A chairdre! I’m leading a discussion group on this collection of essays, and I thought this might be of interest to some of my Internet comrades.

Firstly, the essay collection in question: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf

Alright, so I’m reading through this in order to prepare some notes for my discussion. Thought it might be fun to have a few discussion threads here. This first thread is for the lengthy editors’ introduction. I will make a separate thread for each essay as I read them.

I’ll grab some quotes, type up some thoughts, hope I can spark a discussion! If not, that’s fine, I at least hope someone will benefit from having the link to the PDF.

I’ll edit this post with links to the subsequent posts (though I’m only going to be doing the intro and the first essay today, I’m a busy lady).

Edit 1: The discussion for the first essay by Noah Zazanis is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/396403

Edit 2: The discussion for the second essay by Michelle O’Brien is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/397671

Edit 3: The discussion for the third essay by Rosa Lee is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/401480

Edit 4: The discussion for the fourth essay by Jules Joanne Gleeson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/402441

Edit 5: The discussion for the fifth essay by Nat Raha is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/408500

Edit 6: The discussion for the sixth essay by Virgínia Guitzel is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/412487

Edit 7: The discussion for the seventh essay by Kate Doyle Griffiths is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322

Edit 8: The discussion for the eighth essay by Farah Thompson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/417377

Edit 9: The discussion for the ninth essay by JN Hoad is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/424986

Edit 10: The discussion for the tenth essay by Zoe Belinsky is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/437038

Edit 11: The discussion for the eleventh essay by CAACD is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/444545

Edit 12: The discussion for the eleventh essay by Nathaniel Dickson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508468

  • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
    4•2 years ago

    “‘Traditional’ ideas about the ‘moral economy’, of the family and gender, are not only to do with the provision of comfort and shelter. They also aim to internalise the harsh costs of adjustment and austerity against the vicissitudes of the market. This includes additional demands for uncompensated feminised labour, romanticised as a freely given ‘gift’.”

    This is the crux of Marxist feminism. That reproductive labour (caregiving, reproduction, household work, and all the labour that goes into raising and maintaining the human capital needed to perform wage labour) is an unpaid and eminently exploitable facet of the very identity of womanhood.

    • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
      4•2 years ago

      “It’s no coincidence that, exactly when standards of living are ravaged and proletarian households reach their breaking point, the Global Right takes a moral turn – extolling the family as a unique safe haven against sinister plotting and alien forces”

      This is something that we are seeing right now with the rollback of women’s and queer rights in America as the Imperialist economy begins to crumble. Much like in the final days of Rome, the never-ending need for expansion, the devastation of resources, and the outsourcing/offshoring of production to feed the Imperial core has created a completely unstable and untenable system. And in response, as the core begins to feel the house of cards trembling, the reactionaries push their so-called traditional values as a bulwark against supposed outside threats. But there’s no horde at the door; indeed, the danger the core faces is the cracking foundations of the house itself

      • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
        4•2 years ago

        “Capitalist families are never the answer to the separation to which proletarians are subject. They are exactly the means by which this alienation persists, one generation after the next”

        • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
          5•2 years ago

          “So-called ‘post-Fordist’ life sees the household and reproductive labour articulated in new forms – not just the sphere of wages and the sphere of domestic labour, but the broader reproduction of families as managed consumers of financial services, servicers of debt, and, crucially, as beneficiaries (or not) of a financialised dynamic of rapidly appreciating household wealth, where intergenerational wealth transfers acquire an increasingly distinctive role in contemporary class formation. Households are increasingly elicited to internalise the calculative rationality that they are ‘businesses’ of a kind, to manage themselves as but one nexus in a series of interlocking balance sheets of cash-inflows and cash-outflows, assets and liabilities.”

          This reminds me of an essay by Alexandra Kollontai that speaks of capitalism’s crimes in decimating love. Replacing the vast spectrum of love with the insular nuclear family was a devastatingly effective way to not only weaken the solidarity of the working class, but also to create a self-replicating internalization of the inherent nature of capitalism. Despite the fact that capitalism only began to be conceived during the age of colonisation, we’re raised by our very family interactions to believe it is human nature. More, that it is natural order that transcends humanity. Everything is competition, and only propagation of our own patrilineal line matters.

          A revolution’s driving force, meanwhile, must be love. Love for the world. Love for the people around you. A belief that everyone deserves a better world, where the people around you can be compatriots rather than competition.

          • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
            4•2 years ago

            “From the early 1990s onwards, this process steadily gathered apace and purported to ‘diversify’ itself. Groups that had previously been excluded from access to finance as a matter of course – African-Americans, Latinas, female heads-of-household – found themselves aggressively targeted for lending under predatory and adverse terms. This was required to satisfy the voracious appetite of institutional investors for asset-backed securities”

            It looks like this introduction decided to get me started on this topic anyway!!

            If you read writings from the early days of European colonialism, you quickly find reference to a shared proletarianization and exploitation of Black, Indigenous, and ostensibly white labourers. However, as the population of settlers was predominantly lower class, exploited/indentured Europeans, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie behind the settling were vastly outnumbered and quickly noticed solidarity movements.

            So they invented this entire racial class structure, extending “whiteness” to people they had previously enslaved and colonized, to deradicalize them and enlist them as settler footsoldiers against the populations of Africa and the Americas

            Basically: you were given a little civic engagement as a treat

            • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
              3•2 years ago

              “Medicalisation organises transgender possibility as defined by our interactions with medical science. In the aetiology of clinical life, transsexuality is understood as deviation, excess to or deficient from an otherwise desirable state of embodiment. While possible to manage and mitigate, ‘transsexuality’ in this sense remains a pathological diagnosis, a defect within one individual’s psychological development that can never be allowed to challenge the norm of sex itself.”

              “The chaos of gender nonconformity is reconceived and swept under the organising logic of a racialised, normatively teleological binary transition. The origin and endpoint of trans possibility, where our identities are justified, legitimated, and consolidated in-and-through their journey down a narrow pathway of surgery, hormones, and ‘living in the role’.”

              I don’t have much to say about this passage (rather, I have a lot to say about this passage, but nothing that will fit in the scope of this particular discussion). But transmedicalism is a source of never-ending despair for me, and one so much more present due to the actions of transsexual people themselves. This relegation of trans to a relation to pathology is so engrained in popular culture that the rare trans person who is given leave by society to speak publicly is as likely to buy into and perpetuate it as they are to speak against it.

              And while a pathologised/medicalised trans experience may ring true for some, it is hardly a universal truth, and it gives an undue amount of leverage for gender critical cis people to reify bioessentialist gender class structures

                • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
                  1•2 years ago

                  I have a feeling that some of the essays in this collection will egg me into talking more about it, but in the off-chance they don’t, I’ll make a note here that after we finish this collection I’ll make a thread for discussions about the pathologising of trans identities and the prevalence of transmedicalism in public trans speakers. It’s not entirely coincidental, to my mind, that trans women who are allowed to have a platform tend to push the state’s preferred narrative of what constitutes a trans identity/experience

                  Edit: I realize here I specifically mentioned trans women with a platform, and I want to clarify that the reason is because trans men and non-binary, third-gender, genderqueer, and two-spirit people are pretty much (with rare exceptions) never allowed a platform at all.

              • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
                3•2 years ago

                “Interventions into the lives of intersex infants and children take a symmetrical form: surgeries and hormonal treatments justified primarily by how well they will serve to sustain an approximation of dyadic sexual division.”

                This is always so absolutely infuriating. The common argument against trans people is that we want to give permanently body-altering surgery to children. Not only is gender affirming surgery incredibly rare for minors, not only is that never the fucking argument but it always, always, always ignores the way in which non-consensual, and often secretive irreversible gender surgeries are performed on intersex children

                It is completely disgusting. No trans person is out there arguing for their toddlers to get bottom surgery

                But bottom surgery is routinely performed on intersex infants, often without their parents even knowing

                And so while doctors mutilate intersex children with no accountability in the name of enforcing the binary with one hand, they demand a stop to consensual, informed surgery of trans adults with the other

                • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
                  4•2 years ago

                  “Trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson notes how contemporary discussions of ‘gender identity’ largely efface its origins as a conservative response intended to suture over the epistemic crisis of sex as a clinical category. Rather than appearing through an emancipatory concern, ‘gender’ in this sense served as a sexological speculation, ushered in by eugenic experiments on trans and intersex children and adults. To their evident horror, clinicians discovered that neither genotype, gonads, hormones, genitals, internal organs, nor secondary anatomical features proved decisive. No one isolatable feature could provide the foundational, determining, and unambiguous influence on which binary sexuation could depend.”

                  This is imperative to point out. That through it all, through all the contemporary discussions of “sex” as biology and “gender” as identity and social structure, that at the heart of the matter, there is no physical binary

                  It’s all bullshit. Smoke and mirrors

                  When it became desperately obvious that there were no organs that could prove definitively a binary, they instead sought to foist the responsibility onto the literally invisible DNA. We were told to believe that at last the binary was proven, that despite the fact that chromosomes are not something that can be seen in social interaction, somehow, in some way, there were people with one set of chromosomes that were inherently socialized one way, and people with a second set that were inherently socialized another. And that, through some miracle, even after transitioning those little bits inside you that no one can see still set you apart

                  And even then it was a lie. XX, XY binary is not true.

                  There are more permutations of those chromosomes alone, and more than that, it is a complete and total fabrication that those chromosomes are the sum total of sexual biological expression

                  And we didn’t even know about chromosomes until the freaking 1880s. Yet somehow throughout all of history (ignoring the multitudes of plural-gendered societies that came before us that were suppressed by colonialism) those invisible little things that no one knew about definitively and eternally separated humanity into a binary.

                  • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
                    3•2 years ago

                    “The wrath ‘trans ideology’ triggers among reactionaries is not simply mindless contempt. It is not reducible to psychodrama. Instead, capitalism’s right wing treats apparent breaches of continuity in the operation of its private households for good reason. This open contempt will not be quieted, however skilfully the left wing of capitalism offers hollow promises of accommodation, of an ever more encompassing bourgeoisie featuring reformed households, modernised subjectivities, and gender enlightened oppressors.”

                    I see this a lot, people acting like transphobes are just “behind the times” and that equality is inevitable. But the attack on transness is an attack on anti-capitalism and radicalisation itself, and no amount of integration into capitalism will ever bring queer liberation.

                    Reactionary thought must be excised from society, and revolutionary progress must be the goal.