Labor: Use Your Power to Defend Immigrants and Trans Rights!

Anti-Trans Hysteria Fuels
Police-State Repression

Racist, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Gay – All-Round Bigots Want to Erase Transgender People

On June 30, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho banning transgender women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports teams or events. This caps a drive that President of the United States Donald Trump announced in his February 2025 Executive Order 14201 demagogically titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Five days earlier, on June 25, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can strip Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian refugees. So SCOTUS and POTUS are also in lockstep carrying out the mass deportations called for by the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) reactionaries. The vicious assault on immigrants’ and transgender people’s rights is a battering ram of the drive for a racist police state that would shred the democratic rights of all.

The hysteria whipped up over the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports events is a transparent ploy by all-round bigots who are using this as a “wedge issue” to wage yet another “culture war” against liberals. Just look at the actual numbers involved. In 2024, the head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) testified to the U.S. Senate that he was aware of only ten (10) transgender athletes competing in college sports in the U.S. (and that includes transgender men). Now there are none, since after Trump’s Executive Order, the NCAA barred trans women from women’s sports. Meanwhile, half the states have banned outright or made it impossible for trans girls to participate in girls’ sports. Yet those high school trans athletes number “150 or fewer,” according to a count by TeenVogue (26 February 2025), which could only confirm 17 playing on girls’ teams.

So this is a totally invented issue. Moreover, it not about biological sex, since the courageous plaintiffs against the discriminatory laws had both been taking hormone replacement therapy so it is absurd to label them biologically male. And as an endocrinologist from New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital testified before the Court, transgender women who have undergone treatment with puberty blockers and hormone replacement rendering testosterone receptors inactive “have no athletic advantage.”¹ Leaving aside the obsession with individual competitive achievement in high school and college sports, trans youth like teenager Becky Pepper-Jackson (who began challenging West Virginia’s law excluding her from cross-country and track teams at age 11) and college student Lindsay Hecox (barred from track by Utah’s HB 500, the first law in the U.S. to outright ban trans athletes) should be able to participate as the girls and young women that they are.

Now there is a bill in Congress, the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025” (HB 28) that would write Trump’s Executive Order into federal law, and others that would deny Title IX funds (to promote women’s sports) to institutions in any state that doesn’t ban “men” as defined by sex assigned at birth. But the bigoted offensive against transgender women in sports is only the tip of the iceberg. In 2025, 1,022 anti-trans bills were introduced across the U.S., more than six times the number in 2021, and 126 passed; and already in the first half of 2026, there are 830 bills and 62 have already passed. Moreover, 145 anti-trans bills are before Congress, up from zero (0) in 2022 (see the tracker at translegislation.com). The dozens of measures that have already become state laws aim to make life as a transgender person not just intolerable but impossible.

There are over 200 bills banning gender transition medical care, mostly for minors but also (in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee) if public funds are used for adults to get it. An Idaho bill would “prohibit classroom instruction ... on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through grade 12.” In Tennessee, which has passed 19 anti-trans laws this year, a “Charlie Kirk Act,” named after the founder of the fascistic Turning Point U.S.A. youth group, would supposedly protect (i.e., promote) anti-trans and anti-gay organizing in schools. Particularly threatening are laws requiring that driver’s licenses indicate sex as assigned at birth. In Kansas, Indiana and elsewhere, rabid anti-trans state officials are using such laws to track down anyone who has changed their sex designation. And how do they know who those people are? The bigots with state power are making lists.

The June 2025 Supreme Court ruling on U.S. v. Skrmetti (permitting state laws banning puberty blockers and hormone treatment for minors) together with its June 2026 decision on W.Va. v. Jackson/Idaho v. Hecox and a dramatically accelerating wave of legislation and government actions seek to deny transgender people the right to exist. As we wrote in the wake of Trump’s February 2025 Executive Order:

“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.”

–“Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights,”The Internationalist No. 75, January-May 2025

Since that time, the bigoted blitzkrieg has intensified still further, with the stakes getting increasingly dire. At present a majority of U.S. states (27) have enacted bans on trans athletes in recent years. (These are pretty much the same 27 states that have restricted gender-transition treatments for minors.) And it has had an effect on public opinion, with polls reporting that nearly 80% of Americans (including 67% of Democrats) say transgender women “should not be allowed to compete in women's sports” (New York Times/Ipsos survey, January 2025).

Gone are the days when Joe Biden could declare (in the 2020 presidential election campaign) that “transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” The Democrats may still be reluctant to hop on the bigotry express: out of the 145 anti-trans bills in Congress, we couldn’t find one Democratic sponsor. But they are increasingly remaining silent, or outright capitulating – like California governor Gavin Newsom’s vile declaration last year that he was “completely aligned” with Charlie Kirk on trans women in sports, in his chummy podcast with the gay- and trans-bashing ideologue – and effectively throwing trans people under the bus. The thundering silence about the crescendo of draconian anti-trans measures is also seen in the liberal capitalist media, followed by most of the left, which generally tails the Democrats.²

The manufactured hysteria about the supposed danger of trans athletes to women’s sports³ goes hand-in-hand with the racist smears against immigrants as supposedly endangering the nation, as with the lurid slanders about “Haitians eating people’s pets.” It is important to understand, and to underline, that the same reactionary forces leading the charge against transgender people are also pushing for the mass deportations, are the ones who engineered the cancellation of the right to abortion, who opposed school desegregation, gay marriage and every other measure against social oppression. And they are fully backing the drive to a Bonapartist police state that Trump is preparing with his marauding fascistic immigration police. Both for transgender people and immigrants, looking to the Democrats to defend them is a ticket for defeat.

Trade unions, civil rights groups, gay rights advocates, immigrants’ rights defenders and other oppressed sectors have traditionally – and mistakenly – looked to the Democrats to champion their cause. This party of phony “friends of labor,” blacks, Latinos, etc., is a pillar of the racist capitalist system which is inherently oppressive to vulnerable populations. And while the situation of transgender people in “blue” states (i.e., those governed by Democrats) may not be as dire as in the “red states” that have enacted these laws, the turbocharged bigots have warned “blue states” allowing trans athletes, “you’re next” (Kristen Waggoner, president of far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), after the Supreme Court decision).⁴ To defend transgender people and all those in the hatemongers’ crosshairs requires breaking with the capitalist parties.

From banning transgender medical care for youth (and setting precedents to ban this for many adults), to “conversion therapy” and forced “detransition” of inmates in prisons, to setting up trans people for detention by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police and invalidating their driver’s licenses and other identification documents, the federal and more than two dozen state governments are seeking to stigmatize and turn trans people into non-persons. In the process they are compiling lists of trans individuals and de facto barring them from buying firearms. What’s next? Ordering transgender and intersex people to wear identifying symbols like the yellow stars and pink triangles for Jews and homosexuals in the Nazi Third Reich? Already unwanted immigrants are being thrown into concentration camps.

What is needed is a class-struggle defense of immigrants’ rights, trans rights and the democratic rights of all. We call on the organized workers movement to use its power to defend trans people and immigrants against the bigoted crusade targeting them. One only has to overlay the maps of the states that outlawed abortion following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022; the states that have passed anti-trans laws since 2022; and the states that have anti-union “right-to-work” laws (which are mainly the states of the slaveholders’ Confederacy and of “Jim Crow” segregation), to see that the same reactionary forces are targeting us all. The hate crusade against trans people and immigrants is a two-pronged spearhead of the push for police-state repression, as the “home front” of the escalating drive for an imperialist World War III.

Kansas in the Forefront of the Anti-Trans, Anti-Immigrant Drive

Over the past period, the state of Kansas has been leading the way in this sinister and sadistic campaign. On January 28, both houses of the Kansas legislature passed SB 244, which bans transgender individuals from using bathrooms in government buildings that do not match their “biological sex at birth,” subjecting them to a $1,000 fine for a second violation, while a third could land them in jail for six months. Even more outrageously, Kansans are encouraged to report and sue trans people they claim to have witnessed violating this grotesque law, for a reward of $1,000. In other words, SB 244 places a bounty on trans people. And when Democratic governor Laura Kelly vetoed this “bathroom bounty” law, a two-thirds majority of the state legislature overturned her veto, with all Republicans voting to override and all Democrats against.

But SB 244 contains much more than that. Bathroom bans against trans people have been enacted by states at least since 2013. In 2023, Kansas passed a particularly creepy one, defining “female” as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” To stymie demands for such bans, a number of states passed laws providing that public buildings have at least one gender-neutral or unisex bathroom, something that many schools around the country have done. The new Kansas law, which defines “gender” as “biological sex at birth,” now requires that any “multi-occupancy private space” in a public building be “for use by only one sex.” This puts trans people in an impossible situation, facing fines and jail for breaking the law, or the threat of harassment and violence if forced into the supposedly “biologically correct” bathroom.

And SB 244 is likely to be used for broader governmental repression. The Kansas law aligned with Trump’s Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January 2025, calling for “intimate places” in federal facilities to be sex-designated. Now four school districts in Kansas have been found by the U.S. Department of Education to have violated Title IX by having gender-identity-based bathrooms. Washington is threatening to cut off up to $137 million in federal funding if they continue to refuse to settle. And “once a new anti-trans legal strategy gains traction in one state, it rarely stays there,” as Truthout (17 February) put it. In 2026 alone, bathroom bans have been enacted in Idaho, Michigan and South Carolina, while three were vetoed in New Hampshire.

Again, these laws are not just about harassing trans people. The Idaho bill, which went into effect on June 16, stipulates that more than one “offense” means a felony charge bearing up to five years in prison.⁵ A preliminary injunction blocked part of the law … for now. To quote our 2025 article (“Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry…”), “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!”

Lurking in the background is the sinister figure of Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, a central proponent of SB 244. His role highlights the connection between the anti-trans offensive and anti-immigrant racism. In 2010, Kobach became notorious as an architect of Arizona’s 2010 “show me your papers” law (SB 1070), which paved the way for the introduction of similar bills in 36 other states, five of which passed them into law.⁶ He helped craft hardline anti-immigrant ordinances for towns from Pennsylvania to Nebraska, all of which were later abandoned. Kobach has also been a major figure in prosecuting supposed “voter fraud,” but after examining 84 million votes in 22 states, only referring 14 cases for prosecution. In failed bids for Congress (2004), governor (2018) and U.S. Senate (2020), he received funds from and employed white supremacists.

Like the role of the Christian nationalist “Alliance for Defense of Freedom” in designing anti-trans, anti-gay and anti-abortion laws, the role of Kris Kobach in Kansas underscores that the forces behind the assault on immigrants and transgender people are the same reactionaries targeting other oppressed sectors and working people in general. But Kansas also demonstrates that the politicians are often distorting popular sentiment. Kansas has been a prime target of anti-abortion bigots, including the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita.⁷ Yet in August 2022, six weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the ADF’s Mississippi anti-abortion law, thus allowing states to ban abortion, an amendment to remove the right to abortion from the Kansas constitution, which had been passed by the legislature (and backed by Kobach), was rejected, by 60%-to-40%, by the state’s voters.

They’re Using Driver’s Licenses to Make Lists of Trans People

The Kansas law does not limit itself to bathroom bans. In a particularly ominous move, SB 244 also stipulates that any driver’s license that “identifies the gender of the individual named … in a manner that is contrary” to their “biological sex at birth” is “invalid,” and that the state director of vehicles shall “correct” those licenses. On February 26, approximately 1,700 trans Kansans were informed by letter that their driver’s licenses or other IDs were invalid, and must be “surrendered” immediately. Why? Because like hundreds of thousands across the U.S., they have changed the sex designation on their IDs for gender identity reasons – in other words, because they are transgender! This affects their right to drive, to buy and own firearms, getting a job and innumerable other things, including the right to vote.⁸

If they then get a “corrected” identification document, which amounts to “outing” them, this brings the danger that their ID will be rejected or deemed fake if there is a mismatch between the sex listed on their ID and how they are perceived. Already in June, a trans woman in Kansas who had been “forced to change the gender marker on her license back to ‘M’ because of Senate Bill 244” was charged with operating a motor vehicle without a valid license because her appearance did not seem to the police officer to match the ID (Advocate, 29 June).⁹ On top of its other ramifications, this reactionary measure is a set-up that will increase the already drastically high incidence of violence against trans people, who are vastly more likely to be victims of violent attacks than others.¹⁰

Even more threatening is the fact that Kansas could revoke 1,700 driver’s licenses literally overnight. In fact, the letters notifying individuals that they were no longer legally allowed to drive were sent out even before the state legislature overrode Governor Kelly’s veto on February 26. An investigation by Aleksandra Vaca in Transitics (26 February) revealed that after a lawsuit settlement in 2019 allowing transgender people to amend their birth certificates, the state Office of Vital Statistics (OVS) flagged those changes with a special marker. And since driver’s license updates were allowed in 2007, the Department of Vehicles (DOV) has had a special internal marker for “gender reclassification” enabling it to quickly generate a list of trans people, for repressive purposes. All this in a state whose Democratic governor controls the OVS and DOV.

Now that information has been made public, with devastating consequences. And Kansas is not the only state with such lists. Indiana’s rabidly transphobic attorney general has been intervening in closed and even sealed court cases, filing motions to undo gender marker changes on state IDs (Indiana Lawyer, 21 May). In Texas, going back to July 2022, the rabidly transphobic state attorney general Ken Paxton (who is also notoriously anti-immigrant and anti-abortion) ordered employees of the state Department of Public Safety to make a list of individuals who had changed their sex designation on their driver’s licenses (Washington Post, 14 December 2022). The AG’s order came a month after the state Supreme Court ruled that Paxton had overstepped his authority in ordering investigations of parents of trans youth on charges of “child abuse.”

The Post reported that 16,466 gender changes were compiled in Texas as DPS employees scoured not only driver’s licenses but also state IDs, election certificates and occupational licenses, and pulled records with names of specific individuals. Then, starting in August 2024, the agency “stopped accepting court orders or amended birth certificates as valid documentation for gender marker changes” (Washington Blade, 1 January 2026). Each time “a driver requested to change the sex listed on their license,” the DPS “scanned and saved the driver’s information and “sent it toan internal email account created for collecting these data” (Texas Newsroom, 19 March 2025). Texas officials refused to say why the information was being gathered and what it would ultimately be used for, but clearly it could fuel individual surveillance and prosecution.

And along with targeting trans people, the MAGA regime is compiling lists of immigrants. Last November, after coming under fire from the federal government, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state was revoking 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses issued to immigrant truck drivers. Although a state court ordered California to let the drivers reapply, the state said it was giving detailed information about license holders to the American Association of Motor Vehicles, whose data base could be targeted by ICE. This “means more than 1 million people may face higher risk of deportation,” reported the news site CalMatters (28 April). This particularly affects the overwhelmingly immigrant port truckers. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) should demand that California immediately reinstate those licenses.

As for the government-issued IDs, revolutionary Marxists have no position about what should be listed on them, as this information is particularly for police purposes, but we are emphatically against any changes or requirements that would endanger transgender people, immigrants or any other vulnerable population. The Internationalist Group has fought for driver’s licenses for immigrants and we oppose a national identification document, as it would be essentially for repression. What Trump and the Democrats are seeking goes way beyond that, including biometric information on so-called “Real IDs. As for sex/gender markers on driver’s licenses, there is no legitimate safety reason for them at all. Get rid of them!

Targeting Those Seeking Gender Care, Hospitals, Shelters and Jails

It would be danger­ously naïve to believe that bathroom bans and compiling de facto lists of trans people through driver’s licenses are isolated instances, Instead, this is part of broader efforts to compile lists of transgender people’s data, addresses, medical infor­mation, etc., in order to erase them from public life.

Thus, for example, the batch of 19 anti-trans measures approved by the Tennessee legislature this spring include:

• defining “immutable” sexes of “only” males or females based on anatomy at birth; requiring sex-segregated restrooms;
•  requiring any publicly funded gender transition clinic to pay for “detransition” procedures;
   protecting college groups that anathematize homosexuals and trans people;
  
•   authorizing suing medical professionals for performing gender transition procedure
   prohibiting government funding of gender transition treatment; 
  
• prohibiting bans on “conversion therapy”; 
  
• prohibiting medical professionals from asking minors questions about gender dysphoria; and  
  
• requiring reporting of any gender transition procedures, therapy or referrals, with the names of medical professionals and details about the individual that could (and in many places, would) make them identifiable.

This is all taking off from the 2023 Tennessee law SB 1 that banned providing puberty blockers or hormone therapy or performing surgery on anyone under age 18 to treat gender dysphoria (while allowing them for other medical purposes). This is the law upheld by the Supreme Court in its June 2025 ruling on U.S. v. Skrmetti, that threatens medical providers with up to 30 years in jail. Interestingly, the last package of transphobic Tennessee laws included declaring June “nuclear family month.” Yet for all the talk of upholding parental authority in the latest laws, under SB 1 gender transition measures are illegal, even if the parents request them. What this is about is creating a “moral panic” over trans people like the claim that “illegal immigrants” are “invading” the U.S. – transparently nonsensical but politically useful to whip up hysteria.

The whipping up is coming straight from Washington. In May, the Justice Department issued criminal subpoenas seeking “names and files of providers, administrators, accountants, attorneys, volunteers and other personnel involved in what it calls ‘sex-rejecting procedures’ and their related ‘billing or coding activities’” (Salon, 22 May). New York University Langone Hospital received a grand jury subpoena demanding this information, as well as “documents sufficient to identify each patient who underwent Sex-Rejecting Procedures.”Within days of Trump’s 28 January 2025 Executive Order 14187 (grotesquely titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”), Langone stopped gender care for youth. The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth joined hundreds in protesting against this.

Meanwhile, savage new steps by the prison system aim to make conditions there even more barbarous and potentially deadly for transgender inmates. On February 19, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) issued a new policy on “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria.” The policy mandates confiscation of “social accommodations” like “cosmetics and clothing, used to alter the person’s appearance to align with the person’s ‘gender identity’”; a ban on hormone therapy for any transgender inmate not already receiving it – and medical “detransitioning” by forced tapering off and discontinuation of hormone therapy for those currently getting it.¹¹ While partially blocked (for now) by a court order, some trans people in prison have already been “detransitioned.” Moreover, if the diktat goes through it will not only affect federal prisons but also the 36 state prison systems that tie their policies closely to federal regulations.

Adding yet another layer of potentially deadly targeting of trans people, the policy, which treats being transgender as a mental disorder, calls for prisons to “treat” it with “psychotherapy, psychotropic medication, or other appropriate medically accepted interventions.”¹² So while the government says it won’t pay for transgender medical care, it declares that it will pay for medical “treatment” of transgender people to try to force them to cease being transgender. As for what the FBP is calling psychotherapy, what they mean is “conversion therapy.” This grotesque practice, denounced by the American Psychiatric and Psychological associations, is classed as torture by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCTV) and the UN.¹³ It was, however, OK’d in March by the U.S. Supreme Court in its Chiles v. Salazar ruling.

Then, on May 29, the Office of Management and Budget, the departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor and Treasury and dozens of other federal agencies issued a proposed “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” stating that before receiving federal funds, a grant recipient must pass a “pre-issuance review” to screen against these being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” what it brands as “gender ideology,” including anything from bathroom access and healthcare to HR procedures that might be examples of “deny[ing] the sex binary.” Thus, any school, medical facility, etc., failing to adhere to the MAGA line on trans people could have its federal funding blocked. Many hospitals and nonprofits have preemptively restricted transgender medical care.

A key purpose of this method of changing laws by ordering rules changes is to test the waters for police-state rule. And these policies will kill people – through deprivation of needed medical care, sadistic pseudo-medical/psychological torture and suicide, as well as sexual assault and murder when trans people are put in prisons according to their “biological sex at birth,” as Trump’s 20 January 2025 Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” called for. Already a decade ago, a large-scale 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey reported that 30% of trans people in prison had been physically or sexually assaulted in the last year. In 2024 a report on transgender inmates by the Vera Institute of Justice reported that over half (53%) had experienced sexual assault in their current sentence.¹⁴ This will clearly get worse as the executive orders and federal rule changes take their toll.

Defense of Immigrants’ and Trans Rights in the Fight Against Police-State Repression

The intensifying repression of transgender prison inmates is of particular importance as a far higher percentage of trans people are imprisoned compared to the rest of the population. According to Prison Policy Initiative (4 June 2024), “One in six trans people have been incarcerated at some point, including nearly half of Black trans people. This is compared to about 3% of the total adult U.S. population in 2010 that had ever been in prison, and almost 10% of Black adults.” Those numbers will inevitably increase, as the new labyrinthian anti-trans measures take effect, ensnaring trans people in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t trap in which, one way or another, they will end up in the claws of “law enforcement” enforcing laws and rules designed to victimize them. Unless the victimizers are stopped.

The avalanche of repressive measures against transgender people at the state level, as well as by federal rules in hospitals and prisons, is being replicated throughout the federal government. And as we have indicated, there is an intimate connection between the war on trans rights and immigrants’ rights. Thus, in the drive for mass deportations, as part of the “legal” framework to let the ICE Gestapo snatch immigrants off the street, last September the Supreme Court set the precedent (in a ruling on the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) that the “specific articulable facts” required by the immigration act for immigration agents to have a “responsible suspicion” that a person may be an undocumented immigrant could be that they are speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent, that they are at a particular location like a bus stop or car wash, their type of work, or their “apparent race or ethnicity.”

In March, the State Department issued a rule on “Enhancing Vetting and Combatting Fraud in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program,” saying that the box for “sex” on the form for entering the U.S. must “match the applicant’s biological sex at birth, even if that differs from the sex listed on the applicant's foreign passport or other identifying documentation.” This lays the basis for accusing transgender people of “fraud or misrepresenting a material fact” in obtaining a visa or other documentation, making a person ineligible to enter the U.S. So if the box says “female” and the person “appears” to be a woman but the birth certificate says “male,” they could be accused of “misrepresentation of sex.” Or if the application says “male” but the person appears to be a woman they could be held on “reasonable suspicion” of presenting a “fake birth certificate.”

This kind of “Catch-22” scrutiny could occur long after the person entered the United States, and even used to invalidate a “green card” (residency ID document). So “looking trans” (whether you are or not) – that is, at variance with what some agent considers the norm for either legally ordained sex checked on a form – could be deemed a “specific articulable fact” to provide a supposedly legal basis for seizing people. It could get someone held for questioning, excluded from entering the U.S. or kicked out of the country. It could also lead to trans people being abused get trans persons abused in immigration detention facilities. Although ICE is required by law to report the number of transgender detainees, it has stopped doing so. And a federal complaint has been filed about a warden at an ICE facility in Louisiana targeting and demeaning trans detainees and assigning them to forced labor (Newsweek, 27 September 2025).

And it’s not only in immigration matters that this kind of entrapment can occur. A recent (May 6) rule-change proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) calls for changing forms for firearms and explosives so that they “make clear that ‘sex’ on ATF forms refers to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female and does not include the concept of gender identity.” It also reiterates that forms shall be filled “under penalties of perjury….” So if a trans person who has changed their ID gender marker wishes to buy a gun, they are faced with two options: 1) input the sex designation assigned to them at birth, which, after being contrasted with their ID, would cause a mismatch and likely denial of sale; or 2) face the threat of a federal perjury charge, a felony that can bring five years in federal prison – now mandated to forcibly “detransition” transgender inmates. This is a clear attempt to scare trans people away from exercising their Second Amendment right to secure firearms as a means self-defense.

The elaborate legal and repressive framework being erected to deal with a tiny percentage of the population is indicative that this manufactured “crisis” serves a broader agenda. The bigoted executive orders, barrage of anti-trans laws and federal rule changes go together with the use of ICE as a paramilitary force to terrorize immigrants – and the general population. They are central to the drive toward a “Bonapartist” police state, wielding the “imperial presidency” bulked up by Trump’s Democratic and Republican predecessors.¹⁵ Glorying in the sadism of the onslaught against marginalized, vulnerable sectors of society, fascistic elements in the Republican Party have been emboldened, from Kansas Young Republicans on up to the vice president, JD Vance, as well as outright fascists like the Proud Boys, who see themselves as “Trump’s army.”

It is crucial that class-conscious workers drive home that the assault on immigrants’ and trans rights threatens everyone’s democratic rights. And it vital that labor – the organized workers movement – come to the fore in defending those rights. As the banner of ILWU Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area on May Day 2024 put it, along with calling for workers action to stop deportations and to stop military cargo to Israel, we need to mobilize workers’ power to “Defend the Rights of All of Us.” First the racist reactionaries are coming for immigrants and transgender people. Next up are other oppressed and vulnerable populations, and all working people, because the anti-trans crusade is a front for the ruling-class attack on all those it oppresses and exploits. And the fight against the transphobic, xenophobic onslaught must be a working-class fight.

Use Workers’ Power in Defense of Trans People

What stands in the way of unchaining the enormous potential power of the multiracial working class? First and foremost, the subordination of labor and the left to the Democratic Party. Many gay, lesbian and trans activists have also looked to the Democrats for support, reeled in by its rhetoric and rightly repulsed by the vile, trans-bashing MAGA Republicans. While the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) and most of the “left” are working overtime to refurbish and strengthen illusions in this U.S. imperialist party that twice paved the way for Trump, revolutionary Marxists emphasize that unchaining the power of the working class requires breaking from the Democrats and building a revolutionary workers party with a class-struggle program to defend all of the oppressed.

Many (by no means all) liberal, and even not-so-liberal Democrats do oppose the orgy of reactionary legislation targeting transgender people. Virtually every Democrat in the Kansas and Tennessee legislatures voted against the anti-trans legislation detailed above. Maine governor Janet Mills refused to bow to Trump’s threats to strip her state of federal funding unless it banned trans women from women’s sports. But when Dems fear that support for trans rights might cost them at the ballot box, they duck … or cave, or even join the attack. Congressmen Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) openly pander to anti-trans backlash. But when push comes to shove, not a few may follow their shameful path.

California governor Newsom takes the cake. (This is the wannabe John F. Kennedy who hails Trump’s drive to bury the Cuban Revolution, grotesquely claiming that cutting off Cuba’s oil is bringing “democracy” to the embattled island.) By inviting the notorious trans-hater Charlie Kirk onto his podcast, and declaring he was “completely aligned” with Kirk in opposition to trans athletes in women’s sports, Newsom was cynically trying to ingratiate himself with the bigots. More typical is Kamala Harris, who during the 2020 presidential primary campaign said she supported “necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care” for inmates of federal prisons, but when she came under fire for this in the 2024 presidential campaign would only say that she would “follow the law.” Of course, the current attacks on trans people are all “legal.”

While looking to the Democrats to protect transgender people is a dead end, the Supreme Court’s 2025 Skrmetti and 2026 Jackson/Hecox rulings should make clear that faith in the capitalist injustice system such as Harris was trying to foster is (and always was) entirely misplaced. The court was not stopped by the fact that the bans on gender care for minors are blatantly discriminatory.¹⁶ And even in liberal bastions like California and New York, gains in trans rights are all too easily reversible. Last year, the shutdown of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’s Center for Transyouth Health and Development and NYU Langone’s Transgender Youth Health Program, and ending gender transition surgeries for trans youth under the age of 19 (a very rare occurrence) by Kaiser Permanente California and Stanford University, took place in “blue” states where transgender medical care is still legal.

Powerful forces are behind the assault on trans rights. For the Christian nationalists (like the ADF, which designed many of the reactionary laws and won approval from the Supreme Court) and evangelical Christian rightists, defense of transgender people is an insult to their god. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said supporters of “transgenderism” “follow neither god nor science, but rather the lies of a radical and a destructive ideology.” The Southern Baptist Convention in a 2014 resolution “On Transgender Identity” proclaimed, “Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles as ordained by God are part of the created order,” and “intersexuality” and “gender identity confusion” are the result of “human fallenness.” This is a comparatively “mild” expression of the virulent transphobia for which the very existence of trans people is an abomination.

Moreover, the anti-trans hysteria campaign is the godchild of racist reaction. The Southern Baptist church was created in 1845 to defend the institution of slavery as supposedly divinely ordained, and after the Civil War it continued to uphold white supremacy. We have noted how the “Christian right” sought an “an emotionally charged issue to stir people up” to defend the tax exemption of whites-only “Christian academies,” first whipping up anti-gay bigotry in the 1970s before latching onto the issue of abortion in the ’80s.¹⁷ These are the same forces that are the bedrock of the trans-bashing crusade today, amplified by the fascistic MAGA rightists who use it as a tool to go after the Democrats and rev up police-state repression. For all their posturing, the racist right doesn’t give a damn about women’s rights, and wants to turn white women into baby factories.

So along with being paired with the war on immigrants, the war on trans people is closely intertwined with racist reaction, the attacks on women’s rights and the crusade to uphold the nuclear family, the central institution of women’s oppression. (Hence the Tennessee law making June “nuclear family month.”) And as trans people have been targeted by a generalized reactionary offensive, part of a wholesale attack on democratic rights, for Marxists the defense of transgender rights must be part of a class-struggle defense of all the exploited and oppressed. The Internationalist Group calls to mobilize workers’ power to demand that:

– trans persons be allowed to use the bathrooms of their choice;

– transgender women be allowed to participate in women’s sports;

– government stay out of medical decisions about gender transition, which should be a matter between the person and their doctor,

as part of a fight for high-quality socialized medicine for all.

Likewise, we call for workers action to:

– drive out the ICE/Border Patrol Gestapo;

– stop immigration raids and deportations,

– fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Yet while these are all simple democratic demands, they have only been achieved in the context of social revolution. It was the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 that won citizenship rights for all working people, regardless their country of origin. And it was the Bolshevik Revolution that established free abortion on demand and struck down laws against homosexuality.¹⁸ The fight against the repression of transgender, lesbian and gay people is not a sectoral struggle but part of an overall fight to secure democratic rights and uproot capitalist social oppression through the socialist reconstruction of society.

The assault on transgender people is part and parcel of the overall decay and degeneration of capitalist society. To fight it, we need to build a revolutionary workers party – which, as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote, acts as a “tribune” (defender) of the people. Building such a genuinely communist party that champions the cause of all the oppressed in leading the fight for international socialist revolution is the urgent task for those who would put an end to age-old social oppression and banish the spectre of a thermonuclear World War III that threatens the future of humanity. ■

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

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