This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.

This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Trans activism isn’t just about pronouns and bathrooms. It’s about class struggle

By: []

Date: 2021-08

Debates around trans rights have been capturing headlines lately. The mainstream media usually reduces demands made by trans activists to being about what pronouns people should use or whether trans women should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms or participate in women’s sports.

While these are important issues, the focus on them can come at the expense of a more fundamental struggle – not just for trans rights but for trans liberation. In academia and at the grassroots level, the new field of trans Marxism understands the oppression of trans people as not just the result of individual people’s prejudice, but as a part of capitalist exploitation.

The gender police

The reality is that transgender people are far more likely to be part of the working class than their non-trans counterparts. A 2015 study found that in the US, 30% of trans people live in poverty, twice the rate of non-trans people. For Latinx trans people the figure is 43%, and for trans people with disabilities it is closer to 50%. Many transgender people have difficulty accessing or retaining jobs as more than three-quarters experience workplace discrimination in the forms of refusal to hire, sexual violence, or privacy violations (such as a person’s trans identity being ‘outed’ to coworkers which might result in harassment or discrimination).

There are complex reasons for this systemic inequality. To a large extent, it has to do with the construction of gender itself. We might think of the binary gender categories of male and female as given by biology but they have much more to do with social expectations. Marxist feminism – with which trans Marxism has close affinities – teaches us that early capitalism imposed a strict gender binary which helped create the conditions for capital accumulation. According to Marxist theory, under capitalism, it is workers who create the value that capitalists take as profit. This is the source of exploitation. But Marxism feminism asks who it is that raises, feeds and cares for these workers from childhood into adulthood so they can produce this value in the first place? Largely, it is women’s unpaid domestic and care work that underpins capitalist profit-making.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/trans-activism-isnt-just-about-pronouns-and-bathrooms-its-about-class-struggle/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

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