features, indeed it may intensify them. Patriarchy has retained its power under capitalism with 88 percent of billionaires being men and 19 CEOs being men for every 1 woman; this isn’t said to beg for female representation under capitalism but rather to show that capitalism perpetuates male-dominated societies just as the systems before it did.

Gender Theory

Patriarchy is not the only legacy that capitalism retains. Gender is one such legacy, an ancient and foundational idea which we’ve built cultural concepts on and around. Placing these concepts on top of sex started before we can even remember. And capitalist institutions continue this extended delusion because they significantly rely on, and so encourage, gender’s continued existence for the sake of economic sustainability. Under capitalism, gender is informed by the roles we undertake to produce the next generation of workers, this is called reproductive labour. These roles can be anything from the actual act of reproduction to childcare and education; femininity under capitalism has historically been defined by the performance of the role of the primary caregiver to children, while masculinity has been defined by performing the role of both provider and protector. Capitalist gender lazily assigns people these gender roles in part due to its own apathy towards ending these prejudices but also to make working-class people enforce their own oppression under the threat of being considered unfeminine or unmasculine and thus being rejected by the mainstream culture of capitalist society. The effect of this is two-fold, to provide identity and to create the next generation of workers for the capitalist machine. Gender forces an identity on every person, which it attempts to justify by basing itself upon biological sex while imposing cultural roles and expectations that have nothing to do with genitals, chromosomes or anything remotely biological. Gender is based rather loosely on semi-plausible and simplified abstractions, i.e, men are the providers because they are stronger and women stay at home because they are less strong. This is inaccurate for several reasons: some women are stronger than some men, not all work is based on strength especially in the modern world, there’s no evidence that women are naturally more able than men to raise children but rather that they’re schooled into parenthood, and many more beyond those. Most gender roles are learned, forced onto young children so that they’re efficient at producing and being members of the workforce. It would be more logical, efficient and empathetic to the human race as a whole to liberate ourselves from these roles and simply fulfil the roles which we wish to.

Transgender people revolt

Many binary transgender people (those who transition from male to female or vice versa) often seem to not challenge capitalist gender at all but rather perform its stereotypical features aggressively to make themselves the gender they identify as. While on the surface this seems correct, trans people don’t perform gender stereotypes to become the gender they identify as (no trans man believes that trousers make them a boy); rather they perform the stereotypes in order to be seen by capitalist society as the gender they identify as and to protect themselves from the discrimination and violence they might face if they don’t fully ‘pass’ (succeed in being perceived) as that gender. A person who is willing to cross the lines of socially-conditioned gender, regardless of reproductive ability and conditioning into parenthood, is revolting against ideas of womanhood and manhood as defined by involvement in reproductive labour; the transgender person undertakes the same act of revolt as the lesbians and gays of the 1960s who refused to participate in traditional reproductive labour and the women’s liberation movements who refused to define themselves by their ability to reproduce.

But capitalism, as always, sets people against each other rather than acts for the good of humanity. We can see the backlash against the increased awareness of socially-constructed gender through the October 2021 BBC article ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’ by Catherine Lowbridge. This article was an attack on trans women, claiming that the alleged actions of a few trans women could be seen as representative of all trans women, based on a study conducted by a dubious group with only 80 online participants (Get the L out, Lesbians at Ground Zero), providing merely anecdotal evidence and including the opinions of Lily Cade, an accused rapist, who would go on to use the attention she got from the article to publish a manifesto calling for the lynching of trans women (www.them.us/story/lily-cade-violence-terfs-bbc). In the article (which the BBC has since changed) the writer cited Lily Cade without mentioning that she is an accused rapist (despite being told this by a transgender activist), skims over the unreliable nature of the study and claims not to have talked to a transgender person for an alternative viewpoint. This biased piece of propaganda from the BBC betrays the prejudice in capitalist society against those who attempt to change its superstructure in this way and the fear that this may disrupt and change capitalism.

Every socialist who understands the composition of society should expose and oppose such prejudice, armed with the knowledge that changing just the superstructure would merely be soft-left liberalism, and that changing just the base, without disrupting prior ways of thinking, would not work; a socialist society with a capitalist mindset would collapse in on itself. Socialists are liberationists, liberationists from capitalist ideas of race, gender and sexuality because liberation is incompatible with capitalism as a system and, of course, liberationists should be socialists, to free themselves from wage slavery, gender prejudices and state power.

SHERIFF

Why I’m a socialist (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every morning, as the sun is still rising, a crisp 5am where I am awakened by noise coming through the paper-thin floors and walls of my flat complex, I open the blinds and take in the beauty outside my window. Of course, this beauty is the litter flying out of our bins and dancing around, a private circus show! And, as I hear my dad grumbling, and getting his crappy grilled cheese breakfast made in the George Foreman, I can practically already smell the rust coming from his steel-capped shoes and the electrical smoke on his carpenter pants. I often wonder, isn’t there a world better than this?

Is there not a world where my dad is fairly compensated for the hours he spends, a world where I don’t have to live in a dump surrounded by affluence? Walking to school, I never understood that I was different to the others, but now it’s so clear. I go past family homes every morning, decorated with BMWs and Chevrolets parked outside with their licence-plate-teeth grinning at me, and every morning I’m jealous that people have an upstairs. I’ve never had an upstairs of my own, a room which wasn’t practically transparent for everyone to listen in on because of how small the house is. I’ve never been to a private school, nor have I the outfits or the latest fashion which all my peers covet. I’ve always been what they would consider an outsider, inadequate and an outlier to their inner circle.

My friends don’t really get it. Sure, they’re not rich, but they’re well-off enough to have a house – I mean how lucky is that? Never in my parents’ lives have they had the money to actually buy property, yet some people in the world have dozens of homes, which they don’t even live in. What do they have them for? To showcase? To boast? Meanwhile, I need a place to live which doesn’t have mould in every corner, or a boiler which isn’t straight from 1940, and what do they need it for?

Perhaps because I’m not one of them, I don’t understand the reasons behind it – I probably never will – but to me, this world is black and white. There shouldn’t be an argument over who deserves housing, we are all deserving of at least that – shelter. And I find it so hideous that people like us are out on the streets while landlords hoard their property, boasting about how smart it was to get into real estate. It’s not ‘smart’, it’s just the exploitation of a broken system.

What does this party offer to me, specifically, as someone who is both transgender and autistic? Genuinely, what does this article have to do with either of those things? What are you talking about, Jame? Well, I think the answer lies in the fact that both of these things will forever be intertwined with my status as a working-class citizen. I don’t have the money to afford private gender-affirming care, of course, so I’ve had to rely on the wonderful Conservative-run NHS for help.

Denied

I’ve been on the waiting list for about two years. Of course, when profits and tax cuts are prioritised over actually helping the people, and healthcare is neglected, this is what you end up with. I’ve had to wait a similar amount of time to get my autism diagnosis, on top of that.

So what, Jame? What does this have to do with anything, why the Socialist Party?

Because capitalism doesn’t care about people like me. Not one day in this world have I ever felt like I’ve truly mattered, simply just another burden to the government, never somebody worth fighting for. Never have I felt reassured by government when they say they’ll repeal conversion therapy, never have I felt safe when I’ve walked through CAMHS’ doors and I’m met with stark-empty hallways and a dilapidated counselling service. Never have I felt equal, and sure my superiors can smile and make me feel comfortable all they can, but to them I’m just a pawn they need to wrangle in place so that their bosses don’t decrease their pay for not managing me well enough. Do I really want to continue living in a system where the worker is so undervalued and overworked, that they are not even considered human? We are just products, who need to be maintained and placated so that the higher-ups aren’t faced by union strikes.

But it hasn’t been working. It hasn’t been good enough. Concessions are not being met, and I’m tired of being ignored as a transgender, autistic, working-class teenager. My needs, most people’s needs, are not being met. We’re in a world where the difference between the mega-wealthy and the poor is so discouraging that it’s hard to think that we can carry on this way.

I don’t see the world in the same way that you do, most likely. And in my eyes, things are either good or bad. Things are unbelievably bad. I see the world as being in a massive stalemate, torn between what’s right, and greed. There are solutions, but nobody is jumping at the opportunity to use these solutions, because they are too distracted by greed. Yet, nobody is speaking out? Everyone is just sitting around, letting our leaders do nothing? When will change come? When will things actually be good? I just don’t understand. People will flagrantly defend our leaders, capitalism, the free market, but what has it ever done for us?

What has it ever done for us trans, autistic, working-class teens?

That’s why I joined the Socialist Party, because I’m tired of the way I’m treated. I’m tired of being exploited, ignored, disparaged, and I want to make a change. I don’t want to be part of a system which hates me for my uniqueness.

Jame(s) Witkowski

Letters: Transgender Issues and Capitalism (2023)

Letters to the Editors from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’d like to take up a couple of points made in the ‘Transgender Issues and Capitalism’ article from the December Socialist Standard.

Whilst I agree with the first half of the article that gender is a social construct and gender roles are learned, I would argue that biological sex is significant. Women the world over tend to be smaller physically, obviously with exceptions, and is the sex that, if she chooses to, carries a pregnancy and breastfeeds a child, which, certainly in this society affects an equal place in the workforce.

Further into the article, I read what appears to be a contradiction. ‘Many binary transgender people often seem to not challenge capitalist gender at all but rather perform its stereotypical features aggressively to make themselves the gender they identify as’. But the writer then goes on to say ‘A person who is willing to cross the lines of socially conditioned gender is revolting against ideas of womanhood and manhood’ As if being transgender is a revolutionary act.

I also agree with the latter part of the article in that ‘capitalism as always sets people against each other’, but the writer gives a one-sided example of this with the story of Lily Cade calling for the lynching of transwomen. No mention is made of the hundreds of death and rape threats from trans activists against prominent feminists whose crime is to fight to preserve women-only spaces.

The mainstream media and capitalist hegemony deliberately endorses and encourages identity politics as a way of dividing the working class. Instead of obsessing over personal pronouns workers should be promoting class consciousness with a view to ending this oppressive and divisive system that we live in.

C. Dee

A defence of Christmas

Call it Yuletide or Winter Solstice festival if you like. I am aware that many socialists don’t celebrate Christmas. Do they know that in disdaining it, if for different reasons, they are behaving like the evangelical protestants today, and the early Christians too?

Every society cosies down for Winter and marks the season with festivity. In the Roman world, Christmas was the Saturnalia, where revelry was practically compulsory. Christians disdained it, and the Church Fathers banned Christians from garlanding their homes with holly, ivy and mistletoe. Pagan homes were lavishly garlanded.

In the Middle Ages Christmas lasted the whole Winter, from November 11th until February 2nd. All garlanding was in, including Christmas trees, holly, etc. No one did any work, except for castle servants, and to replenish firewood. The serfs had got in the harvest and, unlike today’s wage-slaves, had no clock to tick, but plenty of time for festivity.

With the rise of the bourgeoisie came Christian puritanism and the cutting down of Christmas. Wage-slaves cannot be allowed too long without producing surplus value for their masters, whose only god is money. The churches complied.

The old festival was always about excess and revelry. People today who moan, ’Christmas has lost its meaning’, blah, blah, are Christians who want a Christian-based memorial to the Jesus myth along Puritan lines. They are not, in their moaning, going back far enough! Yuletide isn’t Christian.

I don’t see why socialism wouldn’t retain Yuletide. Regions of the Earth will have inherited cultural traditions, and I don’t see why those which are harmless wouldn’t continue – especially the universal one of being cosy and festive over Winter.

Anthony Walker

Reply: 

We tend to agree. Socialists for obvious reasons concentrate their current fire on the ills of capitalism, but we are not the fun police, and think it very likely that people in a post-capitalist free society will find any and all excuses for festive celebrations, whether based on celestial calendars, harvests, anniversaries or some other pretext.

A Gender Item (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there a distinction between sex and gender? In the vast majority of cases the sex of a person can be established through physical attributes and these are determined by two sex chromosomes, the X and the Y. Two X chromosomes results in the female, X and Y chromosomes produces the male.

There are exceptions. Human cells usually contain 46 chromosomes, but occasionally, approximately 1 in a 1,000 males have a 47th, an extra Y. This can result in being taller than average, have learning difficulties, speech problems or weaker muscle tone. They don’t have distinguishing physical features and their sexual development is normal, although infertility can result.

It is possible for females to be karyotype 46 (usual number of chromosomes) and XY. This is gonadal dysgenesis and results in females with normal female external genitalia, but malfunctioning gonads that are prone to becoming cancerous and are usually surgically removed.

What all this demonstrates is there are naturally occurring variations that may cause physical and psychological issues, but do not alter the basic biological determination of females and males. That would seem to be a matter of material reality and not one of personal choice.

Can the same be stated in relation to gender, or are gender and sex merely interchangeable words in this context? There is an argument that avers sex to be as stated above, while gender takes into account social roles that may be determined by a person’s sex, or by personal definition according to subjective awareness.

There are at least eight gender identity terms – transgender, two-spirit, cisgender, non-binary, genderqueer, gender expression, gender fluid, gender neutral – and there may be others. The majority of the population are, in this list, cisgender, that is, their gender matches that which they were assigned at birth.

The question then arises as to what the material basis is for the plethora of alternatives with which a minority identify. People are, of course, free to choose the identity they present to the world, but such a choice suggests gender to be merely a social construct; or is there a genetic basis?

Scientific study of transsexuality appears to be minimal. Transsexuals are individuals born as one sex, but identify as being of the other sex. Studies of twins indicate a genetic basis for transsexuality, although there is presently no clear understanding of what that genetic basis is.

Nor is there an established common terminology used across studies. This means there can be no clear accounting of numbers as to how many individuals are transsexual. Approximations range from 7 to 9 out of every 100,000 people as being transgender.

Amnesty International estimate there are 1.5 million transgender people in the EU, about 0.3 percent of the population. An Equality and Human Rights Commission 2011 survey in the UK of 10,026 respondents found 1.4 percent were in a gender minority group, of which 1 percent had gone through some part of a gender reassignment process. That process did include actual actions taken, but also thoughts about it.

Everyday speech often uses sex and gender interchangeably, but some academic disciplines reference different definitions while others do not, which is also the case with dictionaries. Languages such as German and Finnish don’t have different words for sex and gender, the context of use being the defining factor.

All this indicates a great deal of uncertainty, which makes the possibility of giving offence all too real. A minority, however small, needs to be accepted on its own terms and not become subjected to a despotism of the majority.

Capitalism has done a great deal to break down social barriers and overcome discrimination. Driven by the constant need to realise profit, differences between people, actual or perceived, cannot be allowed to hinder that process. This is not a moral, but an economic imperative, and is a long way from being fully realised.

That prejudice and discrimination continue to exist cannot be denied, but neither can the progress made. A ‘No Blacks, No Irish’ notice is now utterly beyond the pale even though ‘Black Lives Matter’ remains pertinent.

In matters sexual, homosexuality has gone from illegality and the subject of barbed humour to celebrated wedlock in half a century. This is not to suggest all is well, far from it. Human attitudes are not fixed and need to be challenged. What one generation regarded as deviant, the next (or perhaps the next but one) accepts without question.

If this is not the case then we socialists are wasting our time promoting far-reaching changes that can only come about if the generality of popular ideas radically change. If the basis of present society, capitalism, cannot be replaced by a superior system, socialism, then human progress will have stalled.

While accepting that capitalism has allowed a great deal of progress to be made, it cannot go beyond its own economic imperative. For socialists, the free development of one is contingent on the free development of all. For a society in which this is possible, the constraints and divisions engendered by capitalism must be overcome.

Capitalism reduces most if not all aspects of society to commodities to be traded for profit. Sex is certainly a category with many such commodities. From pornography to gender re-alignment, from commercial stereotyping to lifestyle products, no possibility for profit is ignored.

The prevailing ideology of capitalism is individualism: Margaret Thatcher’s (in)famous pronouncement that there’s no such thing as society was a clear expression of this. No society equals no classes in any meaningful sense. People are free to self-define their identity, and woe betide anyone who might contradict or question.

However, denying society does not mean it doesn’t exist. An obvious lesson of the Covid pandemic is that not only does society exist, it must act in concert for the well-being of all. It also cannot be denied that society plays a major role in defining gender roles.

Recent history shows gender roles are not fixed because society is not fixed. There’s a continuous dynamic between individuals and sub-groups with society at large that initiates social change. Science plays a huge part in this by bringing new understanding to play.

There are hormonal and surgical ways of physical gender realignment, to match external sexual characteristics with psychological disposition. This patently does not bring about a chromosomal change.

Self-definition has merit: who has the right to decide how another should dress, deport and generally live? There are, though, women who, to say the least, are uneasy about those born men redefining themselves as women.

Caution should surely be the watchword during adolescence, a period of sexual uncertainty as the brain transitions from childhood to adulthood, which is perhaps the only transitioning that should occur at that time.

After detransitioning, former transgender man Charlie Adams established the ‘Detransition Advocacy Network’. This was in response, Adams claims, to being contacted by a significant number who’d transitioned in their teens and then changed their minds in their 20s.

The claim is that, triggered by gender dysphoria, transitioning seems not to have alleviated the condition, leading to a realisation that the change had not addressed deep-seated issues. These include body image problems, eating disorders and even, in some cases, autism.

However, following a survey in the USA of 28,000 transitioners, the ‘National Center for Transgender Equality’ reported only 8 percent detransitioned, of whom 62 percent only did so temporarily after succumbing to pressure. Just 0.4 percent detransitioned having changed their minds.

There does not seem to be peer-reviewed in-depth research into transitioning, its causes and consequences. The two examples featured here illustrate in the titles of the organisations the lack of objectivity.

The Adams charity declares its advocacy of detransitioning, while the ‘National Centre’ is clearly supportive of transitioning. Similarly, much of the comment available on the internet is of a partial nature from right-wing and actively anti-LGBT news outlets to radically pro-transitioning groups, with a plethora somewhere in between.

This is an area of uncertainty that science will undoubtedly continue to help clarify. Meanwhile, minds need to remain open. There cannot be progress if people are silenced by either legislation or social, largely media, pressure.

There is a responsibility to express contrary ideas without malice, with those shown to be wrong exposed through reason. Such is the very basis of democracy, open discussion without fear of censure.

One of the basic misapprehensions of a socialist society is that equality will be achieved through uniformity, when actually the opposite is the case. Diversity is integral to socialism, for it’s through the dynamic of difference that progress will continue to be made. Socialism cannot be static, a once and for all arrangement of relationships and roles.

Dave Alton

No Outsiders: Class Inclusivity (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two Birmingham primary schools starting the new autumn term will see the reinstatement of the ‘No Outsiders’ programme, dedicated to teaching LGBT rights and earlier suspended after being strongly opposed as non-age-appropriate by Muslim parents, an opposition widely interpreted as homophobic (BBC News, 3 July – bbc.in/2xrzTZZ).

The ‘No Outsiders’ programme presupposes that children have to be taught to accept diversity, whereas in reality the opposite is true. Outside the grip of parental or social indoctrination, children have no natural reason to be intolerant of others. Children have to be taught to be racist, sexist, or anti-gay. They are loaded with prejudice like a gun is loaded with bullets.

Muslims in Britain suffer their own share of discrimination, so you might imagine that such a marginalised group would be more sympathetic and respectful of other groups in the same situation (in the jargon, ‘intersectional’) and so less likely to dish out discrimination of their own. But you’d be wrong.

For example, racism is notorious in the gay community. For ‘a glaring personification of the lack of intersectionality that exists within broader gay culture’ see ‘Gay bars can be mind-bogglingly racist’ (LINK).

Gender surrender

Then there is the trans-terf war, which has ripped the LGBT community apart to the point where dialogue and compromise have become well-nigh impossible. This is partly a product of post-modernist ‘queer’ (LGBT) studies, in which the concept of gender as being socially constructed has moved the emphasis away from simply ‘owning’ identity towards ‘performing’ it, thus disappearing Alice-like down the rabbit hole to a Wonderland where anyone can identify as anything and any attempt to deny this is an oppressive act.

The fuss isn’t so much about women self-identifying as trans-men, it’s mainly the other way round. Many women are furious at what they see as a new form of male colonialism, in which men, accustomed to getting their way on everything else, now attempt to hijack womanhood itself. Others see it as an existential threat, a sinister plan to ‘deconstruct’ that womanhood out of existence. You can’t fight for equal rights if you don’t even exist.

Here is a domain where common sense has no sway. Is it reasonable for a man self-identifying as a woman to be allowed to swim in the women’s swimming areas of Hampstead Heath in London? No, you say? Yes, according to new rules from the City of London Corporation (Evening Standard, 23 May – LINK). If a man self-identifies as a woman, should s/he be entitled to enter women’s refuges? You might call that crazy, yet Women’s Aid has indeed caved into this very demand and changed their entry policy accordingly (LINK). Some situations you simply can’t win. An attempt to combat the colossal rate of violence against and rapes of trans-women in male prisons resulted in one trans-prisoner being admitted to a women’s prison and then committing several sex offences against women inmates (LINK).

Lesbians meanwhile are proposing to quit the LGBT collective (‘Get the L out’) in protest at the idea that someone with a penis must be accepted as an authentic lesbian, with the further implication that if they refuse to have sex with such a ‘lesbian’ they are being somehow oppressive.

Such protestors in turn are pejoratively labelled TERFs (Trans-Excluding Radical Feminist) by transgender activists. Do most trans-women really expect to speak for all women? Do they really have a male colonial agenda? Do they really expect lesbians to accept them as ‘dykes with dicks’? Almost certainly not. Most trans-women would just like to get through the day without being spat on or hospitalised. They are rejected as men, obviously, but women are also slamming the door on them as women. So they are treated as sideshow freaks, as something less than human, as a perfect target for violence and murder (‘Transgender hate crimes recorded by police go up 81%’, BBC News, 27 June – bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48756370).

Why has this situation blown up now? It’s partly a matter of technology. Successful transitioning from one sex to the other has not been possible until comparatively recently, so society has never really had to deal with this debate before. It raises all sorts of new questions about what we mean by gender, and whether we can continue to see things in binary categorisations (male/female, straight/gay) or whether in fact these are more like shades on a spectrum. And academic LGBT theory is running far ahead of the herd. Capitalism has only very recently started to normalise homosexuality, and then only in some places, and that has an ancient pedigree. There is really no precedent for people changing biological sex, and that is a challenge too far for those brainwashed with gender stereotypes and looking for someone easy to punch.

Now even anarchist and class-war political groups have waded in and taken up mutually hostile and hard-line positions. Liberals wanting to do the right thing are utterly perplexed. Express an opinion at your peril.

This is the war of all against all, the political nightmare of identity politics, a world of echo chambers and mutual rage, a world where everyone shouts and no one listens, where class consciousness evaporates and the working class eats itself alive. Who’s right, in all this? That’s just the point – everybody and nobody. Identity politics is never a battle of right versus wrong, it is always a tragedy of right versus right. In the multiple pile-up of discriminations capitalism engenders, nobody escapes completely innocent or unscathed.

So much for gurus

You might at least expect the Dalai Lama to rise above it all. But this widely-revered guru and living saint (and self-declared feminist), again caused a furore recently by reiterating his 2015 remarks that any female Dalai Lama ‘must be attractive, otherwise it is not much use’ and ‘[If not] people, I think prefer, not see her, that face’ (Telegraph, 2 July – LINK).

What would happen to the identity debate in socialism, a world of free association and free access, where nobody has power over anyone? There are no gurus to guide us there either. Nobody knows how gender and sexuality may evolve when society has stopped making war against itself. Perhaps there will be a continued trend towards post-humanism, as organic and machine technology converge in symbiosis. Maybe more people will want to change sex, or live as multiple sexes, whatever that means. Conversely it’s possible that the current preoccupation with sexual and gender identity will come to be seen as irrelevant, an obsessive hang-up among many others typical of the capitalist age. From our barred window looking out from the current madhouse, we can’t even say for sure what sanity looks like.

What is likely though is that people will adopt the practical limitation of freedom not licence. What this means is that you are free to do anything you like but you do not have licence to impose on the freedom of others. Anyone who objects to this is free to style themselves as an ‘oppressed minority’, however in a democracy there are always minorities, and not getting your way on everything is not the same thing as oppression.

Divided we fall

Returning to the present, the 2014 film Pride told the true story of lesbian and gay activists making common cause with striking Welsh miners who, for their part, had to confront their own entrenched homophobic attitudes. The film’s feel-good message was unequivocal – if we are workers, whether we’re gay, straight or whatever, we’re on the same side in the class war, and fighting the bosses is what brings us together. Class consciousness transcends all and unites all.

The problem is, this consciousness of being part of a class prevails best when the external class threat is felt urgently and equally by all affected workers, as in the case of a strike or a lockout. But it’s rare for a threat to be that localised and acute. The class war is not just a street battle or a strike, as the Left romanticise it. Class is really the dynamic expression of minority ownership of the means of living. We, the overwhelming majority excluded from and by this ownership, feel its force whenever we have to get up for work, tolerate our boss, pay our bills, swallow our dignity and accept our limitations.

Some workers face additional problems that come at them in different ways depending on who, when and where they are. Some of these forms may be just annoyances, but others can spell deadly danger. Sometimes they come from the police and the state, but often they come from other workers who are angry and ignorant and ready to lash out at somebody vulnerable and within reach. If you belong 100 percent to what society calls ‘normal’ then you won’t be especially vulnerable or exposed, and you might be tempted to downplay these effects as trivial, or even imaginary. But if you are exposed, they can loom so large that they fill your horizons and eclipse all other things. And here is why class consciousness begins to fracture and fall apart. When you suffer as a victim, you don’t care if you’re helping to victimise others. If you’re a battered wife, you don’t care if you’re also a racist. If you’re a male with your head under the boss’s foot, you don’t care about your attitude to women. If you’re attacked as an Asian, you don’t care if you’re also homophobic. Individual identities become locked into silos, and communication is cut off. Class consciousness is dead. Game over.

Hijacking at the intersection

If you don’t want the capitalist class to win, you have to force people out of these silos by offering a generalised view of discrimination they can all relate to. Intersectionality was an attempt to do this, by creating a common framework of overlapping or ‘intersecting’ discriminations, but which has largely been taken out of context and distorted.

The trouble is, some people are too fired up to focus on common frameworks, and will seize any excuse to promote their unique victimhood (the ‘I’m more oppressed than you’ game). As soon as you accept the idea that people really do have different experiences of discrimination, and you try to understand these differences in order to work together, they will twist this into a promotion of their own agenda.

This is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. If your class consciousness is strong and coherent, then acknowledging as workers your different lived experiences will only make you stronger. And make no mistake, it is vital to acknowledge these different experiences, because in the past what has passed for class politics on the left has too often been the uni-dimensional preserve of a dominant identity group while other groups were ignored, marginalised or even excluded. In practice this leads to a self-perpetuating cycle in which like attracts like and the circle never widens. It’s no good if you’re attracting one person but putting off nineteen or twenty others because they fear they won’t fit in. Class consciousness, properly understood, is more than just being against capitalism and bosses, it is also about ending minority ownership and all discrimination, and it requires some positive attributes too, like inclusivity, empathy, the ability to listen and share, to criticise honestly and to be open to criticism in the same way. This is the class consciousness socialists need to create, because it’s the only kind strong enough to defeat capitalism, and that means including all workers, with nobody left outside.

Paddy Shannon