Not Democratic “Faux Friends” But a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry,
Labor Must Defend Trans Rights

Starting on the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump unleashed a series of attacks on one of the most vulnerable social groups in the United States: transgender people. In his inaugural address on January 20, he proclaimed: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.” As part of his blitzkrieg of executive orders,¹ he followed up this reactionary diktat with an order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

This measure ordered that a person’s gender cannot diverge from their sex at birth, which – in line with anti-abortion dogma – it decreed to be determined “at conception” as male or female, defined by who produces the smaller or larger reproductive cells.² Far from upholding “biological truth,” the broadside was a manifesto of antiscientific bigotry. (For example, it cannot be determined “at conception” which reproductive cells will develop.) With a stroke of the pen, Trump & Co. seek to erase transgender people. In a vile festival of anti-trans measures, the administration wants to purge trans people from public life as it sadistically displays its all-sided effort to make their daily life not just unbearable but impossible. As far as the bigots in power are concerned, transgender people should not exist at all.

Trump’s executive order had many immediate effects, among them assaulting transgender health services, including blocking a swath of federally funded scientific research; requiring that passports and other federal identity documents use individuals’ “birth sex” (forcing trans people to “out” themselves when traveling or otherwise using such ID); eliminating anti-bullying programs in schools, and purging transgender people from the military. It also requires housing trans prisoners according to their birth sex, which as one study after another has shown leads to dramatically higher rates of brutalization and sexual assault on them. In addition, the executive order calls for across-the-board censorship, stipulating that the federal government purge from its publications any texts that “promote gender ideology.”

A subsequent (January 28) order mandated that transgender medical care for those under age 19 be ended in medical facilities which receive federal funding, which is just about all of them. This will have devastating consequences for large numbers of young people, and professionals in the field warn of the danger of this leading to a sharp increase in the number of suicides. On February 5, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. And when the governor of Maine refused to carry out the ban, a couple of weeks later Trump threatened to withhold all federal funding to the state. On March 5, the federal government suspended $175 million in funds to the University of Pennsylvania because in 2022 it had a transgender swimmer. And at the state level, so many anti-trans laws and measures are being proposed, and in many cases passed, that it is hard to keep track.³

What about the Democrats, whose war-mongering and pandering to Wall Street at the expense of the working class (among other things) paved the way for Trump? The liberal media have been full of agonized analyses of their prostration and/or collaboration with him since the election. While 17 attorneys general in Democratic-governed states signed an amicus brief against Trump’s anti-trans executive orders, many Democrats consider defense of trans rights to be an albatross for the party. Some – from California governor Gavin Newsom (who has had schmoozfests with far-right fanatic Charlie Kirk and fascistic ideologue Steve Bannon on his podcast) to congressmen such as Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) – have wasted no time in hopping on the bandwagon to echo anti-trans talking points.

During Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign, her overwhelming silence on questions of trans health care and rights was widely remarked on, particularly when her opponent, Trump, was whipping up anti-trans fervor.⁴ When attacked by the Republicans over her approval, in a 2019 questionnaire, of medically necessary gender care for prisoners, she only responded that she would “follow the law.” Yet as California attorney general, self-proclaimed “top cop” Harris put trans women in male prisons and was confronted on the campaign trail for having sent a brief seeking to deny trans health services to transgender women prisoners. The message from the Democrats is clear: we’ll use trans issues as political bargaining chips when convenient, and throw you under the bus when politically “necessary.” Looking to these faux friends is a recipe for defeat.

The “full-throated explicit dehumanization” being aimed against trans people⁵ will surely escalate the already horrific levels of anti-trans violence and harassment. Since 2013, there have been 372 documented cases of transgender people murdered in the U.S. Highlighting the racist roots of so much of the anti-trans offensive (discussed further below), over half of them were black trans women.⁶

It is important to note that the anti-trans campaign comes not only from the official bourgeois political apparatus and conservative ideologues but also from outright fascist and fascistic groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc. In New York and other areas over recent years they have targeted “Drag Queen Story Hours” and helped whip up a moral panic branding gays and lesbians as well as trans people as “groomers.” (The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth have on numerous occasions sent teams to join in defending the story hours.) Since gay and trans people’s existence is seen as transgressing the sexual and familial relations prescribed by capitalism, bourgeois ideology has traditionally framed them as dangerous and predatory. Now this has been whipped up to anti-trans hysteria, stoked by a right-wing campaign about producing more (white) babies in order to “save Western civilization.”

Fascist and white-supremacist groups have seized on the anti-trans bigotry campaign, seeking to mount dangerous provocations that are a threat to the working people and everyone’s rights. Workers action to stop fascist attacks will be vital in the coming period. And as with the defense of trans people’s rights and lives in general, this urgent task cannot be entrusted to or carried out by any party, politician or institution of a decaying capitalist system based on exploitation, oppression and massive, escalating inequality. To bring to bear the enormous potential power of the multiracial working class in this crisis, we must fight to unchain that power from its historic subjugation by the Democratic Party and labor bureaucracy – a struggle that can be effectively waged only by those programmatically committed to forging a revolutionary workers party on the program of international socialist revolution.

Weaponizing Hysteria for Votes and Profit

Trump’s “obsessive fixation with purging trans identity from society,” as Rolling Stone (12 March) described it, can appear quite odd, as he rants that today “everything is transgender.” “They” are “hurting women very badly,” he vituperates, bizarrely claiming trans people are causing millions of federal dollars to be spent for “transgender surgery on mice,” and, in the first major speech of his second administration, spending almost twice as long inveighing against them as he did talking about his supposed priorities of job creation and bringing down prices. While less than 1% of the U.S. population identify as transgender, they – along with immigrants – are a main target of the same forces that go after abortion, women’s rights and gay rights. It’s all about the bourgeois family, as always the focal point of the most virulent reactionaries.

A barrage of anti-transgender political advertising figured prominently in the 2024 presidential and congressional campaigns. Many commentators noted that the most effective of these was the Republicans’ TV ad, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” which cynically combined anti-elite “populism” with mockery of “wokeness” over pronouns. As Chase Strangio of the ACLU, a leading transgender rights specialist, noted in an article titled “Trump’s Anti-Trans Attacks Won’t Stop with Us” (Time, 21 January):

“According to the data that we have, approximately 1.6 million people ages 13 and over identify as transgender in the United States. That is 0.6% of the population. This tiny minority of people was the subject of nearly $215 million in negative ad spending during the 2024 election cycle. If someone unfamiliar with American politics tried to assess life in the U.S. in 2024 only by reviewing campaign ads, the likely takeaway would be that the greatest threats facing the country include trans kids playing sports and receiving ‘brutal operations’ while at school.”

Certainly, spending “bigly” to beat the drum of anti-trans bigotry was – like the racist smear that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield – aimed largely at re-energizing the MAGA base. Warming up for his reelection run, Trump noted at a June 2023 rally that “it’s astonishing how passionately people react” when he fulminated against transgender athletes: “When you talk about tax cuts, they remain calm. But when you mention transgender issues, everyone goes wild.” The more lurid the claim, the better, no matter how patently absurd.

So last August Trump wowed the far-right Moms for Liberty group’s convention, ranting: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” After more test runs, he hyped this ridiculous fabrication on the Joe Rogan show: “You know, they take your kid – there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” After tweeting a “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity,” upon returning to the White House he issued an executive order that began with the concocted claim: “Across the country, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children….”

It’s hardly surprising that for many parents, fears and unease about their kids in their teenage years, when they are going through puberty, forming identities, etc., are standard, and were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. For Trump’s anti-trans stratagems, it’s advantageous that most parents know little about the topic. As for the fear crusade about “sex-change surgery,” a large-scale public health study published last July “found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S.”⁷In other words, the scare campaign on this subject is – like so many others – based on made-up “alternative facts.”

As for treatments such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers, these are provided by medical professionals under well-established standards of care, notably of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. They are not doled out by teachers (a standard target for rightist agitation) or social workers, and they are supported by the American Medical Association and many other medical associations. Nor is it an easy process to receive such treatments, as they involve extensive consultation and examination, both physical and psychological. The American Association of Medical Colleges declared (April 2021):

“In medical decision making, the doctor-patient relationship must be paramount, and the needs of the patient must be given precedence. Efforts to restrict the provision of gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals will reduce health care access for transgender Americans, promote discrimination, and widen already significant health inequities. In addition to harming some of the most vulnerable patients, efforts to restrict care undermine the doctor-patient relationship and the principle that doctors are best equipped to work with patients and their families to arrive at shared decision-making.”

For us as revolutionary Marxists – whose outlook is based on science and reason, not obscurantist prejudice – decisions on such intimate and consequential questions, and on medical issues in general, are a matter for the person and their doctor. And like all health care, this should be freed not only from bigoted intrusions but from the grip of the profit system and arbitrary government fiat. For free, high-quality socialized medicine! Hands off trans kids!

The current onslaught builds on years of reactionary legislation, like Florida’s 2022-23 “Don’t Say Gay” laws gagging “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” banning books, censoring health curricula, etc. Seeking to outdo itself, in January 2024 the Florida state government issued a memo declaring that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud … and subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties.” Then there’s the scatological fear-mongering of anti-trans “bathroom bills” that started in North Carolina in 2016 and were passed in 13 states.

Now the Denver Public Schools district is targeted for a “directed investigation” – by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (!)– of its all-gender bathrooms. Not satisfied with censoring and witch-hunting teachers, and having the government intrude into everything from bedrooms to doctors’ consulting rooms, the self-styled defenders of “freedom” want to extend the bourgeois state’s purview to the toilets. As we have long said, opposing state regulation of consensual sexual relations, Government out of the bedroom! And now given decades of reactionary backlash, we must also insist Government out of the bathroom! Let trans people use the toilets of their choice!

Then there’s the hyped-up hysteria about transgender athletes, exemplified by the bill to ban them from women’s and girls’ sports in schools receiving federal funds (passed by the House in January), followed in February by yet another Trump executive order (“Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”). Here too the obsessive claims are deliberately divorced from reality. Testifying before a Senate panel in December, NCAA president Charlie Baker (a Republican former governor of Massachusetts) stated that out of 510,000 NCAA athletes, there were less than 10 transgender athletes competing in collegiate sports. That amounts to … 0.002%. In March, when Maine declared that it wouldn’t break state law to go along with Trump’s diktat against trans athletes, six federal agencies hit the state with an investigation – and found only two transgender girls competing in the 2024-25 school year (Bangor Daily News, 11 March).

What’s It All About, Really?

Reality is not the point in the war on “everything trans,” something else is clearly at play. At one level it’s about money. Trump-stoked hysteria against trans health services helps sharpen the blade and provide a pretext for cuts to a gamut of health and social services from Medicaid to Head Start preschool programs to innumerable others. Pushing revolting anti-trans bigotry under the guise of “protecting children,” this is the gang whose 2017-18 drive to separate immigrant children from their parents sought to outdo even the record of Democratic president Barack Obama. Today, as detailed by advocacy groups, the administration is waging a veritable “war on children” including through wide-ranging cuts.⁸ The Children’s Hospital Association of the U.S. warns (2 May) that these “would jeopardize programs vital to children’s health” and “unravel programs that families rely on to protect children and support their healthy development into adulthood.”

The playbook draws on long-standing precedents. Embedding measures against funding for trans health services in federal law follows the model of the infamous Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal money from being spent on abortions. Since it was first passed in the 1970s (with Democrats Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden backing it), it has been routinely reenacted by Congress every year, including when Congress has been fully controlled by the Democrats.⁹

But this is only one aspect of the parallels. Pretending to uphold “freedom” for moms and children, censors and witch-hunters fan fear, gag educators, ban abortions, books and classroom discussions, and snoop into sports teams, bedrooms and bathrooms, while cutting vital health services and child welfare programs. Virulent opponents of women’s emancipation lie that “protecting women” is the goal of their crusade to make America “safe” again from anything other than traditional gender norms, as they seek to impose the role of “trad wife” on women, like it or not.

In a similar vein, antisemitic Christian rightists lie that “fighting antisemitism” is their goal in smearing, censoring and brutally repressing students and faculty (among whom many are themselves Jewish) who protest the genocidal war on Gaza. Meanwhile, the demonization and persecution of a small minority – trans people – as scapegoats for a society in crisis chillingly recalls the Nazis’ targeting of Jews in interwar Europe. Gleeful and ostentatious sadism against trans people goes together with that displayed by the anti-immigrant onslaught, in which crowds call for mass deportations and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem poses, bedecked in a $59,000 gold Rolex, in front of a cage stacked high with gaunt, head-shaven prisoners.

So “the cruelty is the point” does capture part of what’s behind the anti-trans offensive. But only part. The crusade against trans rights recapitulates and revives many themes from campaigns in the 1970s and ’80s against gay rights, as well as the fear-mongering, marginalization and murderous neglect of AIDS patients by reactionary icon Ronald Reagan. The present-day power of the religious right goes back to the increasing prominence of evangelical Christian political operators under Reagan and his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter. Long-time campaigners against gay marriage, like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance, are now key players in the anti-trans panic-peddling. And, of course, “Save the Children” was the slogan for the bigoted rhetoric vomited up by “Florida orange juice queen” Anita Bryant in her 1977 campaign in response to Miami-Dade County enacting an ordinance against discrimination based on sexual orientation. This has served as a template for “family values” crusades on hot-button social issues fueling the growth of the religious right. As we have noted:

“Whipping up this campaign for bigotry, Bryant ranted that children had to be ‘saved’ from the supposed threat of gays and lesbians teaching in the schools. Like similar movements, it drew on the model of how the politicized Christian right cohered in the 1960s on the basis of racism against black people, to ‘save’ white families from school integration and ‘save’ society from secular education and the separation of church and state.”¹⁰

In 1983, our article noted, the backlash offensive “led to such horrific phenomena as the hysterical targeting of daycare workers at the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles County,” a crazed witch hunt involving “bizarre claims that the school’s teachers and staff were Satan-worshippers who had engaged in ritual sexual abuse of hundreds of children.”

Much like the anti-abortion movement – and intertwined with it in innumerable ways – the anti-gay and anti-trans campaigns are rooted in the history and present-day reality of racism in capitalist America. As discussed at length in “Workers Solidarity Against the Anti-Trans Onslaught” (Revolution No. 20, September 2023), the themes, techniques, playbooks and much of the personnel go back to the white backlash against school desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s. A vivid example is Loudoun County, Virginia, which was ground zero for the racist “Massive Resistance” campaign launched in 1956 against school integration.

Fast forward to 2021, when KKK leaflets seeking to capitalize on school-board issues appeared in Loudoun County as numerous anti-trans bills were coming up in the state legislature. After right-wing Republican Glenn Youngkin used anti-trans demagogy in his successful campaign for governor that year, he enacted a series of measures against the rights of transgender students – and 1,400 students in 12 Loudoun County public schools walked out in protest.

Racist fears of white “disappearance” and “replacement” fuel MAGA’s “natalist” wing, personified by Vice President JD Vance. Gay, lesbian and trans people – together with “childless cat ladies” – are branded an obstacle by those obsessed with fomenting and enforcing the production of more white babies (see “White Supremacists Push State-Enforced Pregnancy”). There is, moreover, a long history of far-right religious and anti-communist zealots organizing in defense of “Tradition, Family and Property” (the name of a long-standing Brazilian ultra-rightist group founded in 1960 “in the service of Christian civilization”). Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has adopted the “God, Fatherland, Family” slogan used by anti-abortion campaigners and inherited from Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship (see “Giorgia Meloni and Her Fascist Fratelli d’Italia” on page 19 of The Internationalist No. 75). Nationalist promoters of traditional values in many countries, including Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, etc., also carry out reactionary anti-gay, -lesbian and -trans measures.

Marxism and Trans Rights

The institution of the nuclear family is, in fact, what’s most fundamental to the discrimination and oppression aimed against trans people and others seen as transgressing allegedly “normal” definitions, boundaries and restrictions on gender and sexuality. The anti-trans campaign seeks to deny and blot out the very existence of trans people not to “defend women” but to defend and enforce the oppression of women (and youth) within the family. This building block of bourgeois society is key to passing on the wealth and property of the ruling class as well as the reproduction and regimentation of the labor force in capitalist society, as Friedrich Engels analyzed in his work, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

It is essential to grasp this basic Marxist insight regarding the material basis underlying the ostracism and targeting of transgender people. Of course, Trump, echoing right-wing culture warriors, seeks to witch-hunt what he calls “gender ideology” as some kind of Marxist/left-wing conspiracy. And defense of trans rights is an urgent duty of all defenders of democratic rights. Yet the truth is that only Marxist historical materialism makes it possible to understand the oppression of gay, lesbian and trans people and orient struggle in defense of their rights – which is especially vital when, facing all the provocations and assaults against basic rights, there is a lot of confusion and misdirection.

Liberal ideologues, in contrast, think the task can be accomplished by pressuring capitalist politicians and institutions to “do the right thing,” together with a focus on changing language – a classic error of idealist thinking, which ignores the material roots of oppression and zeroes in on how it is represented or understood. Sometimes, this liberal identity project takes the form of frankly bizarre and dehumanizing linguistic constructions, such as terms like “birthing-person,” “womb-haver” or “menstruator” to refer to women and issues related to their oppression. Such strange and demeaning phrases do not help trans people but do bring grist to the mill of rightists who seek to portray trans people, leftists or anyone questioning gender norms as a bunch of wacked-out weirdos living in a world of their own.

It is true that transgender men and other trans people “assigned female” at birth have to contend with onslaughts against abortion rights and other aspects of reproductive health. However, the vast majority of people who access abortions, or have their ability to do so restricted, are women. The Bible-thumping, racist agenda against abortion exists because of the special oppression of women. To paper this over with bizarre turns of phrase benefits the enemies of trans rights and women’s rights, while obscuring the fact that effectively fighting oppression is a social, not individual or linguistic act.

While Democratic liberals started posturing as trans people’s “allies” in the recent past (only to abandon this when they decided it was electorally expedient), revolutionary Marxists’ support for gay and trans people’s democratic rights goes back well over a century. In 1895, the German Social Democratic Party – founded by Karl Marx’s associates Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel – defended Oscar Wilde when the playwright was sentenced to hard labor for homosexuality. Three years later in the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament), Bebel denounced the inclusion of “sodomy” and similar “crimes” in the penal code. In part this reflected the influence of the gay and trans rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, who collaborated with key figures in the Marxist movement. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute of Sex Science in Berlin, which in 1923 was visited by the Soviet Minister of Health, who spoke about the Bolshevik regime’s decriminalization of homosexuality.¹¹

Bourgeois conservatives insist that biology is destiny and that both sex and gender cleave strictly to a rigid binary– at the same time as they misrepresent basic aspects of biological science and cite as holy writ the outlandish dogmas of religious obscurantism (e.g., that women are subjugated because a snake got Eve to eat an apple). Bourgeois liberals turn reality on its head by claiming ideas and language are the root cause of the status quo, while working unceasingly to keep the workers and oppressed chained to the capitalist order through U.S. imperialism’s Democratic Party.

For communists going back to Marx and Engels it has been no secret that humanity, like all of nature, cannot be understood through rigid and eternal categories, binaries or boundaries. As is the case with so many other things, gender as well as sexuality is on a gamut and varies enormously by time, place and the effects of social and historical changes. In societies across the world, extending far back in history, there are numerous examples of people “changing their gender,” from the Muxe among the Zapotecs in Mexico to the Hijra in South Asia to “Two-Spirit” people among various Native American peoples, the Burrnesha in Albania and many others. Try as they may, the crusaders for ignorance and bigotry cannot eradicate the multiplicity, variability and range of human existence, including when it comes to sex and gender.

But while knowing these things is necessary, it’s not sufficient when it comes to the fight to defeat the attacks on the rights of trans people. While “identity politics” defines people according to competing categories, some of its adherents, in an attempt to address resulting conflicts, talk about “intersectionality” and say that various sectors can be “allies.” In contrast, Marxist politics recognizes that the different types of special oppression have common roots in the history and workings of class society, and to effectively fight them requires linking together the struggle against them and bringing to bear the power of the multiracial working class. This requires that we fight to unchain workers power from all capitalist parties, institutions and politicians, putting forward a program of class struggle to uproot all forms of capitalist oppression through international socialist revolution. The urgency of this is clearer than ever when the all-sided crisis of capitalist society has put power into the hands of a clique of sociopathic billionaires and grifters headed by a wannabe dictator.

“When a small group of people is targeted, the attacks never stop there,” trans activist Chase Strangio pointed out in his January piece for Time. Divide-and-conquer is the name of the game for a social system – capitalism – that is based on inequality, exploitation and oppression. Against this, Marxists emphasize that the struggle to defend democratic rights is indivisible.

Many people assume that it’s impossible to get workers to defend the rights of groups targeted by discrimination and prejudice. Yet this is largely a question of leadership and program. “Defend Transgender People” is the call of the Painters union banner in Portland, Oregon in local Pride marches, reflecting the work of activists from Class Struggle Workers – Portland (CSWP), which works fraternally with the Internationalist Group.¹² The 2016 “Hard Hats for Gay Rights” contingent was also sparked by the CSWP, which has long played an important role in Portland-area struggles against racist and fascist provocations, to defend immigrants, for labor action against the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza, and for a class-struggle workers party.

Remembering that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” labor must use its power against the deadly dangerous offensive targeting the rights and very existence of transgender people. As the onslaught intensifies and spreads, the connection between this fight and so many others is highlighted for all to see – working-class defense of trans rights is inseparable from defending the rights of us all. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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