‘No one way works’: An Interview with Ira Terán and Emrys Travis on Trans Marxism
The situation for trans people in the UK is at a critical point. Following recommendations from the globally condemned, flawed Cass Report, the new Labour government has already introduced a permanent ban on prescribing puberty blockers for trans youth. Upheld by the High Court as ‘lawful,’ this will devastate the lives of young people in need of life-saving, gender-affirming healthcare. Years of transphobic rhetoric have been pushed through numerous political and media channels, resulting in steady increases in transphobic hate crimes year after year, as trans people face a wide range of discrimination, including within the workplace and disproportionately living in deprived areas. Conditions such as this highlight why a Marxist approach is more important than ever.
It’s important to emphasise that Marxist approaches to trans people are not new. As early as 1972, Carol Riddell1 was formulating a Marxist approach that understood the gender binary system as a function of capitalist relations, one in which trans people ‘were the casualties of a gender role system that performs important functions for capitalism.’2 Leslie Feinberg expanded upon this in 1992 in hir pamphlet, ‘Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,’ utilising a Marxist approach to track the forms of trans oppression that have emerged from the development of racial capitalism. With the release of Gleeson and O’Rourke’s Transgender Marxism anthology in 2021, many comrades were given a glimpse into the numerous forms of trans Marxism that have flourished in the decades since. Now, in 2024, Ira Terán and Emrys Travis have produced the ‘Trans Marxist Issue,’ for Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), another much needed publication that further demonstrates how trans Marxism has continued to evolve in our current climate. In this interview, we will be discussing the TSQ issue itself, what exactly trans Marxism is, how and why trans Marxist approaches can differ, why it is so important in our organising and struggles as well as what comrades can learn in the UK (and elsewhere) about the importance of trans struggles.
Sylvia McCheyne: How would you both describe trans Marxism, and how would you communicate its necessity in a landscape that is increasingly hostile to trans people and people who do not immediately fit the gender binary, as anti-trans rhetoric appears to be the thin end of the wedge for radicalisation in the UK?
Ira Terán: I am tempted to begin by saying that as Holly Lewis points out, a trans and queer Marxism has to be understood as a project of self-abolition within revolutionary politics. That is, we understand Marxism itself to be oriented towards trans and queer liberation, but that is not how Marxism is concretised daily in our militancy. On the one hand, trans Marxism has to do with an understanding of capitalist totality, in which a gender and sexual discipline and coercion cohesion is not separated from the reproduction of capitalist class relations, and it's not separated from the relations of production themselves. On the other hand, the lived embodied experiences of trans comrades include interesting and barely used tools for the class struggle in a wider sense and for the whole of the working class. I think that for us trans Marxism stands for both an embodied, situated critique that shows how anti-capitalist politics can still reproduce a fragmented vision of capitalist life, especially in everything that has to do with intimacy and bodily autonomy. But on the other hand, because we are sure that trans experiences and queer lives contain numerous aspects that are to be understood as barricades against bourgeois existence.
Emrys Travis: I love that, barricades against bourgeois existence is exactly it. Whereas you can end up in understandings of identity politics that try to separate out groups of people. I think what Ira said is perfect in a way, but my way of trying to explain this to basically anyone who I come across is that we exist in a time of a lot of polarities and it's very easy to just kind of go back and forth on things like, ‘We need to focus on class/we need to focus on identity, or, we need to focus on big World Systems thinking about what joins us/we need to break it down to the fragmentary.’ These have been trends that create this self-polarising machine and everyone sort of fights against everyone and, as well as everything that Ira said, trans Marxism I would say is dialectical. What I mean by that is both trans-ness and Marxism, and especially trans Marxism, are ways of not looking at these kinds of theoretical debates and saying ‘either/or’ or ‘base/superstructure,’ this is the thing to focus on; trans Marxism is ‘both/and.’ Both on a gender level and on a more kind of conceptual level.
IT: Absolutely, I would also add that the very notion of trans-ness which has to do with a movement establishes a dialogue with social reproduction theory. Inasmuch as it's interested in historical processes instead of results, or frozen products of social life. It's also interesting because it allows for an understanding of every capitalist social relation as something that is moving, something that is not eternal, even those social relations that have been more naturalised or reified as desire or gender.
ET: Yeah, absolutely. I think this came out in various contributors' pieces. There's a danger in giving trans people a fuzzy idea of who that is, some kind of ‘figurehead’ saying, ‘from this specific entrypoint, you can diagnose all of these things about society,’ but also… you can! Trans existence absolutely – of course not exclusively – holds these keys to understanding things like that that trans people, ‘make visible in the world that crucial Marxian analytic move - that what ‘appears’ is often enough the opposite of what ‘is.’’3 Trans Marxism is about both a point of increased and overlapping contradictions that allows us to see how gender oppression and gender binarism interact with other aspects of the capitalist totality. It's a privileged window in a sort of Lukácsian class-consciousness sense, onto a particular facet of that, and a facet that I think is really timely to say the least. But, it's also a window onto what's possible and the very idea that our politics should be driven by a kind of…Not utopian in the sense of unrealistic, but an optimistic idea of what is possible. We make ourselves; we're not the only people who make ourselves. I think trans Marxism, as an intervention into trans studies, is about saying ‘okay, let's take that beyond the level of the individual, the fragmented or the group of individuals and make that grapple with systems, like the economic systems of production, all of these big material things.’ To insist these are relevant to each other, we can't think about any one thing in isolation as if this has nothing to do with something else, because it always does.
IT: One thing we tried to engage with in our introduction was that of several and opposing manifestations of trans-ness and we wanted to confront trans liberalism – whose idea of gender dissidence has to do with individual, privatised transformations – with a wider understanding of trans-ness as containing abolitionist power, as something that has to do with a rupture with societal confinements. And, in such a way, understanding that what is lived concretely in trans experiences and through transitions is another way of seeing possibilities against capital itself. For instance, there is little difference between obtaining the collective means to be able to continue to exist against cisnormativity and, for example, gathering the collective forces to confront the police to stop an eviction. Is risking your life going to stop people from getting deported? Or taking part in the housing movement or confronting the cops? How everything has to do with capitalist state power repressing everybody who confronts it and how we collectively and strategically can build other ways. I like this definition by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology that says that ‘communism [is] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.’ I like to think about how trans life within capitalism also contains the embodiment of that desire to leave what we have been told is the only world we come to know or the only life we can get to live. I like to joke that we are not only assigned a gender at birth, but also a mode of production and that we can still rebel against both non-chosen destinies.
ET: Part of the reason that I'm so attached to this issue as our ‘baby,’ is it was so serendipitous the way that the submissions we got really just pulled at these kind of different threads, not all the same threads in each one, but these kind of recurring motifs and picking out and pulling apart Marxist concepts that plenty of avowed Marxists don't actually understand. I'm really interested broadly in the diverse ways in which people who come to theoretical Marxist concepts understand those concepts through their own experience. As we’ve said it's a dialectic between the individual lived experience and the totality of everything, from the one to the other and back again; that's how we understand things, that's how we make sense of the world. Where we are in trans-ness broadly is that there are far more people now than 5-10 years ago who actually know a trans person. And, we are also – particularly in the UK and parts of Europe for wider far-right reasons, as you said – confronted with the sharp edge of radicalisation. Even the most pessimistic of us didn't necessarily think in 2014 with Laverne Cox’s ‘Transgender Tipping Point,’ that we were then going to get such a pipeline to reaction – increasingly to a very ‘classic’ kind of bigotry – and that it would specifically be trans people that are made the lynchpin of it. But the fact of that is an opportunity for us to say, firstly, we know that liberalism and a queer politics that is led by an idea of ‘tolerance’ without fundamental change doesn't work. It's clearly not working, it's not gained enough to weather the backlash that it's caused and we need something bigger – and we have something bigger, I think. What I love about the trans Marxist issue is that people really instrumentalise these concepts in an understandable kind of way for people who are into trans studies, but not Marxism, or for people who are self-describing as Marxists but have never necessarily gone: ‘oh, now I really understand what is meant by reification.’ I think it gives a really good sort of elaboration (and not through saying ‘this is how this is,’ but through, in conversation, voices and sometimes disagreeing voices), an elaboration of how we understand these concepts – and these are concepts that are coming back into focus for a lot of academic Marxists. The fact that we can come in and say, what is a better example of reification as a concept than the gender binary, or sexual identity? As it is understood in the kind of ‘Born This Way’ parlance of it. What's a better example than of something that is being stuck and fixed like a dead butterfly, but that actually is so expansive, so processual and so in flux?
IT: Agreed. On the one hand, I think we have a scenario in which it’s harder for the advancement of trans Marxism because trans liberalism has transformed into anti-gender reaction worldwide. But, on the other hand, it is one of the biggest opportunities for trans Marxism because it is the politics that can show all the phantasms of liberal statecraft and how our liberation does not fit into this narrow, marketable politics of validity. I was afraid in the beginning because most of the collective knowledge of trans and queer Marxism is born in Facebook groups or subreddits and now it is part of scholarly journals, which is okay, but it's always a danger because it's turning proletarian or lumpen-proletarian collective conversations into a commodity.
ET: It's been really encouraging to sort of be expanding the network of individuals we know who are scholars in this area. But it's also that you have an idea of individuals that you're already aware of, you try to approach them to solicit a submission or ask them to edit a piece and it's like, well I’m having this conversation in the middle of a housing crisis issue that I'm trying to deal with. Everybody's got that kind of thing, ‘I can't do anything intellectual for this amount of time because I'm having to earn money in my minimum wage job.’ It is very much that. It's nice to have got a foot in the door of ‘high academia’ from that perspective.
IT: I think it's an interesting contradiction to duel with because it is true that if TSQ, Verso, Pluto Press, etc. publishes this knowledge, they are going to reach much greater numbers. We want revolution to happen and that means that our ideas have to be read by lots of people. I think there's also this part of ‘we love genealogy and we know where we come from’, ‘we know the voices that have advanced and developed trans and queer Marxism so far’, but we didn't want those voices to freeze and to become one more reified academic field in which there are eight, nine people who are even naturalised as hierarchical voices. Because if there’s one thing that trans Marxism has taught us is that, because we have experienced that naturalisation and hierarchisation in our life and in our militancy, we don't want things to be monolithic.
ET: I think a really important point in this is that we were adamant to accept submissions from every language that we have the capability of reading and understanding. I think there is definitely something to say critically of the Anglophone-centrism of trans Marxism. I don't think anyone involved in it would deny that; we were trying to hopefully push a little bit through that. One limitation of a British perspective or an Anglophone theoretical perspective is the teleologist perception that: first there was gay and lesbian liberation, and then people poked some holes in that, how that was ‘problematic’ or exclusionary, and then queer theory came and that was the New Wave, that was the corollary of the Third Wave of feminism. Whereas when you look at an Italian perspective, which is one of my areas of research, the biggest kind of queer figure for Italians on the street would be Mario Mieli, who is from that original kind of gay liberation wave. We, the British, don't keep our liberationists close to heart as we should; the sense of separation (between the ‘gay’ and the ‘queer’) is not there in Italy. It doesn't work the same, there's all these different contexts, understandings and semantic fields around concepts from these different cultures; I think so often – both in these kind of fields, but also more broadly in queer politics – we get so hung up on a particular concept that we kind of ‘pin’ it in language and forget that, as soon as you translate this, maybe it means something entirely different anyway. How you talk about something in English is not necessarily how the material instantiation of that concept actually happens in the world. I think Anglophone people definitely forget that and I have in the past forgotten and had to repeatedly relearn it.
IT: A key thing on that reflection, choosing Pedro Lemebel as the cover of the TSQ issue to break with not only Anglocentrism but also Fortress Europe, and say there are other parts of the world in which queerness and communism have intertwined. I will also add that all the authors that contributed are not those figures who are most ‘known’ in the field of trans Marxism, and that's great. I think it's so interesting that all the contributors are beginning there and I would even say at least some of them, that I know, are involved directly in political organising and militancy.
ET: I'm big on the idea that trans Marxism definitely equals we need to be talking about capitalism, labour struggles, worker organising. ME O’Brien’s work is a great example of that kind of analysis. But it doesn't only mean that, it means reintroducing, or in some places reclaiming, concepts from the ways that a lot of them have been developed reactionarily, since the Frankfurt School. The whole idea of ‘materialism’ is, you would think, baby’s first Marxism – it doesn't just mean ‘can you see and touch it right in front of you?’ Because of that vulgar understanding of ‘materialism’, various Communist Parties in Britain have been very explicit in saying ‘we don't think that trans ideology, ‘gender ideology’ is compatible with a Marxist analysis.’ That just shows how shit your Marxist analysis is, doesn't it? On the one hand, it's very easy to look at the liberalism of the LGBT+ movement of today and the trans politics of today and come away with a Marxist critique that is like, ‘this is shit,’ and in some senses that's fair enough. But people run with that and go ‘therefore this whole idea must be a terrible idea.’ Or, you could understand that we make history but not under the conditions of our own choosing. This issue takes some of the key Marxist concepts and says ‘look, we can do cool things with these,’ but we're also saying, ‘this has consequences for how we do our politics in the very immediate term as well as the longer term.’ Thinking critically about how we combat ideology, how we break through the capitalist realism that says, ‘this is all we've got.’ There's a great Angela Davis quote where she's saying:
I don't think we would be where we are today – encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame – had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly, effectively, resist prisons, and jails, and police.
This is a part of it, but where does hope come from in times like this? The answer for many people is their lived experience of transition, as a sort of embodiment of possibility. So then our task is to draw that back out again and say, ‘now we need to bring that joy and that spark of possibility to organised politics of whatever kind.’ The Marxist bit is important in ensuring that we don’t just get lost in the idea that if everyone in the world took hormones then all the problems would be solved – obviously not.
ET: Everything that we win that is on the enemy's terms, they can take away so easily, I think that's what we learn. But even if they take it away, what lasts from groups such as Action for Trans Health in the 2010s is – part of the point of the movement is the movement as a process; whatever organisation you're trying to sort out the contours of in that given moment, it’s not going to last forever. The people who have organised within it will go on to organise more. I think that's something we should keep in mind, it helps to think about how we do our organising in a bit more of a meta way, it's generally a plus for accessibility and so on. There’s necessarily this fragility and that should not make us pessimistic, it should make us say: We Want it All, to quote ‘An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics’.
IT: There were some really interesting experiences to study in Spanish transfeminist campaigns against pathologisation in the early 2000s. Further, one text that I found really interesting was the ‘Trans Health Manifesto by Edinburgh Action for Trans Health’. I think they developed some really interesting ideas there.
ET: I think another point that is something that I perceive from French, Italian and Spanish feminist organising is that there is more of a widespread sense of coalition. When we call something feminist, we're also putting a load of words together; we’re saying it is trans inclusive, it is queer inclusive, we stand with sex workers, and so on. I think Sisters Uncut embody this in the UK; the conviction that no one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.4 This idea of being uncompromising – there's no point in saying ‘we get this first and then we come back for the rest of you,’ because it's been viscerally shown, not just now, but for the last 50 years or so, that there is no ‘we'll get this, then we'll come back.’ Which is not, as some people make it, a moral judgement on individuals such as cis women for example, people can get über minoritarian in response to the idea that the most privileged of the oppressed groups have got theirs – you can get insular. I think that's also what trans Marxism is about – don't be insular. It's a bad idea. It’s not saying, ‘don't be insular, just go out and do all the organising everyone else is doing and trans-ness isn't relevant,’ it's not that. Trans-ness is very relevant, that's why we need to not be insular. Everybody has to bring their own lived experience through community and through organising into movements. It's the collection of those things that actually brings us to a point where the working class can have leverage. Right now in the UK, we've got no leverage. What's sad about looking back on Action for Trans Health is it very much felt like we did have leverage, or at least we had space to examine what leverage we had.
SM: In terms of coalitional solidarity, I have felt a bit more hopeful recently. I think we’ve been seeing a lot of mobilisation from LGBT+ people in solidarity with Palestine.
ET: That's huge. It's so visible. It is great because it's a bulwark against pinkwashing which, as a function, is being nailed into the ground. Maybe that's optimistic from my perspective.
IT: Here in Spain, most, if not all of the student encampments in solidarity with Palestine, had plenty of queer and trans people. It was coalitional solidarity from the queer movement in our country, ‘no, not in our name.’ Queer liberation stands with Palestine, with anti-colonisation, in every part of the world.
ET: I think that's key. And we (at least in my experience in British trans organising) didn’t know, with the goals and horizons that we had then, how central it was.. We had been told, ‘you behave in this bourgeois, individualist, liberal, Western rights-based way, therefore you're on the side of Western imperialism against these backwards, unenlightened people who think that you're all perverts.’ And we’re saying ‘no,’ and now with the waves of reaction against trans politics in the imperial core, I think that dynamic is much more visible – the people who are claiming that (for example) Palestinians think we’re perverts, are also the ones calling us perverts themselves! So going forward I think, or hope, it will be much harder to try and do trans politics in a way that fails to recognise the ways that our ‘acceptance’ can be weaponised.
IT: I think it’s also a point that proves this idea of trans-ness being mobilised, not as an individual reified identity, but as a politics of refusal and rebellion against the established order. It makes sense, you start refusing the imposition of gender and then you refuse the imposition of empire, the capitalist world and so on.
SM: I wanted to briefly mention that at the encampment at the University of Sheffield, they reported on the gender and sexuality of the students. They were trying to argue there's ‘certain kinds’ of people there, which I think is interesting. It’s very unfortunate that the university evicted the encampment.
ET: Having been to the Cambridge encampment, talking with them about their strategy relating to this, they were trying to archive all of this and also dig out other past archival stuff, especially feminist stuff. There were people working on and interested in all these different bits and pieces and recognising that these are all linked.
IT: As an anecdote, when we began a queer Marxist journal in Spain, it received a lot more attention and love from queer and non queer anarchist comrades than from communists who are outside queer politics.
ET: Unfortunately, quite a lot of the time, anarchists have communists beat on this one.
IT: I think there is also this problem that there is a really big separation on Marxist analysis and Marxist organising. I think it's interesting to say that anarchist collectives are sometimes closer to Marxist mobilisations of totality. I think that trans and queer Marxism has, at least in Spain, given new hope to a lot of anarchists on Marxist politics as something you can be together with. We share a non-economically deterministic, non-class reductionist approach that is much more attractive to anybody who stands against oppression in a non-Orthodox way. You cannot analyse class relationships without all the manifestations and all the relationships that are implicated in the reproduction of capital. You cannot focus only on the social relationships that we find in the direct point of production without understanding imperialist divisions of labour, racialisation, feminisation, ableism. It's part of the whole process.
ET: I think, sometimes, social reproduction theorists can get a little bit into the weeds on the question of ‘is XYZ necessary for capitalism?’ in the way of, ‘and if we got rid of this thing? If that thing collapsed?’ That's a thought experiment that has no basis in reality because none of these things are going to fall down alone, I think that's an important thing to remember. We're not trying to insert gender politics into class politics; we don't have to insert anything, it is there and the Bolsheviks recognised it. Alexandra Kollontai recognised it. What gets bound up in the field of trans Marxism – like family abolition, which is of course always a hot topic and something that people will get very polarised about in my experiences of organising – is the conceptual, what you said about mechanical materialism is exactly it; none of this is mechanical, it's not like formal logic or a controlled lab experiment. It's not something where you can take out a bit and see what happens to the other bits. That's not how anything happens in life. What is more important is linking these things when we think on the past 150 years, what Marxism and what communism and what socialism and what anarchism in different contexts and at different points of the world have done, has been influenced by these different iterations of concepts to do with gender – Eros, sexuality, the family and then the slightly more conceptual reification, for which Kevin Floyd's book The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism was foundational for me. He takes up this idea of the straw man that gets thrown around from some communist organisations at queer and trans people that says ‘bourgeois decadence.’ That's been the accusation across that whole period of time – this is bourgeois decadence, your identity and your lifestyle is a product of capitalism – and it's like, well what about yours? The reification of our identity reveals the reification of all identity. So it’s about throwing what is normal into question, not rejecting all and everything of what is normal in an un-nuanced and un-dialectical way. Which I think is sometimes the downfall of some anarchist and some queer approaches. I say queer specifically in the sense of ‘there is the queer and there is the normal and we are against the normal’; we're never going to get anywhere then, are we? Because most people consider themselves among the normal and we're trying to liberate everybody. There is no world where trans people only get everything that we want and nobody else is liberated alongside it. It's the very classic, ‘we don't live single issue lives.’
IT: I will also say to those mechanical, ‘vulgar’ Marxists that it's reactionary trying to keep Marxism and the very concept of communism the same after hundreds of years. If it's a real movement based on the premises now in existence, the struggles that are inhabited in every decade are different, the contradictions that become the conflicts of class struggle every year are different, and it is there where the seeds of revolutionary futures are growing. Of course communism is to be actualised through queer and trans liberation. We have a problem with this notion in class reductionist politics of asking, ‘is gender truly logically necessary to capital?’ I was discussing this recently with Holly Lewis. She answered that, ‘literally anything in our daily life is in the level of abstraction of capital and we still consider it part of the capitalist mode of production as it really exists historically.’
ET: One of the great things about trans Marxism is the ways that it's elaborated on different threads of Marxist theory – things like regulation theory, modes of regulation. That’s not the same thing as a mode of production, it's capital’s immune system – how does it defend itself against threats? We can't take a straightforward optimism from how much we (trans people) have clearly shaken things up, we didn't expect this to be as big a deal in terms of the space of political discourse that trans-ness specifically takes up. We can't just go, ‘okay, that means we're winning.’ Whether or not we're winning is not how much we take up space in people's heads. It's not power – but, it's not nothing either. It is an important facet to remember, the optimism, the hope and the idea that something else is possible. The amount of backlash, the way we scare people, that's not nothing. It says something about what people are willing to have challenged and what they're not and what that means about what the challenge means. I think trans Marxism is a pretty direct descendant of gay liberation. Specifically by gay liberation I mean, there's a good amount of material about explicitly gay Marxists. There's the gay Marxist group, various stuff in British history in the 70s. This whole idea of, ‘so, what's the political programme? We blow up sex and gender.’ What we understand by those things and what they look like in times of the organisation of individual people's everyday lives and of society as a whole becomes unrecognisable from where it is now; the labels that we have been fighting to affirm, we do so in the knowledge (or the hope) that they will no longer make sense. That's what we're fighting for. That's an answer to the question of what we can bring to political trans organising – that idea of the long-term political horizon that's so often missing. Understanding our immediate goals, like broadening access to medical transition, not only for their obvious value in and of themselves but also in terms of our longer term goals. It’s important that we think in those terms in order to guard against the ossifying forces of ideology that want to capture each goal and make it the end-point of trans politics, or trans identity.
SM: Recently, trans ‘leaders’ established in the non-profit, charity sector met up with and were photographed beside Wes Streeting, hoping to negotiate against the proposed ban on puberty blockers for trans youth. This instance is very reminiscent of what Nat Raha described as 'trans liberalism.' How should trans Marxists respond to this?IT: I will be brief, in my context here in Spain, trans liberalism has an ideological hegemony, but not an organisational one. There was a key event in 2021, which was the murder of a gay man, Samuel Luiz. After that moment, all the institutionalised and official movements in the LGBT+ non-profit sphere became secondary against the more autonomist, self organised anti-capitalist groups. After that departure point it was interesting because most of the trans youth here are currently organised in self managed, critical collectives outside the nonprofits and NGOs. That does not mean that the ideology and the discourse of trans liberalism has been defeated. We have a ‘Ley Trans,’ (trans law) in Parliament and there wasn't a struggle sustaining it, just lobbying politics. This is a problem because when the far right want to remove the law – everything was managed from a lobbying, liberal perspective – there's no social field to back it up or to retain our rights. We cannot leave these demands, non-reformist reforms, to the reformists and to the people who are not interested in radically transforming the world. We have to build strong political communities that can make the nexus between our daily necessities and a more wider revolutionary change. But, I would say that we are doing a good job on combating trans liberalism (in Spain).
ET: That's the difference. The British context is interesting because I feel like the horse has bolted. That's why that picture interests me because is that not a last gasp, at this point? Look at party politics and what is being promised and what is being, not just not-promised emptily, but straightforwardly denied. That's not just on trans stuff, it's on disability, it's on race, it’s on immigration. The centre is expanding and shrinking at the same time, the promise of gradual liberal ‘progress’ is more and more obviously hollow. It’s why I'm optimistic in a sense about the trans kids – not in terms of what they're being forced to endure, but because of the hostility of that context, how they will metabolise the question of ‘what is to be done?’
IT: There's something really interesting here, which is that LGBT+ non-profit organisations are not able to fulfil their promises in a capitalist crisis. Once reactionary politics spreads worldwide, once gatekeeping and scapegoating begins, liberal politics do not work any more. Lobbying does not work any more, awareness campaigns do not work any more and people know that. I think it's an interesting moment in which we can organise in other ways and that's already happening. The old ways of liberal LGBT+ politics just don't work, in a hate crime-filled, reactionary, proto-fascist statecraft, which is more repressive and is not about tolerance any more.
ET: I don't know even if the work to be done in the meantime is that of convincing people who take a liberal approach to trans issues that they’re wrong. I think it's actually building power as this becomes more evident, as it seems like it will continue to do – the contradictions and the ways that the house of trans liberalism is built on sand. To materially be there and to have enough organisation in place to be able to welcome people in and build and keep building, that's really what’s missing in Britain at the moment for sure.
IT: It’s so important to learn together that we can build our own demands and retain them on our own. To build counter-power, self-organisation, self-determination as class power. We don’t need the government, we don’t need liberal representatives to claim our rights – especially because when the far right reaches those positions, we are going to lose them all. We need to fight for our own struggles. Even when liberal politics worked, as is the case with the Ley Trans in Spain, we lost the self-determination for minors, for migrant people and for non-binary people. That won't happen if it's our own process of self-organisation and it's our own demands materialising through struggle.
ET: I think our lack of autonomous power is also about very understandable material conditions that are broader than just the trans context and more to do with how life is organised today, how much the windows for taking time and space to organise have been foreclosed. You can't just be like ‘I'm going to go on the dole and organise now.’ People do but it's hard, this is not the early 70s. I've worked in disability inclusion within a non-profit organisation for the last three years. It's been a really interesting process of trying to take the (very) few opportunities that those kinds of positions offer to steer things in directions and embed radical ideas. NGOs and nonprofits in the UK have this big inclusion and diversity kind of thing right now and yet are structurally, legally unable to engage with party politics. But this is happening at a point in time where to engage with party politics in the UK is just a fruitless endeavour on this kind of issue. So it's limiting in a sense, but people don't necessarily point out how much you are able to be political about without ‘being political’ in the ways that the charity commission would get on you for. A community upskilling among trans people and radicals in the third sector is necessary, not because it in itself would be worth dedicating the energy, but because of the material reality that this is one of the only places trans people are employed. If we're already in those positions, what can we do from them? How can we kind of try and do our little ways of hacking the system from inside while we are forced to be in work, and still sustain ourselves and each other so that we have the capacity for more meaningful organising outside of work? This is something I've really struggled with on a personal level recently.
IT: Also how liberal politics brings fragmentation. It is opposed to party building politics, but then if they, for instance, ban hormones for trans youth, you don't have the whole of the working class defending your demand because you were never in that organising process creating the demands together.
ET: Exactly. We as trans people are still a minority, albeit a growing one. One thing to ask of trans liberalism is, ‘what is your political horizon?’ Is it tolerating people who are as they are because they can't help it and they were born this way? Or is it acknowledging that this is part of a societal system that is still overwhelmingly oppressive in gendered terms to everyone in the world? What is the horizon?
IT: I think that here, the fact that we did not defend trans demands as part of class power and as part of this self-organisation of the oppressed, contributed to the reactionary media backlash. A big part of the reactionary media would not really work if this had been truly prepared through pedagogy and revolutionary political demands. The thing is that it's not our own, we have not fought for that, it has been introduced by liberal representatives. That makes it harder because it's not something that the working class sees as their own. I think it's unfair to say it's just because of transphobia, it's also because there hasn't been a process there. Liberal politics also lead to really quick victories that can be really easily swept away.
ET: And by the time they are swept away, you've lost what movement you had that was behind it because you burned yourself out getting it. I also want to add a point about using NGOs, which is that they tend to be quite separate in the UK from trade unions, and there’s potentially a good opportunity there to build links in ways that might generalise a sense of solidarity between working class and labour issues and (so-called) Equality, Diversity and Inclusion issues.
ET: I remember reading your review and there is an analogy for this in my day job, which is that people are scared of the word disability – they are a lot more accepting of the word neurodiversity. I'm interested in why that is and the dynamics at play and how we translate that into messaging and bring people along in the right way. But it doesn't mean that neurodiversity is ‘wrong’ or should always have to come with that caveat. I feel similarly about social reduction theory, and I'm happy with how much the trans Marxist issue comes out hitting hard for some of the less digestible Marxist concepts – particularly ‘totality,’ there is still very much a general reticence to that, whereas other concepts are assimilated kind of more easily. One thing is to be aware of the history of why that is. I don’t want to say the history of ideas because I mean something in between that and the social history of different groups and movements and the polarities that ossify those perceptions and then make them real. When all you're doing is defending against the other polarity, you just get vulgarism on both sides and I think that's something that I like about social reproduction theory is that its theorists take a dialogic approach which seeks to unify things even (or especially!) through criticism. Zoe Sutherland and the late, great Marina Vishmidt wrote an excellent article criticising social reproduction theory for this kind of idea that can fall into responding to the devalorisation of certain kinds of labour by valorising other kinds of labour, for example.
IT: One interesting aspect of social reproduction theory is that it brought new, refreshing approaches with which being able to understand gender as part of capitalist totality. We have to admit that it was one of the first successful attempts to do so, even with all the limitations we can find now. One of them can be of course this sort of naturalisation of reproductive work as something inherently revolutionary. Another thing with social reproduction theory is it always had several authors and currents and it accepted differences as part of their basic corpus of ideas, which was great. The main basis of social reproduction theory was, on the one hand, that labour power or workers themselves depend on processes and historical relationships that were placed outside the class relation or outside the factory walls. That allowed for a more critical understanding of capitalist life because we started looking for all those relationships that took place outside of the wage relationship. That premise is still really valuable, to focus on all those processes, all those identities that do not have to do directly with the sphere of work, but are integral to these epochs of history. On the other hand, I think it's interesting that this issue of TSQ – especially due to its authors – also shows that there are other approaches that are inspiring new people. Such as these new gender readings of value form critique. There's a lot of people inspired by the work of authors such as Maya Gonzalez, Marina Vishmidt (rest in power) or Beverley Best. We needed social reproduction theory in order to open the door to all the relationships of capitalism that were not directly capitalist. After that we can see that there are more approaches and more to come and that's great.
ET: Yeah, and start digging into more controversial kinds of Marxist bits and pieces and melding them more with those. I think you're absolutely right.
IT: I think that trans Marxism, just like our trans comrades, is promiscuous and it shouldn’t engage with one current of thought, but be heretical. I will always be grateful to social reproduction theory.
ET: To be honest, it took up less space in the TSQ issue than I thought it would, which was quite refreshing. I think that there's something important in social reproduction theory, firstly in what Ira said in that there were different people with different views and the ways in which they disagreed, I remember finding that really inspiring because you've read that much philosophy and theory that says let me call the other person stupid in the funniest way, or just, ‘oh, this is wrong so we can throw all of this out.’ It's the Marxist way to engage, dialectically, using a historical-materialist methodology and that's not just being like ‘you're wrong.’ I remember that being quite formative for me when I was reading those things. Also, I think it's fundamental that the history of it is in the rediscovery of Lise Vogel and Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, which came out in 1983, where it had all truly fallen apart in terms of the organised post-68 left. I think we today have a lot to take from the dissipated energies of that historical moment.
IT: What you say, it has to be dialectical. I would highlight that it's always inter-connected. It's not something casual that these value form theory readings of gender have worked a lot with the Wages for Housework campaigns. Everything has a relationship and it’s not about forgetting about what came before. But using new tools and new readings, I think that is the best way to approach this.
ET: There’s something about the ‘meetings’ of those moments, the moment that Lise Vogel closed off at the end of her book, unintentionally. Because of when it came out and what was happening, Wages for Housework, all of that and the 70s moment, there was something that fell off that we can pick back up and do new things with. I think part of what was exciting about social reproduction theory is that the theoretical field through the 90s and the 00s had been a desert of the fragmentary. People split off into doing their own bits and pieces – and then it was this excitement of rediscovery of that earlier unifying moment, and the potential to reincorporate the best of those intervening developments into something more committed. It's different in different countries in terms of how queer and other identity-based leftist movements have developed, but in Britain, categorically, the mainstream LGBT+ movement both politically and theoretically has forgotten that past radicalism (for many obvious reasons, such as the Thatcherite counteroffensive, Section 28 etc), and the act of remembering and rediscovering radical past coalitional solidarities (like what the film Pride (2014) did for Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) is crucial. It was so transformational for me personally to discover those histories – from the world of Tumblr and LeftBook arguing about who can or can’t use a particular identity-label or whatever, which was so prevalent through my 2010s queer awakening, to then be thrown into the realisation of just how restricted our whole window of political possibility has become. The boundaries of the way that we think about gender, queerness, identity, sexuality, disability as well, and social organisation as a whole – it was just blown open. I remember Nat Raha called our present moment the ‘consolidation of the Thatcherite dream,’ and even more so since 2016 – I think that’s important context for the meeting of these historical moments. I'm very inspired by my friend and comrade Lola Olufemi and her book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. I'm really interested in imagination, understanding imagination as a material force just as ideology is a material force, and thinking about how we can liberate and mobilise the former towards the latter’s dissolution.
IT: Regarding the importance of political imagining, all these theories should not be understood as purely abstract and, for instance, social reproduction theory and texts such as Feminism for the 99% actually nourished the political movements of the feminist strikes in 2017-19, which provided a lot of practical political education to some of us.
ET: We're kind of a bit more internationalist than certain previous feminist movements, that’s quite big.
IT: That is something to be celebrated, a massive global feminist awakening which had Marxist feminist roots. If we understood that we can learn from other currents, it was probably one of the theories that sustained one of the biggest gender-based expressions of class struggle in the early decades and just for that it has to call our attention as revolutionaries.
ET: That has to be what trans Marxism does, we’ve not quite got the arsenal for the scale and scope, but the idea of it happens on the streets. It happens in a lot of places. It has to not just be us writing in TSQ – which is not a contradiction of the fact that we are very proud of what we’ve curated.
SM: Does anyone have any concluding remarks?
IT: Everything for everyone. What we have not, we shall build.
ET: (Joking-not-joking) dialectics.
References
1 For more on Carol Riddell, see: Carol Riddell, ‘Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire,’ in The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, (Routledge: New York, 2006) pp. 144-158; Sam Caslin, ‘Trans feminism and the women’s liberation movement in Britain, c.1970-1980,’ Gender & History, (2024), pp. 1-16. <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0424.12767> [accessed 06 August 2024]
2 Richard Ekins and Dave King, The Transgender Phenomenon, (Sage Publications: London, 2006), p. 2.
3 Kade Doyle Griffiths, ‘Queer Workerism against Work: Strategising Transgender Labourers, Social Reproduction, and Class Formation,’ in Transgender Marxism, eds. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, (Pluto Press: London, 2021), pp. 132-155 (p. 144)
4 Diane di Prima, ‘Revolutionary Letter #8,’ in Revolutionary Letters, (City Light Books: San Francisco, 1971), pp. 13-14 (p.14).
5 Jo Aurelio Giradini, ‘Trans Life and the Critique of Political Economy,’ Transgender Studies Quarterly, 10:1 (2023), pp. 48-53 (p. 51).