In a political and cultural climate that is already viciously hostile towards trans people, the recent update of the guidelines from Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), constitutes a further attack on the rights of trans people within the workplace and wider society. In implementing the Supreme Court’s decision from last year, the guidance suggests that single-gender toilets should be segregated by “biological sex”.
This is both an explicit encouragement from the state to the already relentlessly litigious anti-trans movement but also now to trans-exclusionary sections of the capitalist class to deprive trans people of the facilities of their gender. It also places trans people, already at the sharp end of violence and oppression by the state and society at large, in the middle of an increasingly paranoid moral panic that increases the risk of vigilante violence against, for instance, trans women forced to use male toilets.
This has predictably been supported by almost all sections of our political class. Reform and the rest of the far right, who are the primary political expression of the small but vocal anti-trans movement, unsurprisingly see this as a huge vindication of their reactionary project. The Tories, less than a decade ago publicly very supportive of gender self-identification under the leadership of Theresa May, have now reverted back into a typically paranoid and reactionary stance. The Labour Party also persists with their support of the roll-back and denial of trans rights, with even the “candidate of the left” in their leadership election Andy Burnham predictably siding with the courts and EHRC earlier in the week.
This of course functions in part as a wedge issue, building support for a reactionary movement that distracts from the increasing cost-of-living crisis, dysfunction of our political class and complicity of the British state in genocide and imperialist war. Contemporary transphobia serves another purpose however.
The anti-trans movement, either in its social conservative or trans-exclusionary “feminist” form, ultimately strives to essentialise gender norms, a key aspect of the social reproduction of the working class under capitalism. Rather than assimilating people who do not fit with standard patriarchal norms into wider society, as the brief political consensus in favour of gender self-ID and the acceptance of gay marriage reflected, the current strategy of the ruling class is to reinforce the bourgeois family and strict gender binaries as the means of building the backbone of a compliant, easily exploitable working class.
This is not just a “culture war” distraction but a movement to discipline forms of expression that chafe against the standard forms of social organisation within the more stable capitalism of decades past. It is also an attack on our democratic rights, with the supreme court ‘legislating from the bench’ to deny rights to trans people, , just as we see in the case of pro-Palestinian activism. Are we expected to believe that the government had intended to implement a ‘bathroom ban’ with the Equality Act, even when it was issuing travel warnings against trans people visiting US states which had implemented such bans? This illustrates the need for socialists to put no faith in institutions of the capitalist state.
As democratic socialists, it is incumbent upon us to resist all attacks on trans rights on the streets, workplaces and politically in the wider left, which does contain a small but growing section buying into the ideological framing of modern transphobia. Demonstrations against the EHRC’s guidance are occurring across the country, with hundreds gathering in London, Manchester and elsewhere across the UK with radical and defiant messaging. We should attend and support these protests, whether as trans people or as CIS allies.
We must also struggle for motions and policies within our trade unions that aim to resist this guidance and its consequences,making the link between trans rights and workers rights explicit. Initiatives such as Trans Mutual Aid Manchester and organisations explicitly struggling for trans liberation, such as our comrades in the Trans Liberation Group and organisations like Manchester Trans Liberation Assembly must also receive our support.
Finally, it must be clearly stated that the struggle for trans liberation is a struggle that relates to so many others. Whether through understanding the Supreme Court’s decision as the granting of enormous powers to the capitalist class to discipline and surveil workers, transphobia as a key recruiting ground of the modern far right / street fascist movement or through the rollback of wider LGBTQIA+ rights that could easily follow this, the struggle for trans liberation is one we must win!
Fuck the Courts, Fuck the State, We Decide Our Own Fate!
Trans Rights are Workers Rights!
Trans Liberation Now!