What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

It is necessary to clarify here that by “queer” we are referring to all people who do not fit within the dominant normative notions of gender, sex, and sexual and romantic orientation. GSM, LGBT+, queer etc. are culture-specific labels for these people. Though there is of course always some controversy or other regarding the specifics of terminology, we will use “queer” for the sake of requiring a single one, and because we like it.

The queer question is as old as class society itself, although it hasn’t always been phrased as such. While the modern forms that queer consciousness takes are younger than Marxism and the Communist movement, we know from decades of scientific, historical, and anthropological scholarship that queer people have always and everywhere, in some cultural form or other, formed part of class society, and their recognition and rights within those societies have constituted class struggles.

Recently the answer to the queer question, as posed above, has increasingly been “Yes”. However, there has also been a continuation and diversification of political tendencies that galavant as Marxists but which actually serve to obscure and mystify the very heart of Marxist analysis, dialectical materialism.  Such groups put forth vulgar positions which seek to justify chauvinism and oppression against queer people, and they do this by disguising themselves as Marxist. Although the specific details may vary from group to group, the goal is the same: to use pseudo-Marxist or Marxist sounding nonsense to exclude some particular groups of queer people, or all queer people, from the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat.

Queer people, if even just by sheer happenstance of being part of the working class population, have always been among the ranks of the Communists. We can safely discard any arguments asserting that queer expression is a purely modern, western liberal phenomenon. The old trends within 20th century Marxism which rejected or did not have a firm answer to the queer question lacked the access we now have to modern scholarship on gender and sexuality, and have been scientifically outmoded by it. Those few organizations which still cling to notions of “bourgeois decadence” or other such wholesale rejections of queer liberation are therefore objectively unscientific and do not warrant further discussion here.

More common than wholesale rejection of the queer question these days is an error of idealism which asserts that the struggle for queer liberation is either secondary to or irrelevant to the cause of proletarian revolution. 

Some argue that “Queer liberation is unpopular with the masses broadly, so it should be rejected or set aside so as to make Communism more appealing to those masses.” A principled Marxist knows immediately that vulgar populism is not revolutionary — the Communists lead the masses on the path to liberation, we don’t tail their backwards ideas and errors in science while begging them to join us. Those who hold this position need to go all the way back to their unopened copy of The Communist Manifesto and actually read it this time. Marx and Engels clearly explained there that the task of the Communists is to guide the most advanced class conscious section of the working class: 

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Manifesto chapter two, emphasis mine.)

It is clear that the task of the Communists is to unite all sections of all the oppressed classes, not exclude one or the other on the grounds of populist appeal. 

Others argue that “Some queer identities, such as the homosexuals, are recognized by Marxism as having a material basis. However others such as the transgender and transsexual identities ignore or contradict the material basis of sexual biology, are therefore idealistic in nature, and must be discarded in order to arrive at a materialist position.”

This second idealistic deviation is one of the most subtle and insidious of the social-chauvinist arguments, and is a slow poison to materialist analysis. In the course of properly refuting it, we will arrive at a more correct, more scientific analysis of the queer question. The fundamental flaw in the above argument is in how it assumes the “material basis of sexual biology” has any bearing on the queer question. It does not. The deviationists either forget or are unwilling to admit that sex itself is a social construct.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State Engels explains: 

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for child breeding.” And today I can add: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the wellbeing and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.

Here it is explained quite clearly that sex is a social category based on the division of labor. Men and women became defined in dialectical contradiction with one another. They are not eternal immutable categories, but categories which arose from the conditions which existed at a particular historic time. One common theory about this division of labor is that it was made necessary by child rearing;  women were biologically equipped to nurse newborns and men were not, and this took shape in the social consciousness as the first dichotomy. The material necessity of this division of labor has long since been abolished by developments in society. Today infants can easily be fed from bottles and reared by anyone. The original basis for the sex dichotomy has passed into history. What remains is the institutions to which it gave rise.

As societies developed and grew in complexity, they began to rely more and more on maintaining a pool of labor to continue to serve the increasingly complex social functions necessary for survival. The development of animal husbandry gave rise to a production surplus which enabled the development of manufacture; weaving, pottery, etc. Men, not being bound to care for the children as the women were, were driven to take up the task of maintaining the pool of labor through acquisition and exchange of women’s reproductive labor — and therefore the acquisition and exchange of women. 

For a more detailed discussion of this process see The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.

Further developments in production led to settled agriculture, by which point the nature of women as the exchangeable property of their tribe became fully entrenched. The great increase in surplus brought by settled agriculture enabled the overall population to rapidly increase beyond that of older modes of production, a process known by historians as the Neolithic Revolution. Methods of manufacture became more complex, metallurgy was developed and further revolutionized agriculture with the plow. Class society began to take shape as the acquisition of wealth became possible, and control over women’s reproductive labor became a primary form of wealth. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands led to the development of private property to institutionalize this control, which first took the form of ownership of women-slaves and livestock. Ruling patriarchs were then compelled to compete with one-another in order to maintain their control over society, and therefore competed on the basis of violent acquisition of property. Women were seen as a resource which could be obtained through force, and those societies who still treated women as equals were largely subsumed by the violent expansion of the enslaver state.

We can therefore see how differences between individuals in their biological characteristics (configuration of sexual organs, ability to nurse infants) at one point made necessary the first division of labor, which later gave rise to the institutionalization of the patriarchal state. Ruling ideology adapted to serve the continuation of this state of affairs on behalf of the ruling elite — the sex dichotomy became “naturalized,” seen as immutable and eternal, and encoded as such in countless religious scriptures and legal codes ever since. But we can easily see how this sex dichotomy is the product of a particular stage of social development, and we can therefore easily see how it will pass into history. 

A useful comparison is the categorization of human beings into racial groups: though there is a “material biological basis” for this division (skin color and minor differences in constitution and disease resistances), we know that “race” is not an eternal natural category but a socially constructed category which was developed to legitimize the institutions of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Racial ideology emerged from a particular moment in historical development and will in turn fall as the conditions which gave rise to it recede into history. So too will the sex dichotomy.

As capitalism develops, it breaks down the old class barriers as it proletarianizes the masses. It is not a coincidence that the feminist movement first arose in the 19th century, when proletarianization began to hit its stride and the “natural” nature of women’s disadvantaged status began to be more consciously questioned. Increasingly, women began to perform the exact same labor as men, working at first in parallel factory operations and later directly alongside men. It is evident that “woman” represents an oppressed class just as much as “proletarian” or “Indigenous,” and as the social division of labor which enforces this class division becomes increasingly obsolete the necessity of its overthrow begins to crystalize. 

How does the queer question figure into this analysis of sex? We must look at the emergence of queer identity and consciousness as a historical process. It is nowadays a well-known fact that societies in which class had not yet developed had different notions of gender and sexuality than the patriarchal rule of class society. “Two-Spirit” First Nations people are a common example of this. There are as many notions of gender and sexual diversity as there are different cultures, which makes it clear that this diversity is common to all human groups. 

The emergence of class society and the rise of the rigid sex dichotomy condensed the wide spectrum of human expression into two classes, an oppressed class of “women” and an oppressor class of “men.” Queer expression fundamentally challenges the naturalization of the sex dichotomy. If women can choose to have romantic and sexual relations with women, then the naturalization of female sexual subordination to men is directly challenged. If “woman” is not an immutable natural state — if it can be altered, transcended, or cast off — if a woman can simply become a man, or something else outside the binary dichotomy, then the sex dichotomy is revealed to be materially meaningless. This is a threat to existing class relations, so queer expression is violently suppressed by patriarchal ideology.

Capitalism continues to require the sex dichotomy in order to function. Capitalism requires that the population continue to grow with each successive generation. As production improves, the amount of labor crystallized within commodities falls, and so too does the rate of profit. In order to maintain a steady rate of profit capital requires that production always increase, which requires increasingly more workers to produce and consume commodities. Therefore it is necessary for the continued existence of capitalist class relations that the working class grow without limit, and in order to facilitate this women must continue to be exploited for their reproductive labor.

As the process of proletarianization continues, the perception of the sex dichotomy as “natural” begins to wither away. It is not a coincidence that queer consciousness has primarily risen first within the most advanced capitalist economies. It is here that proletarianization has reached its most advanced state. It is also here that the forces of reaction respond most harshly to the rise of queer expression. This is why fascism (which we know is how capitalism reacts to a state of crisis) is so concerned with “traditional family values” and rigid gender roles. It is a violent reaction to the emergence of real human expression, an intensified reimposition of ideological structures of bourgeois oppression. Language accusing queer people of “defying the natural order” and other such anti-materialistic nonsense is slung about. “Communists” who parrot this rhetoric are communistic in name only: they objectively serve bourgeois reaction.

In communist society the requirement for endless growth is finally done away with. Absent the necessity to generate profit, production is purely on a needs-driven basis. The absolute volume of production can be consciously set to ensure everyone is provided for, and further improvements in production reap a reduction in the working day for all. Reproduction becomes a personal choice rather than a social imperative, and so the material basis which gives rise to the sex dichotomy is abolished. Men and women become true equals, and thereby the distinction between them ceases to be of any consequence and individuals become free to express themselves however they like. Queer liberation is not merely adjunct to communist revolution, but is in fact an intrinsic aspect of it.

This then should make clear the scientific socialist position on the queer question: as an oppressed class within capitalism, the very existence and free expression of queer people holds boundless revolutionary potential. The task of the Communists is not to set aside queer issues in favor of “the working class,” but to recognize that the vast majority of queer people are of the working class and make up a highly class conscious revolutionary element.

The oppression experienced by queer people, even today under liberal “tolerance,” is highly intense and acute. Queer people are subject to rampant discrimination in all areas of life, with the most visibly queer people relegated to the extreme margins of society. They are subject to severe violence, and in many places it is still fully legal to murder queer people. They experience the worst of the brutalities of capitalism, with homelessness (particularly among youth) higher than any other demographic. This severe oppression leads queer people to band together and support one-another as a matter of survival. They regularly form their own organizations, community support groups, activist groups, community defense, and so on. They are of course naturally drawn to radical politics in search of answers to their oppression — the “transgender communist” stereotype exists for a reason. They often go on to form a vanguard of sorts for other liberation struggles, making up a disproportionately large section of and often being the leaders of labor activists, Communists, anarchists, antifascist militants, national liberation activists, and so on. It should be difficult to miss how this spontaneous organizing and spontaneous arisal of class consciousness by queer people represents a heightened form of class struggle in embryo, yet somehow certain “Communists” appear to be wearing blindfolds. 

It’s long past time we change that and start making serious efforts towards uniting with queer organizations. This starts with forming a coherent political line on queer issues. The resurgence of fascism endangers us all, and queer people most acutely and most urgently. We need to be able to provide community defense, political activism, medical support networks, and education to queer adults and youth. The Communists have until now largely left queer people to their own devices on these fronts, and this is a fatal error in analysis. We cannot afford to continue to allow this revolutionary potential to go to waste. The victory of communism must be the victory of all oppressed people.