The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

This must be said: corporate diversity schemes can never guarantee the safety, dignity, and prosperity of the transgender worker - or, indeed, any worker - in the way that a strong and robust trade union movement and a properly funded welfare state can.

Yet - to speak personally - I can say that, ever since I was a child, I have had to learn to keep on going in a world which signaled to me at every turn that I was mad, bad, sick, deluded, disgusting, a pervert, a danger, unlovable. I still do...Often, in the course of writing and researching this book, I spoke to younger trans people and their families and found myself hoping that, at a deep psychic level, they would not have to abide with the recurrent narratives of disgust and shame that this world has always imposed on me. This is not intended to be self-pitying; hope, including mine, is precious and powerful.

In my own experience, it is entirely possible for a person to know a woman is trans, insist they do not believe she is really a woman, and yet still treat her misogynistically. This may seem a paradox, - but, as Serano argues, it is because our popular culture and media has spent decades depicting trans women as extreme embodiments of very misogynistic tropes. First, we are represented as agents of vapid and regressive femininity - vain, obsessed with how we look, stupid, weak, childish, and entitled. We are simultaneously hypersexualized: either as grotesque sexual deviants, particularly if we are unconventionally feminine (or lesbians); or, as yielding, sexually passive and deceptive if we are more feminine in appearance and/or if we date men.

Hope is part of the human condition and trans people's hope is our proof that we are fully human. We are not an 'issue' to be debated and derided. We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people, too, who see in out lives the possibility of living more fully and freely. That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existences enriches this world.

Although visibility helps redress a representational inequality, it does nothing on its own to achieve redistributive justice. This is a larger, more complex and ultimately more important fight, one whose aim is to reallocate resources to the most vulnerable trans communities in their struggle to resist state violence (like police harassment, imprisonment, or deportation), poverty and dispossession, and achieve better labour conditions.

Together, an LGBTQ+ coalition with class consciousness and anti-racism at its core must recover its radicalism and reaffirm its opposition to capitalism and patriarchy. Infighting and division are in the interests of our right-wing oppressors. Gay people and trans people have had to battle similar arguments about being "unnatural": homophobia still often rests on the prejudice that the worthiest form of sexuality is that which is capable of reproduction. Transphobia, too, emanates from prejudice that a person's stated identity is more trustworthy if it reflects their "natural" role in human reproduction. Similarly, cisgender women's reproductive freedom is the first thing to be curbed by conservative regimes. Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia share much of the same DNA. To the patriarchy, we all do gender wrong.

The idea that conspicuous consumption is a route to sexual and gender freedom has been effective in allowing the LGBT movement’s muscles to atrophy. In a godless age, there are new ways to give the masses their opium.

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

Nearly half of transgender people who do have children have no contact with them.