Transgender Marxism

Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle O'Rourke, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle O'Rourke

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786807335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory.

Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against 'gender ideology'.

Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.

1

Social Reproduction and Social Cognition: Theorizing (Trans)gender Identity Development in Community Context

Noah Zazanis

The questions of agency that arise with gender transition present a challenge to feminist theories of socialisation. If gender exists as a structure imposed onto its subjects, what does it mean to ‘change’ genders while remaining subjected to that structure? Many liberal trans-affirmative arguments have relied on essentialisms (biological or otherwise) to justify the necessity of transition, and the validity of trans identity.¹ But if trans identification is not determined by our biology, neither is it an uncomplicated product of early socialisation. Transgender identification is not inherent, or even necessarily constant. Instead, trans identities are formed responsive to their social context. We transition through the exercise of individual and collective agency. This occurs in community with other trans people, and through everyday acts of reproduction – each of which influences social cognition. To understand how trans identities are formed, it is necessary to examine the social relations produced and reproduced by trans people. It is these continuously developing contexts which allow for transitions to occur and identities to emerge.

The discussion of socialisation into specific gender roles originated in the radical feminist canon, but has since been mainstreamed within both popular feminist movement politics and the academic study of gender. One of the earliest theorisations of ‘gender socialisation’ in feminist theory is found in Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Feminism, Method, Marxism and the State’.² MacKinnon presents socialisation theory as a radical feminist intervention into socialist feminism, which she argued had until that point located gender in the labour of (biological) reproduction, presenting sexuality as neutral/natural while ignoring men’s exploitation of women through (hetero)sexual relations. ‘Gender socialization’, she writes, ‘is the process through which women come to identify themselves as sexual beings, as beings which exist for men. It is that process through which women internalise (make their own) a male image of their sexuality as their identity as women’.³ Womanhood, to MacKinnon, is defined through coercion into heterosexuality.⁴ In this view, the defining characteristic of women’s shared subjectivity is powerlessness at the hands of men, as reinforced through sexual objectification.

MacKinnon’s radical feminist analysis spoke (and speaks) truth to many women’s experiences of male domination and traumatisation at the hands of men. For these women, to be female is to exist as object and victim; gender socialisation is a unidirectional and non-agentic process, to be resisted through feminist organising but with little potential for subversion from within. So while trans-inclusive radical feminisms have existed since its advent, and MacKinnon herself has expressed support for trans women’s self-identification,⁵ many of the underlying assumptions of radical feminist socialisation theory lend themselves readily to transantagonistic conclusions when applied outside the realm of cisgender experience. If womanhood is defined by forcible sexual submission, what positive content could trans women see that draws them towards a female identification? And if trans men have experienced sexual assault at the hands of men – as most of us have⁶ – do these experiences forever mark us as, in some sense, female? Without an understanding of agency, and of gendering as a multidirectional process, there is little room for trans people to legibly exist outside of our initial assignment. According to this ‘old school’ perspective, female-assigned trans people will always be seen as victims of our socialisation, and male-assigned trans people will forever benefit from theirs – at least until gender is abolished.

The more classically feminist varieties of trans-exclusive radical feminists (TERFs) often point to such ‘socialisation’ arguments to suggest that trans people’s self-identification as our genders could not possibly reflect ‘material reality’. While these arguments may not seem to dignify a response, it’s worth reproducing an example to illustrate the tenor of the current debate within feminism. Referring to Shon Faye, a UK-based trans woman and activist, Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy writes:

Faye has only been living as a self-defined transwoman for two years, meaning that for 27 years, he [sic] was socialised as a male, and offered all the power and privilege men are under patriarchy. He [sic] has no idea what it feels like to fear pregnancy, to be talked down to or over, to be discriminated against in the workplace, to live in fear of rape or abuse in private and in public, from the time he [sic] was a child.⁷

This is, of course, both empirically and experientially false. For instance, trans women experience sexual violence and intimate partner violence at rates higher than those typical for cis women.⁸ Likewise, while trans men’s relationships to male power are hardly straightforward, many of us can describe instances in which being read and treated ‘as a man’ has resulted in privileges granted that were previously denied.⁹

Similarly, trans-exclusive feminists have pointed to essentialisms within trans politics and rhetoric in order to argue that trans identity is necessarily bioessentialist, and therefore both misogynistic and scientifically questionable. In her review of the controversy surrounding J. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, Alice Dreger attributes trans criticisms of the homosexuality/autogynephilia typology of transsexualism to a ‘feminine essence’ theory of transness, which relies on a belief in innate gender identity to justify transition.¹⁰ It’s certainly true that there are some strands of contemporary trans discourse which do appeal to a certain bioessentialism, in order to argue for the validity of trans experiences, presenting transgender neurochemistry as an uncomplicated ‘point of fact’.¹¹ These ‘trans liberal’ arguments attempt to establish trans people as just another natural fact. These assertions are both scientifically contested and politically questionable, but adjudicating this dispute is not my main concern here. It will suffice to say here that these views by no means represent the totality of trans understandings of gender. While many trans people hold essentialist understandings of gender identity, one could equally say that so do the majority of cis people. In order to challenge this mischaracterisation of trans politics, however, it is necessary to conceptualise exactly how trans identities are formed socially.

One key component missing from socialisation theory, which is necessary to understanding identity formation, involves the role of agency in gender identity development. Radical feminist accounts claim to offer a thoroughgoing explanation of why societies produce gendered subject positions or identities. However, they provide no explanation for the conditions in which a certain socialisation may fail to be internalised by a subject; why any person, trans or cis, may choose to reject the prescriptive roles into which they are socialised through transition, feminist resistance, or gender nonconformity of any sort. This silence raises the question: To what extent is socialisation theory ‘social’? The dialectical relationship between structure and agency poses a paradox for socialisation theory; if genders cannot be transformed except through their wholesale abolition, how can anyone step out of their gender roles enough to incite such transformation?

In comparison, Marx himself stresses the importance of human agency to alter the conditions of our existence. As he notes in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.¹²

Building upon Marx, social reproduction theorists have emphasised the extent to which often-naturalised categories such as gender and the family are themselves socially contingent upon practices of reproductive labour. As such, social reproduction theory (SRT) allows room for agentic behaviour through new practices of reproduction – both within economic systems and as a necessary precursor to economic transformation.

In an article for Viewpoint Magazine, Fulvia Serra emphasises the importance of nurturance and emotional intimacy as modes of reproduction necessary for creating and sustaining revolutionary movements. Intimacy, she says, has been increasingly enclosed into the private household – or channelled into value-producing activities. Serra rejects liberal feminisms that pursue women’s liberation through their inclusion in male-dominated workforces. Serra argues that the so-called breakthrough of liberal feminism have resulted in forwarding the burden of care work onto more vulnerable, marginalised women for little pay, while not causing significant shifts in the basic structure of the family relation. Liberal feminisms have not meaningfully challenged the capitalist mode of production. Instead, citing Silvia Federici, Serra pushes for changes in the fundamental mode of reproduction through the collectivisation of care labour, so as to undo the ‘hierarchy and domination’ inherent in the division of reproductive labour across gendered lines. She especially emphasises how the failure to successfully transform internal relations of reproduction has harmed revolutionary movements. Overlooking reproductive questions can cause the replication of destructive power dynamics, as exemplified through the experiences of women in the Black Panther Party. At the same time, she stops just short of describing a path forward – or of illuminating reproductive practices that could prove transformative within radical communities.¹³

So far, most writing available on transformative practices of reproduction has come directly from queer and trans scholars writing on their own conditions of daily living. In ‘Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics’, Jules Joanne Gleeson highlights the often unacknowledged practices of reproduction which have laid the foundation for the so-called ‘transgender moment’.¹⁴ While she notes that trans social reproduction is not necessarily revolutionary, it is through these reproductive practices that trans people produce the means for our survival – a prerequisite for any revolutionary activity. Additionally, in her later work, Gleeson begins to depict the processes through which trans people produce and reproduce our own identities, through our relationships and social spheres. While transition is often framed as a process of shifting encounters with cisgender expectations, she clarifies that it is equally a process of active community cultivation, and sustenance of trans identity. Through ‘support, mentoring, and reciprocal recognition’, as well as the curation and dissemination of ‘shared knowledge’ and ‘practical wisdom’, trans people ourselves facilitate the development o...