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.

Although it is the Republican Party carrying the flag of extermination, the Democrats consistently enable it to continue by failing to act to prevent it. The fact is simple: the ruling class endorses the murder of trans people. This endorsement is manifest in both Republican and Democratic policies — in the one as the active engine of legislative extermination, the other as passive cover for this heinous program.

No, even the “Democratic” states are not safe.

The capitalists are attempting to reinforce their control over social reproduction, to drum up hatred and division in the working class, and, more importantly, to secure the heteronormative patriarchal regime through which capitalist society exerts its power. Whether they recognize this as their conscious objective is unimportant; whether they are driven by ideological commitments to half-baked religious theories or by fascistic concerns with “degeneracy,” whether they are acting out of self-conscious economic motives or whitewash their material concerns as being driven by some “nobler” form of debased ideology, we do not care.

We say, they will stop.

The attacks will stop.

To our unorganized trans comrades: now is the time to join together in armed self-defense organizations. To our trans comrades in organizations other than ours: the League and its members stand with you. We are prepared to fight fire with fire and to bodily defend you. Should you need aid of any type, we urge you to reach out through USU or other League organizations.

Only through armed power will we repel the enemy.

And indeed, only the complete triumph of the social revolution can bring about trans liberation. Now is the time to raise the flag of revolution, to stand against patriarchal capitalism, to build our fighting force so that we may tear down our enemies, overthrow their barricade, and storm their fortress!

A luta continua!

Signed,
All-Empire Worker’s League
Cincinnati Community Aid & Praxis 
Connecticut Radical Reading Group
Red Help ATX
Unity-Struggle-Unity Press

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”

Yesterday, on September 10, 2025, the white supremacist nazi Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a hate rally. Sorry, Charlie! He was silenced in the midst of a racist screed about the origins of gun violence in the US — one he’s practiced before. He was merely expressing the unspoken rules of gun ownership in the United States out loud.

Kirk was asked “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” The nazi replied, “Too many.” The audience member responded, “In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

Kirk replied, in his last words, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

What stirring last words! Why did he spend his final breath asking his audience whether they wanted to count “gang violence” in the list of mass shootings? Because for Charlie Kirk and the ruling class, the question of gun ownership is simple. Every person should own a gun. The unspoken corollary to that is that only property owners are people.

For Charlie Kirk, as for the many others in the ruling class, rights are for property owners. Property owners are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men. Kirk knew that. He didn’t want “criminals” to own guns, and wouldn’t you know it, many “crimes” are defined or criminalized by poverty. He doesn’t want trans people to own guns, only cis people. Kirk stood for the proposition that all cis white men should own a house and a gun, they should patrol the internal frontier of their country against the poor, against Black people, against trans people, and against workers.

Sorry, Charlie!

We have not one tear to shed for Mr. Kirk, his backers, his supporters, or his ruling class friends. And unlike Mr. Kirk, we don’t agree that property owners should have guns. Only the working class, the poor, the sex-oppressed, the nationally oppressed and their agents, organizations, and tribunes should be armed. Until that day comes, Mr. Kirks’ allies will continue to talk out of the side of their necks.

At a time when the fury of the popular classes has manifested such actions as the daring execution of Brian Thompson, it is curious that the many leaders of the two hospitals have not considered what is happening right now in homes across Connecticut. Parents are being told that their children are likely to suffer, perhaps even kill themselves in the coming years. There are names and faces associated with this suffering, and they aren’t some distant faceless bureaucrats in Washington, protected by the many miles and layers of red tape.

Oh, yes, the executive order that set this tragedy in motion came from Washington. It was drafted by some staffer in some back room. It was signed by the inhuman flesh-puppet Donald Trump. The blame for his election can be equally shared between GOP members and Democrats. So yes, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But gunmen and bombmakers aren’t likely to be interested in them. At least, not for now. The untold legions of parents that found out on July 24 that their children have been sentenced to suffer and perhaps to die aren’t likely to be hunting for figures in Washington to punish.

They will be looking for the people in their community that caused this tragedy. And they will find them.

Curious that these people haven’t built bunkers, hired private security, and gone off the grid.

Because they should.

1. CEO: Christopher O’Connor. ︎
2. CEO: James E. Shmerling. ︎
3. YNHH Board Members: Thomas Balcezak, William J. Aseltyne, Gail W. Kosoyla, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, Alan Friedman, Anne Diamond, Frank Ciminiello, LIsa Stump, Michael Angelini and Pam Scagliarini; CT Children’s Board Members: Bill Agostinucci, Jonathan M. Carroll, Bob Duncan, Paul Dworkin, Matthew Farr, Bridgett Feagin, Christine Finck, Paulanne Jushkevich, Sarah Matney, Lawrence Milan, James E. Moore, Deb Pappas, Lori R. Pelletier, Juan C. Salazar, and R. Moses Vargas. ︎

The haute bourgeoisie, i.e., the billionaire class, the big finance capitalists, have lately taken a heel turn towards transphobia, racism, and general reaction. Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos are the face of this movement. The corporate powers which make up the flesh and blood of the U.S. empire, threatened by anti-trust breakups of their monopolies, have now (in a transparent effort to kiss Trump’s ass) begun to cast off the friendly DEI mask they used to wear. Transphobia is now specifically and explicitly allowed on Facebook and its subsidiary platforms.

State after state is striking down trans protections, banning our healthcare, banning our public existence, banning speech advocating on our behalf. It is a fervent frenzy of fascistic reaction against our existence. The reactionaries, largely from the privileged middle class, call us child predators for the crime of standing up to protect trans children. They cheer when trans kids are murdered. They intend to push us back into the margins of society, out of employment, out of our apartments, to rot on the streets. They intend to murder us through homelessness, prostitution, suicide, gay bashing, imprisonment, rape. We will call this what it is: a systematic targeted campaign of extermination. This is genocide. Trans liberation activists have been warning us of this for years. 

When I chose to transition in November of 2023, I made that choice with the full conscious knowledge that this was on its way. In fact, I made that choice in part because I knew this was on the way. I have studied Marxist theory for my entire adult life, I’ve internalized its methods of dialectical and historical materialism, the methods of scientific socialism (the study of the development of human society). When I finally worked up the courage to admit to myself that I am a woman, I knew in that moment what this meant for me — transition meant discarding the privileges of the oppressor class and openly siding with the oppressed. I would no longer belong to the class of men and of cisgender people. I would be so much more vulnerable to the violence of society. I would experience hardship, suffering, perhaps death. I accept this eagerly. Trans children suffering under this regime need people like me to look up to and to advocate for them, and our history has shown us over and over that liberation only comes through struggle.

Many of us did not see this wave of transphobic reaction coming. It was unexpected and inexplicable, and so many of us are terrified. We’ve seen what they do to those who resist. We watched 15 months of live-streamed systematic industrial genocide against the Palestinians because they dared to stand up to oppression. 

But Palestinians know the truth of resistance: it is the only path for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity. They chose the path of resistance because the only alternative is deliberate submission to slow extermination. I will not submit!

What did the liberal trans rights movement bring us? Was all that effort wasted? No, it brought us consciousness. More of us are now more conscious of the conditions of our oppression than ever. Trans people are no longer a tiny minority, we are now a distinctive class. We have consciousness. We have community. We can take action.

The age of liberalism is over. The era of “trans rights” is over. The days of “tolerance,” “inclusivity,” corporate “diversity” are gone. And of course this was going to happen! We’ve been hearing all our lives “the middle class is shrinking,” and what did we expect? That cispatriarchy, our oppressors, would allow themselves to be squeezed out of their privilege alongside us? Did we expect we could remain among their ranks so long as we swore obedience to the empire, followed all the rules, obeyed and submitted? That’s exactly what we did when we lived and died in the closet, and that was so much more comfortable for them. Of course they want us to go back. And more will follow. We are only among the first to be subject to their rollback of imperial privileges. 

I refuse to go back! Moreover, I refuse to play by their rules any longer. I refuse to beg and scrape for “rights” ever again, I refuse to “debate” the merits of my existence, I refuse to allow their sense of entitlement to dictate the way I live my life and express my soul. I refuse to justify my body to their regime of death! 

It is clearer than ever that we can never attain liberation by appealing to the morality of our oppressors. The moment their comfort is threatened they’re happy to feed us to the machine of destruction that guards their lifestyle. Our struggle lies only with those who resist this global order of death. Our enemy is not merely one or another particular individual, and our enemy is not overseas! Our enemy is the system that empowers bigotry, reaction, and oppression. The system that devours the environment and humanity to feed its mindless accumulative drive. Our enemy is the international system of imperialist finance capital, with its heart in New York City and what passes for its brain in Washington D.C. Our liberation can only be attained by its overthrow! Our friends are all those who stand against the imperialist system, our enemies are all those who stand with it. 

If our friends don’t yet see us as their friends, it is because we have yet to build that relationship of mutual trust and support. 

The people of Palestine have been fighting and dying for their liberation for a century, and today they stand closer than ever to attaining it. The whole might of the empire and its international vassal states rained down on them for 15 months and they stood and fought and won. And the imperialists tell us “they hate queers” as if they’ve ever had a chance to even think on the question. They hate those who murder them, and they love those who stand with them. They have no time to give a damn about your gender. If any of them believe we’re worthless it’s because we are, because we’ve stood and watched for a hundred years while their land has been stolen and their children murdered. 

If you care about Queer people, you care about people all over the world who are oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Our failure to stand up for their interests has long allowed the left wing of capital to use mistreatment of our siblings overseas to justify regime change operations, sanctions pressure, and other hostile actions to violate national sovereignty. The right wing of capital has used this to claim that “gender ideology” is a tool of imperialism. This is how they divide and conquer us.

Put an end to it! Supporters of U.S. imperialism, american/canadian nationalism, NATO, zionism, and “israel” have no place in the Queer community! Participants in these institutions have no place with us, we stand for all human rights or we stand for none!

Today the heartland of the colonial system that began in Europe and which birthed the monstrosity of “israel” is the United States of America. The U.S. empire’s continuous ongoing genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this continent served as the blueprint not only for the establishment and expansion of “israel,” but for Hitler’s war of annihilation against Jews and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Hitler’s rabid opposition to Communism in turn paved the way for the U.S. empire’s so-called “Cold War” against Communism, in which it butchered millions upon millions of Natives of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, West Asia, the African continent, and everywhere else the human struggle for community, cooperation, and liberation — in a word, Communism — stood up against the inhumanity of Capital. 

Did you know many of the Indigenous peoples of this land did not have gendered pronouns at all in their languages before colonization? They never had a reason to care. Colonists care because they want to enslave half of us to the other half to exploit us for our reproductive labor. It was colonists who imposed “gender ideology” on us, and it is those same colonists who today are tearing down our reproductive healthcare and our gender-affirming care. The end of capitalism requires the end of colonization. 

Trans liberation requires Landback.

You know the 2028 election doesn’t hold anything positive in store for us. The Democrats don’t give a damn if we live or die, and if it gets them more money from their rich donors they’ll happily kill us themselves. The system is against us, so we must be against it! 

The movement is growing: 2024 saw the establishment of the international All-Empire Worker’s League, which aims to build the conditions for international unity among all the oppressed, towards the forging of a revolutionary Party capable of going on the offensive to at last smash this system. The movement for liberation needs you just as urgently as you need it. Our biosphere is collapsing under the weight of the imperialist system. The people in this empire are beginning to rise up to meet this challenge, and standing at the vanguard of the movement are trans and other Queer people following the leadership of the nationally oppressed.

Every empire in history thought it would last forever, until it didn’t. We all feel the collapse of this empire in our bones.

It is with that that we must remember, they set the terms of this conflict: Transition or death!

We say in response: Communism will win!