A chairdre! It’s time to get into the second essay in Transgender Marxism
The PDF is here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
If you missed the intro discussion: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Now we’re moving on to the second essay, Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline and Gender Freedom by Michelle O’Brien
Michelle Esther O’Brien is a militant and practicing psychoanalyst living in New York City. She recently graduated from New York University, with a doctoral thesis addressing how political economy and class politics shape LGBTQ organising in post-austerity NYC. Michelle is a co-editor of Pinko magazine, and was previously a social worker in HIV and AIDS services, and the long-time coordinator of the NYC Trans Oral History Project. She is a queer, a mom, and a communist.
As always, I’ll be pulling quotes and making notes.
Feel free to join in the discussion, or just read along and hopefully we all can learn a little something <3
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay by Rosa Lee here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/401480
“Carolyn eventually found work as an out trans woman, working at a Manhattan sex toy shop called Babeland. Babeland was lesbian-owned, marketing itself as a feminist and pro-queer store where sex-knowledgeable staff could answer difficult questions. Hiring a trans woman fit broadly into their self-conception as progressive-minded business owners. At the time, it was one of the only formal wage labour jobs where Carolyn could be out as trans. Long after she left Babeland, the workers there unionised, led in part by the many trans people on the staff furious over the gendered harassment they suffered on the job”
Sex-oriented work is usually some of the only work that is openly accepting of out trans people, especially trans women, for the dual reason that sex-oriented work tends to consider itself liberally progressive, and also because society already relegates trans identity to a fringe sexual deviancy.
This however leads to openly trans women in the workplace being considered an object of sexual fetishisation, valued for their position as an object of sexual fetishisation.
“Trans people usually have a hard time finding work, get treated poorly in most of our jobs, and consequently end up poor”
“This gendered choice sharply constrained her employability, contributing to a period of habitual drug use and social marginality. Even as she regained stability in her life, Carolyn’s employment options were sharply limited. The retail job she was able to find was accessible because of subtle gendered expectations. These factors enabled trans people to eventually gain an employment niche there, where they were able to wage a collective struggle as trans workers.”
“Some trans people pass as cis at their jobs, then face the problem of how to manage their resumes and mismatch with the narratives of former employers, or the risk of discovery”
This is what I was touching on earlier. Former employers can act as references only for a deadname. Often contracts with employment, or records of credentials, or banking information, are all registered under a deadname. Trans people are rarely able to take a job without divulging their status of trans, personal information which isn’t remotely pertinent to their ability to do a job, and will often result in discriminatory hiring practices or workplace treatment.
Where trans people are able to pass they tend to build a work persona. Where trans people had the job before coming out they often feel forced to retain a “professional” self: even those trans people able to “pass” are unable to do so during the early stages of transition, which is where employers often take offense at a perceived “lack of professionalism.”
“This chapter focuses on the experiences of trans people unable to pass much at all at their jobs, particularly trans women. The experience of being a gender deviant needing work, and how trans people fight for their economic survival, has much to say about gender freedom for all”
Alright, let’s get into it!
“Under the white supremacist cultural logic of the US, Black and Chinese men were already considered feminine and appropriate for women’s work. But some of the ocean liner companies prided themselves on maintaining a white workforce, offering an elite experience to a white and racist clientele. Few white men, however, would demean themselves by doing such feminised work. Their employers already considered this type of work somehow ‘queer’.”
This is an important point to make when looking at intersectionality. The class structure in a capitalist society is adaptive to the demands for labour. When the colonisers were demanding labour from chattel slaves, they didn’t extend the class of “woman” to Black women. They were expected to toil in the fields alongside the men. When the colonisers needed reproductive labour, they didn’t extend the class of “man” to Black men, who were expected to cook, clean, and take care of the house.
In this way, people of colour have, from the perspective of white, cis het men, always existed as queer bodies. Their need for labour superceded the very gender binary the colonisers invented and imposed in their struggle for primitive accumulation.
“It is here that white gender nonconforming effeminate men managed to get a foothold in the industry. These stewards found a solidarity and support among fellow queens, coming to incorporate drag parties, homoeroticism, and soon a defence of gay rights into their work life.”
“Over workplace struggles through the 1930s, ocean liner service workers formed the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, bridging these feminised Black men, Chinese men, and white queer men into a Communist-Party-allied militant labour union. These militant workers organised under the slogan ‘No Race-Baiting, Red-Baiting, or Queer-Baiting!’”
Okay but this is an excellent slogan and uh…I may need to work it into a poster.
“Alan Bérubé’s study of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union inaugurated the growing historical and current literature on what he calls ‘queer work’ – professions and industries where queer people helped each other get jobs, found some space to express their non-normative genders at work, reduced the risks of homophobic attack, and in some cases were favoured by employers. These jobs are those often associated with stereotyped gender roles of one’s opposite gender – specifically blue collar labour for women, and activities like cooking, service, laundry, and food service for men”
It’s important to note here that, especially as queer white men began to be assimilated into the exploiter class, the types of labour they dominated began to be more acceptable for straight white men to participate in. This is why cooking, for instance, is often considered women’s work (as it’s reproductive labour) when it is done unpaid at home, but most professional kitchens are dominated by men.
“The most systematic report on trans Americans available comes from a 2011 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, including 6500 respondents. The data on employment was dire: 28% of African-American trans respondents report being unemployed, and 12% of white trans people, compared to 7% of the general population; 15% of all trans respondents were living in extreme poverty, with incomes below $10,000 a year, four times the rate for the general population”
The essay mentions that there is very little data to be had on the topic of trans employment: it’s a relatively new field of study and one that isn’t greatly funded. It’s also difficult due to the amount of trans people who do not identify as trans in the workplace.
However the data we do have is bleak. 28% of Black trans people in 2011 unemployed? With the regressive movement against trans people, against diverse hiring practices, and the increase in unemployment in general (where trans employees are often the first fired) it’s hard to imagine what that number is like now. (I will actually look into that, this is a note for myself, I want to dig around for more recent data).
15% of all trans respondents living in extreme poverty.
“44% of African-American trans women reported experiences in sex work”
This is why I don’t think cis men who have never done sex work should be involved in conversations about sex work. Every time that discussion comes up (here and elsewhere) we get an awful lot of opinions from people who aren’t even affected by this. It’s paternalistic as shit.
I will get riled up about this topic, even though I tried very hard to say very little in the thread earlier because it gets so tiring to have some dude who read an article or two and now thinks they need to dominate conversations on the topic. Until you’ve actually done survival sex work maybe you can sit back and listen and let other people have these very difficult talks.
There are Marxists already with actual lived experiences who have things to say about this, so you don’t even have to worry that there’s no socialist voices involved.
The National Center for Transgender equality is currently compiling a 2022 survey that aims to be their most comprehensive yet, so we’ll be able to see the most recentest data of all once those findings are published.