After a long-fought campaign led by women’s organisations across Britain, and particularly in Scotland, the Supreme Court has finally provided clarification of something which should have been clear all along: that men are male, women are female, and that however they may identify, men are not entitled to protections as women.
Until perhaps 15 years ago, this was not a controversial position, but concepts which emerged out of elitist academic circles in the US, namely queer theory and gender ideology, were then championed by wealthy, liberal political parties and NGOs seeking profit and political influence by presenting themselves as the champions of an up-and-coming identity group. These organisations, backed by capital and far removed from the drudgeries of ordinary, working-class people, were desperate to use this struggle to present capitalism as a force for progress and to prevent workers from uniting as a class against it. This is the culmination of a trend in identity politics which has been developing since the decline of class struggles in the last century.
For clarity, queer theory is a bourgeois academic field, emerging out of women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies, which seeks to reframe various material phenomena, such as sex and sexuality, as mere concepts to be “deconstructed” through repetitive social acts, like changes in language, in the belief that by blurring the lines between categories such as men and women, or gay people and straight people, culturally and linguistically, the real hierarchies between them will magically fall away.
Gender ideology is essentially queer theory applied to transgender activism, a new term used to describe the various different ideas about sex and identity which seek to deconstruct sex as a material reality and instead centre the concept of “gender identity” as a truer way to categorise human beings. Gender identity is understood as an innate and unfalsifiable sense of being male, female, or something else, usually related to one’s personal relationship to masculinity and femininity. Within the framework of this theory, the invalidation of this subjective sense of self is considered a form of discrimination which causes harm to others, and it is this belief which is at the heart of the problem.
It is difficult to quantify the division and hostility that these ideas have created among the workers’ movement, in our unions, and in working-class political parties. Young people, who have been largely exposed to gender ideology through a lifetime of social media use, have become particularly confused by the issue, believing the lie that rejecting the above beliefs means opposing the existence of trans people themselves and therefore puts them on the wrong side of history. Liberalism via identity politics has worked very hard to present historical progress as the incorporation of a series of different identity groups into capitalist society: women and black people, then gay people, and now trans people. The right for different groups to vote in rigged capitalist elections, the diversification of the capitalist class and its leaders, performative rhetoric and rainbow flag-waving: these must be the markers of progress under capitalism, not a rise in the living standards of the workers, their strength of organisation, the intensification of the class struggle, or their proximity to seizing the means of production. If we want real change, this liberal conception of progress must be completely dismantled and replaced with a historical materialist outlook rooted in class.
But at the same time, this pernicious lie that identity invalidation is the same as discrimination must be tackled head on. After all, who would want to support a movement that’s “transphobic”? Queer theory works deliberately to deconstruct material reality through language, so language is our starting point in unravelling the confusing web that has been woven around this question.
Firstly, “gender” can mean various things. To bourgeois second-wave feminists like Simone De Beauvoir, it came to mean the social stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. To gender ideologists, it means identity. To people who are squeamish about the word “sex”, it is simply a polite synonym. As for Marxists, we can avoid it altogether, both for clarity when expressing our views and because, before the interventions of bourgeois feminism, gender was only used to refer to French and Spanish nouns, so the entire evolution of the term beyond that feels bourgeois.
As for “transgender”, this term only rose in popularity to replace “transsexual” in the last twenty years or so. Where “transsexual” once centred on the material process of a change in sexual appearance through hormones and surgeries, “transgender” purely hinges on identity. Anyone who does not identify with their sex for whatever reason must therefore belong to a vulnerable identity group, including queer theorists like Judith Butler who does not identify as a woman purely for philosophical reasons. By centring identity over anything material, the invalidation of this unfalsifiable, subjective sense of self therefore becomes an act of discrimination, and even, for some reason, “fascism”.
But transsexuals like every other group subscribe to a broad spectrum of contradictory political and philosophical opinion. While there are transsexuals who agree with Queer Theory and Gender Ideology, there are others who don’t. Debbie Hayton is a good example of the latter, recognising that he/she is still male and a man despite his/her transition, and so supports the Supreme Court ruling for giving clarity over biological fact. Remember, by the logic of the identity-obsessed gender ideologists, Debbie is “cisgender”.
Since trans people can clearly have an infinite range of contradictory identities which cannot possibly all be agreed with, the common-sense position is therefore that invalidating identities is not the same as discrimination or harm and cannot be treated as such, while real discrimination and harm, once properly identified, should absolutely be resisted for people’s safety and wellbeing. Once we accept this, the walls between the different tribes of this issue come tumbling down, and we can return to unifying workers around the material demands for housing, healthcare, and employment, regardless of sex or identity.
Although the ideological struggle is not over and we can expect new idealist theories to take its place as capitalism continues to try to divide and confuse the workers, the recent court ruling shows that gender ideology is now in decline. This must also be recognised as a manifestation of the decline of liberalism more broadly, with the growth of conservativism as the pendulum of the world’s economies swing from one phase to the next, and capitalism is forced to reframe its ideas to follow suit. Trans rights activists continue to frame an end to liberalism as the beginning of fascism, but despite liberal hysterics about Trump and Farage being worse than Biden and Starmer, this is not a fascist turn except in the sense that capitalism is a constant march towards fascism for as long as socialist revolution is postponed. Fascism can only emerge as an opposition to communism, which is still developing in Britain, and liberal democracy is still perfectly capable of oppressing workers without it. Real anti-fascism must therefore be anti-liberal as well.
Despite this, many socialist organisations still cling to liberalism, failing to provide a materialist, anti-liberal, working-class position on Gender Ideology or anything else. Following the court ruling, a series of statements from leftist organisations and figureheads, promoting the divisive idea that disagreement over trans identities is hostility towards trans people themselves, show that anti-Marxist socialists still haven’t learned their lesson. Zarah Sultana, John McDonnell, Nadia Whittome, Jeremy Corbyn… These figures represent a dying trend in socialist politics, one that is middle-class, liberal, and idealist, rather than working-class, Marxist, and materialist. Their politics, like a poisoned chalice, are repulsive to the majority of working-class people, and since the future of British politics will be decided by the working class, one way or another, if socialists and communists fail to reach them, the right will take our place.
So yes, the working-class position is that a woman is not an identity, nor a collection of social stereotypes. Every society in the history of human existence has recognised that as a result of chromosomal differences, almost the entire population can be easily sorted into two categories as a result of sexual development, and every language therefore has words to describe this difference: male and female, boy and girl, man and woman. Individuals may disagree with this, and just like religion, tolerance towards idealism is important, so long as there is no potential for these beliefs to shape policies the masses must adhere to. Britain’s communists must stand in solidarity with everyone who held a firm position on this issue, even when it was unpopular to do so, and particularly with the strong working-class women who led the way. But we must also go further, challenging the bourgeois feminists who put their faith in capitalist courts and capitalist parties to provide any real protections for women and girls while it is still profitable to undermine them. Women’s oppression emerged under class society and will not be dismantled until class society is overthrown, so we need to go further, and help our working-class sisters to stand with their class as well as their sex.
