Why we fight for Trans Liberation

The election of Donald Trump, the rise of anti-trans bigotry and the recent UK supreme court decision have sparked debates on the left about how Marxists should approach the fight for trans liberation. Morgan Oddie analyses the debates and outlines why we must fight for trans liberation. 

 

On 17 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court issued a ruling that limits the definition of “sex” for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act to the biological sex one is assigned at birth. This effectively eliminates the small gains made by the Gender Recognition Act for transgender people in the issuing of Gender Recognition Certificates for their legal recognition of a gender transition from their sex assigned at birth to the opposite (non-binary people were already excluded from access to GRCs).

 

The case was brought forward by the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) group “For Women Scotland” who were aiming at ensuring that trans women were not included in gender equality targets.

 

As of September 2022, they had spent over $367K CAD for the legal fees in pursuing a judicial review, the vast majority was apparently fundraised through crowd sourcing including over $130K CAD single-source donation from JK Rowling. At the same time, the Scottish Tories have been wasting government money by fighting the Gender Recognition Act in the courts.

 

The ruling has clarified that transgender people can be excluded from single-sex spaces for privacy or safety but fails to indicate how biological sex is defined or proven. Notably silent on practical implementation, the ruling leads public service providers, employers, and healthcare providers to be responsible for deciding how to apply the new exclusionary measures. This potentially impacts everything from changing rooms and sports teams to access to domestic violence support, the ability to pursue pay equity claims, and the use of washrooms in public spaces, like schools, and in places of employment. This exclusion can happen by default rather than having to meet the previous threshold of “legitimate aim”.

 

As intended, this decision disproportionately impacts trans women and will intensify pre-existing social and economic inequalities. Comrades at the Socialist Worker Party in the UK have identified “the avalanche of transphobia in Britain has accelerated” as a result of the ruling, which will only embolden the attacks on trans rights. It is also likely to also sweep up gains for cis women’s rights, highlighting the need for solidarity across communities that are disproportionately impacted by misogyny.  

 

Identity Politics

 

The mainstream media coverage of the UK Supreme Court decision has chalked it up to one more chapter in the ongoing culture wars. Culture wars are used to distract from crises of capitalism but that isn’t a reason to dismiss identity. As International Socialists, we must resist arguments that degrade lived experiences in favour of a monolithic working class. The struggle against all forms of oppression is inextricably linked with the self-emancipation of the working class.

 

Transphobia, along with xenophobia, have been two pillars of far-right organizing that have been strategically adopted by political ruling elite to divide the working class. The rigid gender binary and most of its social referents are products of capitalism because class society has an interest in maintaining gender norms.

 

The reorganization of the family under industrialization and the necessity of the gendered division of labour under the patriarchal nuclear family model is in the interest of the ruling class for social reproduction of the working class. In a post-“lean in” feminism drive for furthering women’s rights under a status quo capitalist system, women are now expected to fulfill dual roles of caregiver and wage earner.

 

As Laura Miles argues in Transgender Resistance, “how we are currently sex-assigned says little or nothing about who could nurture and socialise the next generation, how that might be accomplished, and for what purpose. These vary from one culture to another.”

 

Women’s rights are not advanced through transphobia. By positing that trans rights will somehow detract from the “real” oppression of “real” women, there’s an easy drawn line to biological determinism that constructs  a natural and ahistorical category of woman to justify misogynistic oppression based on biology.

 

Biological Determinism

 

When the women’s liberation movement of second wave feminism pushed back on social norms that ensured patriarchal oppression, they said “biology is not our destiny”. Contradictorily, somehow biological predetermination is the root when it comes to the perpetuation of harmful myths that trans women are only predatory men looking to violate women’s bodies through increased access to their safe spaces and degrade the small material gains won in labour and health. This framework correlates to second wave feminist arguments and their modern referents that male biology and its capacity for rape are the source of patriarchal violence against women.

 

Challenging social norms, led many of those same feminists to accept a type of biological determinism along binary assigned sex lines because of the reductionist framework of “sex is biology and gender is social constructed.”  So, “your body is your body and your identity, gendered or otherwise, is only just a feeling”, particularly if it doesn’t line up how it socially ought to. Unfortunately, the narrative of sex is biological and gender is socially constructed comes from what was a typically progressive and feminist view and is a position still held by many leftists, including socialists, without the realization that this sharp distinction has a high potential to be utilized to be trans-exclusionary.

 

As our comrade Judy Cox from SWP points out, “biological sex and gender to do not exist in separate worlds. There is no solid materialist cake on which the flimsy icing of gender is spread.” Here, we might turn to Marx who rejected the essentialism of human behaviour, as “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”

 

More so, Marxism in both its dialectical and materialist approaches give us the tools of analysis beyond binary methods.

 

Though not an explicitly Marxist analysis, many turn to Judith Butler’s 1990 work Gender Trouble to problematize the gender/sex binary. Their critique of gender essentialism spoke to both the social temporality and performativity of gender, in a way that denaturalized the stable and coherent subject.

 

Butler writes, “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not just to culture as sex is to nature. Gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”

 

Sex and gender are not things that are independent from one another, nor are they abstracted from the social processes that shape them. Among the many issues with this argument is that even sex biology isn’t actually on a binary, with wide variance in the spectrum of chromosomes and corresponding primary sex characteristics, and complex factors impacting the in utero sex development of genetics – poverty and deprivation during pregnancy being a largely ignored one when the far-right make arguments for biological naturalness and God-given perfection.

 

Reductionist biological determinism also ignores the number of intersex people who exist and the harmful genital surgeries to normalize assigned biological sex presentation in infants. We have also seen this play out in the transphobic and racist attacks against cis women elite athletes and the somewhat misleading term “Disorders of Sex Development” or DSD, some of whom have been excluded from competitions, forced to undergo medical interventions to reduce their natural biological sex characteristics, like reducing their testosterone levels, prompting inconsistent and hypocritical discussions of “fairness” in female sports. The forced interventions on cis women athletes, as well as the availability of health care for cis gender affirmation (e.g., pharmaceuticals for male pattern baldness, sexual functioning and libido drugs, hormone replacement therapy for cis people), expose the hypocrisy of the fear of trans healthcare.

 

If sex biology was as natural and perfect as TERFs and the far-right would have us believe, why would this be needed?

 

The biological spectrum aside, through Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), people can also literally change their biological makeup and/or hormonal sex. Although medical transition is not necessary for gender identity validation for all trans people, the possibility of puberty blockers, HRT, and surgical interventions for gender affirmation, further undermine the notion that biology is static and unchangeable. However, we want to avoid the pitfalls of excessive attribution of gender to biology in fore fronting the argument in biology when the social construction of gender is so pervasive. Laura Miles is helpful here in her description of gender identity as the gender-self: “an outcome of interactions between the person’s self-perceived body, their biological sex (including in some cases their deep unease about this), the social perception of their body in the eyes of others, social factors like gender values and expectations, and finally the person’s development as a sexual being with sexual attractions and sexual needs (their sexuality).”

 

So, why all the transphobia?

 

It’s an easy level target for mobilizing the far right.

 

In Ontario, and elsewhere in so-called Canada, Drag Queen story time attacks evolved into school board protests in a convenient wedding of transphobia plus “won’t you please think of the children?” concerns to mobilize large populations of people in moral panic.  

 

Far-right politicians use this emphasis on the dangers of “gender ideology” to lay the ground for further pushes to the right and the increasing rise of fascist organizing.

 

Far-right politicians use this emphasis on the dangers of “gender ideology” to lay the ground for further pushes to the right and the increasing rise of fascist organizing. While the population of transgender and gender-diverse people is actually quite statistically low, there is a disproportionate focus on their social impact by politicians and the media. As fascist regimes organize, as was the case in Nazi Germany, gender and sexual diversity become targets.

 

According to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, there was a reported 400% increase in news stories about transgender issues between 2009 and 2019 in UK media. News coverage in North America has seen similar hikes, mostly from right-wing outlets.  

 

Capitalism creates the conditions for transphobia in its necessity of social reproduction of the working class because the gender binary is necessary. Gender diversity was an early target of colonial violence in the forcible imposition of capitalism on Indigenous cultures. The ruling class maintains its control both through divide and rule mentalities to target marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants, and simultaneously has a vested interested in gender norms going unchallenged.

 

The real gender ideology is the binary that is constructed and maintained in the interests of the ruling class.

 

Why We Fight for Trans Liberation

 

Resistance in collective struggle helps us as working class people imagine alternatives to capitalism. Attempts to divide us and undermine solidarity are in ruling class interest and it is only under socialism we will have freedom from the constraints of biological determinism and the imposition of social norms of gender.

 

The myth that transgender people are all white, socioeconomically privileged, and academically inclined is a fallacy. This portrait is another attempt to divide marginalized groups. Its perpetuation by those on the left who claim the fight for trans liberation is a distraction from oppositional sexism and the unity of the working class only supports the arguments of fascists, the far-right, and the interests of the State in maintaining control.

 

Arguing for the naturalization of binary sex and gender reinforces a narrative that the conditions of the world also cannot change. Disciplining and brutalizing trans bodies functions to preserve ruling class interests in maintaining capital’s investment in the gender binary. It’s only through struggle that solidarity is built.

 

In 2023 when the Million March for Children happened across the country, there was a dangerous temporary merging of an evolved-Convoy white nationalists with conservative racialized communities – early fascist underpinnings attempted to capitalize on the fears and misunderstandings about 2SLGBTQIA+ folk. When Israeli attacks increased in onslaught post-October 7, we showed up to fight occupation and genocide with our Palestinian siblings and comrades, some of whom had helped organize the school board rally a month earlier. We are vocal against attempts at Israeli pinkwashing and reject attempts to pit oppressions against one another.

 

In the last years of persistent multiracial and multifaith organizing, our communities are stronger for having struggled together and solidarity continues to be built on our fundamental principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.