Red Fightback's Marxism and Transgender Liberation

Marxism and Transgender Liberation: Confronting Transphobia in the British Left
Red Fightback, 2020
9780244869779

Recognising LGBT struggles is incredibly simple. It doesn’t require conceding ground to anyone – to the middle class, to reactionary politics, to postmodernism – but recognising them instead welcomes people who’ve already been radicalised through the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Both poverty and discrimination manifest themselves for LGBT people in a unique way, whether it’s facing homelessness as a teenager for coming out to their parents or discrimination at work, many LGBT people recognise the unjust and harsh realities of capitalism and its reproduction within social structures. And with Marxism and Transgender Liberation: Confronting Transphobia in the British Left, Red Fightback recognises this too.

Written collectively, Marxism and Transgender Liberation looks at the different manifestations of transphobia and anti-LGBT positions of communist parties in the UK – at the failure of the Communist Party of Britain to have any understanding of sexism at all as it defaults to transphobia, to the absurd essentialisation of gender of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), while others rely on the false division of labour in early human societies that is reified and made into a principle that, paradoxically, misses the class element of LGBT struggles.

And here in their preface to the book, TI recounts their own personal experience with the CPGB-ML. And although the anti-LGBT rhetoric of the CPGB-ML is by no means an isolated case, it is the most crude and dismissive on the British hard left. The first meeting they went to was ‘broadly unremarkable and rather uninspiring’, they note, something that was not at all unusual; the branch I was a part of in Oxford seemed to be the exception, as when I visited our Bristol branch it involved reading through a book like we were at school. Each of us would take turns reading through a section of the book that was that bit too long, leaving anyone reading it rushing to get to the end. To say that it was mind-numbing was an understatement, and had my branch been that way I never would have joined. I was amazed that even the small handful of people in Bristol would go every week. But TI’s experience with the CPGB-ML worsened still; labelled ‘liberal fascist’ and a ‘naive child’, members then began openly guessing their genitals.

As Luca Wright acknowledges, this failure of communist parties to recognise LGBT struggles reveals a resentment towards those parties’ own estrangement from the working class, that any progressive movements without the input and leadership of those outcast parties can be dismissed as not even false but converging on the conspiratorial. And these parties, for the most part, are not outcasts because of their positions as communists, maligned by a bourgeois state and its press, but are outcasts socially through their own doing. The image of dark and gloomy meeting places, to be stared down by men in flat caps who’ve pinned their identity around a fragile masculinity that is tenuously tied to the idea of real work, is all too often confirmed.

My induction to the CPGB-ML in Birmingham, in a drab room where every surface was covered in bright red (presumably as a reminder), was with one person from the party (in a flat cap), an old trade unionist who wouldn’t stop giving us completely irrelevant anecdotes, a comrade from the Oxford branch, and one young member whose entire experience of Marxism-Leninism was through YouTube videos. This younger member asked if I’d heard of the Finnish Bolshevik. I hadn’t, and I told him offhandedly that I generally distrusted YouTube personalities. They immediately went on to list charges laid against him but assured me that the rape charges against a minor were wrong because it was in fact consensual.

And so it’s no surprise that some communist parties even struggle to get women and the most vulnerable people in society to join them – including LGBT people. They are absolutely essential to any communist party, and the failure to have them in the party – especially those who are new and unfamiliar with anyone already in the party – reflects on the party itself far more than anyone in the Central Committees would care to admit. Do they feel safe being there? Is there accountability? Do they trust other members of the party not to harm them or when working with the most vulnerable people in society? To not then accuse them of being a ‘liberal fascist’ and speculate about their genitals? Not to mention if they trust the Central Committee, whose status in parties so often elides accountability.

But as TI highlights, ‘not long after my experience with the CPGB-ML, I saw tweets they posted attempting to pick a fight with a plucky new group called Red Fightback. They accused Red Fightback of being too pro-trans. This was a ringing endorsement, and I applied to join.’

Throughout Marxism and Transgender Liberation there are much of the same arguments that younger members of the CPGB-ML used to argue against the reactionary elements of the party while I was there, recalling the historical categories of sex and gender that went beyond a gender binary only to be extinguished and policed by colonial and imperialist powers – and it too comprehensively brings to the foreground all of the latest biology to articulate the flexible categories of sex. For anyone looking to learn the biological implications of sex and gender this is an incredibly helpful text – not to mention in bringing to the foreground essential updates to Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and the early division of labour – but I feel that much of this is under a false pretence, a pretence that only reaffirms the dependency on the natural sciences.

Firstly, the fundamental misinterpretation of materialism is one that relies on the supremacy of science by equating materialism itself to the natural sciences. ‘Materialism, in the philosophical sense’, the chapter Marxism and human nature says in the opening sentence, ‘means grounded in the laws of nature.’ The chapter goes on to say that ‘materialism is not limited to the biological realm’, and stresses the social factor in both sex and gender – but there is a dissonance between the claims and what is demonstrated. And I have no qualms with what is demonstrated, but instead with this theoretical pretence that grounds them.

Materialism is, more simply, a philosophy relating to matter. It was a philosophy far before any concepts of a natural law that we’d later see in the enlightenment, originating with Leucippus and Democritus in Greek antiquity, and while materialism develops through the history of philosophy in the work Dons Scotus, Thomas Hobbes, and Francis Bacon – this misunderstanding presumably comes from Engels himself and his view of dialectical materialism. If the view is accepted that dialectical materialism exists within nature, then the question of the developments themselves become a purely scientific matter, and ‘the theory might then be accepted or rejected in accordance with the prevailing state of science without any modification at all to one’s basic attitudes.’ (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 4) But, ultimately, if we depend on strictly biological science and firmly establish a biological basis for trans struggles, does this mean we go against LGB struggles as there is no biological basis for why someone can be attracted to other genders than what is considered the opposite sex? Because there isn’t a ‘gay gene’ that can be pointed to and confirmed once and for all? I’m certain that the authors of the book don’t believe this, and I don’t either, but this is one of the inevitable contradictions on this dependence on the positivism of hard sciences.

Marxists should not wait for the ‘hard’ sciences to catch up to legitimise their arguments. The core of dialectical materialism is, as Lukacs asserts, repeating Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, to change reality.

The vast majority of scientific sources cited to anchor this theory are from the past decade, but it all belies a truth that has been discussed in sections of academia for far longer. While the book notes that ‘postmodernist “queer theories” since the 1990s have just co-opted and defanged earlier [Marxist] intellectual work’, there is here a tacit agreement with the charge against academia by Kay Green, who wrote in the Morning Star that ‘trendy queer theory academics had messed up the language of sex and gender so much that conversations just weren’t making any sense.’ The book responds to this by highlighting the materialist work done by Marxists, concluding, ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that when chauvinistic “leftists”, including the Communist Party of Britain, attack “post-modern identity politics” they are actually referring to the anti-materialist academic turn that took place during the 1990s.’

I almost feel that the spectre of Judith Butler is present in the book; that the beginning of this trend was Gender Trouble, published in 1990, and that she is the primary object of discussion when postmodernism and academia rears its head even if her name is never mentioned. But at the same time the book approaches idea of performativity. In its recognition that modern classifications of sex and gender are ‘inextricably bound up with social meaning and political ideologies’, it quotes Thomas Laqueur as he says that ‘almost everything one wants to say about sex – however sex is understood – already has in it a claim about gender’, alluding to the necessarily social distinction between sex and gender. But it soon reverts back to a view of this distinction as one determined by the hard sciences.

Butler’s concept of performativity is still the most robust conception of sex and gender, but as people – myself included – move further and further left, the concept of performativity isn’t so much proved wrong or even built upon and developed as much as forgotten altogether. Butler’s own politics come to the forefront as another of those false radical academics, supporting Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for the 2020 US election; her insistence on non-violence amid the rise of fascism; her reduction of that fascism to an individuated psychoanalysis of Donald Trump. Butler’s emphasis on the necessary social side of sex and gender slowly falls away as materialism becomes more and more urgent, and the difficulty of her writing becomes another betrayal of the working class by academics. And so performativity isn’t disproven, it’s ignored.

Performativity then becomes a blind spot which biology and positivist science cannot account for – and given its staunchly anti-essentialist position, Marxists and their often-crude materialist and anti-metaphysical stance would do well to work through it to find its kernels of truth. And when Red Fightback’s book goes on to discuss of the ability of children to recognise sex and gender, turning to the social construction of gender, it does begin to approach the concept of performativity but once again relies on the concreteness of neurological science to fit itself in line with its view of materialism as relating to natural law. What does the neurological structure of the brain tell us but the expression we already see on the outside and are told about by trans people themselves? If we consider that it’s these social forces that shape neurological structures anyway, what we are seeing and told by neurology is only being confirmed after the fact. That they resemble other people’s brain patterns are then contingent.

Butler is critical of these attempts to find an originary gender expression, and writes – counter to the false idea held by TERFs that trans women are merely parodying womanhood – that there is no substantiality to the concept of womanhood at all, and they are themselves working through the same trials and tribulations of being a woman as trans women are. ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, Simone de Beauvoir famously writes. This statement embodies the concept of performativity for Butler – that gender expressions themselves are as contrived to someone assigned female at birth as to a trans woman, and are by no means innate or essential, and so can never depend on an innate and essentialised womanhood. This is not to say that this is to reduce gender merely to a performance or acting, but there is an element of learned performance to it. For both women and men, these performativities range from learned techniques and attitudes on grooming, how to wear clothes, how to stand, to how to exist in social spaces; to mansplain, to be quietly mainsplained to; to manspread, to be quietly manspread against. And not to say, this has developed through history, and what at one point was considered masculine – like aristocratic men wearing shoes with high heels – is now considered essential to femininity and womanhood. But, crucially, ‘There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” which are said to be its results.’ (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 34)

Gender inherits the aftermath of metaphysical thinking that ties it to an essentiality, and while Marxism and Transgender Liberation takes this anti-essentialist position it does not go so far as Butler. Butler recognises that gender itself has been made into a socially constructed and performative behaviour, but she does not abandon the concept – instead looking at the tautological nature of the relationship between sex and gender. If sex is the material existence of genitalia (Butler uses the term prediscursive, but we can agree that the material is prediscursive), then rather than sex determining gender it is gender that determines sex – as gender genders the genitalia. ‘It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category.’ (Gender Trouble, p. 10) Woman and man as categories, she argues, are simply the reifications of these performativities on the assumption of their sexed bodies.

But, after all of this, how does this relate to dialectical materialism? When we take the view that the function of dialectical materialism is not to recognise what exists but – repeating Marx – to recognise it in order to change it, Butler actually opens the door for such a view of sex and gender.

If we take the view that the materiality of sex is the existence of whichever genitalia the subject has, at what point does a materialist view – once recognising that they have a penis or a vagina – then jump immediately and without consideration to construct entire gender identities, expressions, and roles that they will take with them to the grave? This crude materialism entirely fails to take into account contingency; that the material fact, the existence of genitalia at all, should continue millennia of ideological baggage is absurd and in no way dialectical. Without antagonising these conceptual assumptions and eliminating contingency, there is no hope of reaching a dialectical materialist view of sex and gender.

Once we recognise that there are no original gender expressions, that there are no right ways to be a man or a woman, to be androgynous or genderqueer, ‘The reconceptualisation of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed.’ This final point, that gender is neither fully artificial or arbitrary, allows us to move beyond the false dichotomy of free will and determinism and recognise that ‘construction is not opposed to agency.’ (Gender Trouble, p. 201)

Recognising that we are not bound to what simply exists, that we are not the mere existence of our genitalia, but our agency over it – as here the unity of form, matter mediated by its concept, that we have agency over what exists – is the entire point of dialectical materialism. To repeat myself from another essay, in which I walk through the steps of dialectical materialism to overcome crude materialism: ‘Determinate matter, matter with content – matter that is arrived at through negation and not through positivism, empiricism, or self-evidence – is a unity of form, as matter mediated by its concept. This is the essence of Marx’s dialectic, of dialectical materialism, and it is only through this determination that we can both move beyond a vulgar materialism.’ (Inside the Last Days of the CPGB-ML, Ebb Magazine) To instead say that what is material binds us to a narrow gender expression and gendered division of labour because it is merely given and empirical is a manifestation of crude materialism, to say the least, and to live a whole life dependent on what is absolutely contingent is beyond ridiculous. Though most people don’t give transitioning a second thought – to which we can say, okay – for many other people, we must stand by them as they choose their gender and how they express this. ‘The loss of gender norms’, and by extension of the assumption that genitals necessitate and determine these, ‘would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations’ (Gender Trouble, p. 200) and allow people to move beyond what contingencies they are bound to.

Marxism and Transgender Liberation does not go so far in this theoretical direction as it should, but I’m confident that this wasn’t through any failure of its commitment to LGBT struggles. As it recognises that ‘in Britain, newer comrades have inherited a smattering of small surviving socialist parties, often with the same dogmatic leadership as forty years earlier who proselytise a very narrow and outdated understanding of the working class’, the younger comrades who are – for the most part – more accepting of LGBT struggles will be able to better articulate this without fear of recourse for being postmodern and anti-materialist. But this is dependent on refusing to concede ground to the anti-intellectualism of crude materialism that manifests itself in the dismissal of all theory outright as it binds itself to what is contingent.