LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back
The far-right is pushing the US back to a much more regressive and sexist society using LGBTQ+ rights as a wedge issue. Democrats routinely fail to stand up to this. Only a mass movement can liberate us.
Trans Rights Are Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
The rights of all LGBTQ+ people are under threat by the approaching fascist Trump regime, but trans people, and trans women in particular, are one of their primary targets right now. Marriage equality has been won, and it remains socially unacceptable to be openly homophobic outside of the far-right in much of the country. That’s not to say that cis LGBQ+ people don’t still face discrimination and hate, but it is widely regarded as politically incorrect if not immoral or even illegal. But society mostly still allows transphobia and transmisogyny to go on. This is how the far-right are able to push all these oppressive transphobic laws. They don’t expect to get much resistance to them, and so far they haven’t. They also don’t intend to stop there. They are already criminalizing abortion in many states.
Trans rights are fundamentally about bodily autonomy and self-determination. So are women’s rights, and indeed human rights in general involve these things. Trans rights usually include being called our actual, self-determined name, access to legal name changes, the right to freedom from harassment regarding gender (including not being misgendered), the right to safely access public accommodations (bathrooms, locker rooms, etc) of our actual gender (as opposed to what we were incorrectly assigned at birth), and the right to whatever healthcare, including transition healthcare, we may need in the sole opinion of ourselves and our supportive healthcare providers.
Beyond this, trans rights means having access to the same rights as everyone else and not being kept from them because of being trans (nor using any excuse as cover for transphobia). Food, safe and accessible housing, healthcare, utilities, transportation, education, community. These are things that everyone should have and not be kept from because of who they are. In this capitalist society, those things all require money, so the right to be free from discrimination in employment or other income (such as SNAP, SSD, SSI, etc), must be included with trans rights.
We also need to include civil rights such as the right to vote, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion among these. As should be obvious to anyone with any knowledge of history, these things have often been kept from cis women, Black people, cis gay people (especially at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic), disabled people, and many other marginalized groups all for the same reasons: hate, bigotry, and maintaining an easily exploitable underclass.
Transphobia is not feminism
In addition to the assault on trans people’s bodily autonomy and civil rights, the right to abortion and cis women’s bodily autonomy are also under heavy attack in much of the country. And it’s important to keep in mind that the right to an abortion is also important for many trans men and non-binary people. The two causes cannot be separated, and it is the same adversary that is coming for both. Of course, access to abortion and transition care requires access to healthcare in general, something that remains far from certain for many people in the United States. We must call not only for access to these specific services, but for a fully inclusive universal healthcare system. This is not even a revolutionary concept. Universal healthcare is the standard in many countries already.
The need to “protect women” and “women’s spaces” is often thrown around by the far-right, and by people claiming to be feminist while working with the far-right, as an excuse for their attacks on trans people. Besides the fact that trans women are women, these people aren’t actually interested in protecting women. They rarely talk about intimate partner violence, the attacks on abortion, nor the pay gap between women and men. “Sex-specific rights” is another term that they will sometimes use, but that is really just another step back toward “sex-specific” jobs, voting rights, etc. Remember how women once weren't allowed to attend universities, get a bank account without a man, or even vote? It wasn't really that long ago!
Back in the 1990s, it was considered feminist when girls demanded to play on boys’ sports teams in high school. Now the far-right are trying to force trans kids to play on different gender teams (if allowed to play at all), even though trans women and teen girls who have been on HRT for awhile don’t have any athletic advantage over cis women and teens (and may well be at a disadvantage), and trans men and teen boys who have been on HRT for awhile are often stronger physically than the women and girls who the far-right wants them to compete against. Keeping “men” out of women’s sports by putting men into women’s sports would be comical if not for all of the marginalized people getting hurt by such regressive policies.
But even the idea of separating sports teams by gender is not as science-based as some would have you think. There is a fair bit of overlap between female and male athletic abilities (partly because sex is a spectrum, not a rigid binary, and humans have lots of individual differences). Before puberty, there is basically no athletic difference between girls and boys, and claims that trans women (being mistaken by some for men) somehow have this huge advantage at things like chess or darts are obviously ridiculous. The people who make such claims say that they are trying to protect women’s sports, but they never seem to talk about how female athletes get paid less than their male counterparts, nor about how female sports teams usually get less attention and resources than male ones.
The far-right have long been trying to use LGBTQ+ rights as a wedge issue to make society much more regressive and sexist. If they are allowed to normalize taking away bodily autonomy from certain groups, it makes it easier to do it to other groups. Once you dehumanize one person, it is much easier to dehumanize others.
Trans and disability solidarity
Trans, disabled, and chronically ill people all have at least one thing in common. We all have bodies that are considered "not normal" by society. Many of us have experiences of being treated poorly or not at all by the medical system.
Trans women are women with bodies that are not traditionally useful to cis men, which is part of how our very existence undermines the patriarchy. Trans women can’t give birth (even though part of the reason for this is the deliberate failure of cis society, with a few exceptions, to develop the medical technology to enable this), and are often not considered attractive to cis men. Except for those who are, and those trans women are often exploited for this and considered even more expendable than cis women.
This “failure” to live up to the gendered expectations of the cisheteropatriarchy is something that is also applied to disabled women, who may or may not be capable of feminized labor, including childbirth, child care, housework, etc.
Trans people are also more likely to be disabled or have chronic illness. Chronic stress is not good for the human body, and neither is the malnutrition, sleep deprivation, stressful work and working conditions, or even homelessness that often go along with poverty. As explained in more detail below, trans people are more likely to be poor than cis people. And all LGBTQ+ people are more likely to suffer child abuse than cishet people. LGBQ people are more likely to have adverse childhood experiences than straight people, and trans people of any sexual orientation are more likely to suffer abuse than cis people. Adverse childhood experiences have been shown many times to increase the risk for physical and mental health problems later in life.
How Democrats won't liberate us
Democrats could have given us a universal healthcare system when they had both sides of Congress plus the White House under Obama, but instead they gave us a big handout to insurance companies. Yes, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is much better than how things were before, but it's still a handout to insurance companies instead of a national public healthcare system like many nations have.
Democrats almost never use tactics like filibustering or other kinds of obstructionism against Republican attempts to take away our rights. Harris chose to campaign with the likes of Cheney instead of taking a firm position for marginalized and working class people.
In the 2016 Presidential election, large numbers of people turned out to support and campaign for a progressive candidate who actually dared to talk about the working class — Bernie Sanders. His campaign drew a lot of people into politics for the first time. Across the country, people were demanding change, and wanted candidates who were not just business as usual. The far-right put up Trump, who is brazenly offensive and appeals to the far-right base because he attacks the very people that they hate. The Democrats’ base has its adversaries too — billionaires, oil companies, megacorps such as Amazon, murderer cops — but the difference here is that many of those adversaries are the very entities that are the biggest Democratic Party donors. So instead of letting Bernie end up as the party nominee, the Democratic National Committee made sure it would be Hillary Clinton instead. This despite the common opinion at the time that Hillary could not defeat Trump but Bernie could. And sure enough, she did not. The Democrats will not go against their big corporate supporters even when not doing so costs them elections. They would rather lose than champion the working class.
In 2019, the Democratic primary election for Queens District Attorney in New York City got far more attention than the election for such an office usually gets. It was between Tiffany Cában, a queer Latina progressive candidate, and Melinda Katz, a Democratic Party establishment candidate. Some of Cában’s campaign promises included changing the “culture of punishment”, and, perhaps most controversially, to stop prosecuting sex workers. The vote was extremely close, to the point that recounts were done. According to some people involved with the campaign, the Board of Elections in the city was found to be disqualifying votes for Cában for spurious reasons. (I lived in Queens at the time, voted in this election, and knew people involved with both the campaign and working the polls.) The Democratic Party establishment and the local bourgeoisie did not want someone who wanted to actually help people pushed into non-violent crimes by poverty (capitalism) getting into the role of DA. So they made sure that it didn’t happen.
With all of the employment discrimination, social isolation, and other forms of bigotry and oppression that they are subject to, LGBTQ+ people in general and trans women in particular are much more likely to be pushed into survival sex work. Sex work is work, and the criminalization of it just serves to make sex workers even easier to exploit, especially by rich cis men.
With Democrats treating progressive candidates like this, can you imagine how they would treat candidates pushing for even more strongly pro-working class policies, such as universal healthcare, national paid family leave, cutting the inflated military budget, guaranteeing housing to everyone, or bringing back the 70-90% tax rate on richest people? They won’t even condemn the genocide in Palestine.
Ultimately, Democrats are a capitalist party just like the Republicans. They will not only go along with but assist the rise of fascism before they will help liberate the working class from the billionaires, corporate bosses, and landlords.
LGBTQ+ rights aren't enough
Civil rights such as marriage equality and access to public accommodations, including bathrooms and locker rooms, are very important but they aren't enough. Trans people, especially those who are visibly outside the gender and sex binary, are at much greater risk of being kept from housing and income. And of course in this capitalist society, being kept from income means you're kept from just about everything else too. Being kept from housing, food, healthcare, utilities, transportation, etc is a big way that trans people, and all other marginalized groups, are oppressed in society. Mainstream media and culture will use such terms as "can't afford it" which really means "not allowed it" by the authoritarian capitalist system. "Just get a job" they'll say, but employers are frequently allowed to discriminate against people they don't like the look of simply with excuses such as "not a good fit", and no employer will hire a disabled person who can only work a few hours a week if that.
Capitalism relies on maintaining an underclass of vulnerable, impoverished people who can be exploited or discarded at the whim of the rich ruling class. This is called the reserve army of labor, or “industrial reserve army.”
"[Capitalism] forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation." -- Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3, by Karl Marx.
Only by dismantling the capitalist system and building a new system that puts people and planet over profit can we liberate all LGBTQ+ people, and all other marginalized groups, instead of just making a few reforms, however good those reforms might be, that will primarily benefit the middle and upper classes while most marginalized people are kept in poverty.
Working class solidarity is the answer
One of the primary tactics used by our far-right adversaries is to keep people divided by encouraging bigotry and hate. They want white people oppressing Black people, cis people oppressing trans people, citizens oppressing immigrants, etc because that keeps us from realizing that it’s the billionaire and landlord class that is exploiting all of us. Beyond that, diversity is resiliency, and not only is standing up for each other a moral good (opinions to the contrary are not worth considering), but struggle for the rights of minorities is good practice for larger struggles.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this is when workers at a printing factory in Argentina came together to defend a trans woman coworker and later ended up owning the entire factory themselves. Through socialist organizing and standing up for trans rights, the workers learned how to confront the bosses and now the factory is a worker-owned cooperative that is run democratically and offers free child care.
The working class needs to lead the struggle because it is our labor that keeps all of society running. This includes growing food, driving buses, treating patients, keeping computer systems running, teaching, and collecting garbage. But it’s not just wage labor. Stay at home parents, the elderly, and disabled people all do important care work that is often completely unpaid under capitalism, such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, child care, organizing, advocating, and emotional support.
The idea of “the working class” often brings to mind cis white men in factories, and while they are certainly part of it, they don’t even make up the bulk of it, especially in a primarily service economy such as the United States. A cashier in a grocery store, a barista in a coffee shop, and a person answering phones in a call center are all working class. Even the better paid workers, such as nurses and programmers, are still working class if they have nothing to live off of besides their labor. People who are working class don’t have business profits or apartment buildings they can rent out to pay their bills with. And due to various forms of systemic oppression, people who are trans, disabled, and/or BIPOC are disproportionately working class. Many disabled people have paid employment, often struggling to survive even more so than their abled coworkers, but even those who cannot do wage labor are not only valuable members of their communities in their own right, but are often doing unpaid care work for both themselves and others. Scheduling many appointments, coordinating transportation, and dealing with insurance all while managing one’s own often debilitating symptoms is a job in itself.
The working class does not have the power of great wealth, of the militarized police forces, nor of the mainstream media. But we do have the power of numbers, the power of solidarity and cooperation, and the power of our labor, including our ability to withhold that labor from the rich. The only way to wield these powers effectively is to get organized.
Building a party of the working class
In order to survive these dark times, we’re going to need to start building a care economy. We’re going to need mutual aid. We’re going to need to make sure people get fed, housed, get their medicine and to their appointments, and are included in community. We’re going to need community self-defense, and independent media to counter all of the bourgeois and fascist propaganda. We’re going to need to organize worker and tenants’ unions, and to support them in negotiations and strikes. We’re going to need to build worker-owned cooperatives, collective housing, and community gardens. We’re going to need to engage with local issues and elections.
But that is not enough. In order to actually liberate ourselves from the oppressive forces of systemic bigotry, fascism, and capitalism, we must not only survive them, but confront and defeat them. To do that, we must go beyond individual issues and individual workplaces to fight for all working class and marginalized people at once.
“From individual strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour.” – “On Strikes”, V.I. Lenin.
To do that, we will need to form a nationwide revolutionary organization that can mobilize all of our collective power and bring it to bear in important moments for the liberation of all of us. Exactly what that will look like in present-day US we won’t know until we do it, but we must start building it now.