I have written about this before, but it has been on my mind as of late. As the rights of myself and many of my trans comrades in the United States continue to deteriorate, my mind goes to this story from years ago.
In 2011 the US government was exposed for funding and otherwise propping up LGBT rights groups in Cuba as part of an effort to disseminate American propaganda and stir up general disorder against the Cuban government.
As we all know, Cuba is a global leader in LGBT rights, particular stellar among AES. Through substantial efforts for many years, Cuba has made massive strides in achieving rights for all people and this makes it a particularly hypocritical target for the yankees.
Let me be clear, the weaponisation of our rights by the US hurts us all, but it hurts out trans comrades in the global south even more. As the US attempts to use our rights as a weapon with which to damage the popularly supported government of Cuba (they do the same to China), people around the world come to associate trans rights with Western imperialism.
This unfortunate situation makes the struggle our comrades in these countries face even harder. While the United States continues to strip away the rights of its own LGBT population, it fosters global reaction against our struggle through its own imperialism.
It truly is one of the greatest opposing forces to human rights in the world.
I have interacted with people in this group quite a bit online, and have definitely made progress with some of them, however, natural disclaimer that online does not always reflect irl applies. A surprising number of people I have talked to have never met a trans ML and mostly associate us with liberalism so that alone goes a long ways (always a surprise to me, nearly all the trans people I know are ml’s lol)
Honestly, I think this is an even harder battle. A lot of the western “left” seems to be relatively social imperialist and it shows with peoples’ support for things like US aggression towards China, the blockade of Cuba (how does anybody support that???) and so on. Of course, I’m not speaking of all leftists, but a good number of non-ML self-identified leftists I have met are pretty much OK with destabilisation of these countries. This is wild to me. Honestly, I barely know what to do with liberals or the liberal-adjacent “leftist.” I am perhaps a bit pessimistic on this front due to personal experiences (that I’m probably going to also write about lol).
That Peoples’ Daily article is nice, thorough, and covers the issue well. :)
Yeah, I would say group 1 is much easier to work with on the education front. Anti-imperialism was my own path to the left, so maybe I just understand that mentality more than I understand how to talk to group 2.
I found this surprising as well. Thankfully people here on Lemmygrad (for example) tend to start from a position of “critical support” for trans people even if they don’t quite understand, and even when they have developed a skeptical opinion, they attempt to be respectful and are open to being corrected.
I think by talking to people here who are uninformed about trans issues but want to learn is going to teach me about the kinds of things that other MLs want to know about trans people. I hope by answering peoples questions here I can figure out the key information that is needed to dispel doubts about trans issues among MLs in general.
I have run into ignorance of trans issues among communists IRL as well, with different orgs I have been involved with, where I observed a certain level of ignorance around trans issues and unfortunate trends in two orgs that basically “tolerated” trans presence but didn’t understand it or care to investigate it, and therefore didn’t have a strong ideological basis for their tolerance, which made it very weak and easy to devolve into anti-trans positions, which I saw happen over time.
I am with you there, and agree that this is the harder battle. I think maybe it would be appropriate to further divide this group to address some of the tendencies I see inside of it. For the moment I will just talk about honest leftists who are not simply being performative, but who are operating on some inner desire to fight oppression.
In the case of anti-capitalist leftists, such as many anarchists, I can commend them for having such a strong opposition to oppression and having a skepticism of authority. They do not want to be complicit in oppressing anyone and they do not want to simply believe everything they hear. This is a good trait, but when their ideological foundation is weak and their historical knowledge is limited, it is easy to undermine and take advantage of their skeptical nature and control them by fear. They are compelled by their inner moral compass to stop oppression–so, just tell them some oppression is going on, and they will oppose it immediately without adequate investigation, which is how they get co-opted, ironically to do the very work they oppose so much.
I think one of the reasons they avoid investigation is because they have an inner fear of being indoctrinated into supporting something horrible. They do not want to entertain information from the oppressor for even a moment; I think to them, it feels dangerous. I imagine with the honest people of this group, the best thing to do would be to show them how to properly not be co-opted for a bad cause (which I think is their top fear), which I think would entail exposing them to the inner workings of the “human rights” racket, providing them with a dialectical materialist outlook, and would also involve a thorough period of debunking anti-communist propaganda, as well as overcoming their inner revulsion at contemplating information that comes from sources that have been accused of terrible acts and their revulsion toward listening to people who would disseminate such information (that is, MLs).
That’s a lot of hard work for any single individual to undertake one-on-one with someone else, virtually impossible I would say in most cases. I think this is where education and propaganda that clicks with the particularities of this demographic is needed, so that this process doesn’t become one individual’s impossible task in educating their anarchist friend but instead become information that can be passed around naturally. I feel it necessary to mention here that I am by no means against a more confrontational and argumentative approach with this group. I just want to add a tool to the tool box and create some kind of material that they will respond to positively and that will provide them with true information and advances their desire and ability to do the right thing.