A chairdre! Time for another discussion on 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
The intro discussion with links to all other essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Today’s essay is Notes From Brazil by Virgínia Guitzel.
Virgínia Guitzel is a working-class philosophy student at the Federal University of ABC, and a Member of the Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores (MRT), which is the Brazilian section of the Fração Trotskista – Quarta Internacional. She is a participant in the Women’s group Pão e Rosas, which worked in the front line struggling for legal abortion in Argentina.
Feel free to join in the discussion, add your thoughts, comments, questions. I hope we are all able to learn something today <3
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay, by Kate Doyle Griffiths, here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322
“Brazil has the highest rate of murder of trans people in the world. The average age of the victims is 26. The life expectancy for trans people is just 35.”
This is bleak. Absolutely heartbreaking.
“The claim that ‘gender ideology’ was being imposed on children and youths in schools by the left circulated widely in sensationalist media and WhatsApp groups during the last presidential campaign.”
This is a really common thread the past decade in governments the world over.
As capitalism is reaching its crisis point, a fervent demand for a re-establishment of the nuclear family (a tool created to destroy solidarity and prop up the labour market through discrete units of debt-accruing, self-reproducing workers) becomes a focal point for capitalists. Nuclear families have been essential, as we’ve seen, not only as a way to reproduce the work force, but also as a means of socially reproducing the individualistic values necessary for capitalism to thrive and for resistance to capitalism to falter.
“While credited as a religious reformer with a modern perspective, Pope Francis has in fact used his position to uphold the clergy’s aggressive stance towards trans people.”
This one kills me. I was once told that Francis was “finally a good pope” and he was “progressive” but, uh…the wealth of the Vatican, its refusal to allow sexual predators to be held to account, and even a cursory glance at the things he’s actually said can show you how false that is.
“He peppered the rest of the decade with denunciations of transgender people, culminating in 2019s document Male and Female He Created Them, which reaffirmed the Church’s anti-trans stance, and also mandated surgeries on children born with ambiguous genitals.”
Okay. So trans people are wrong because God made us male or female. However the violent application of uninformed and nonconsenting sex surgery on intersex people is right because…what? God fucked up?
“Bolsonaro is the standard-bearer for the most hateful, reactionary forces in Brazil. During the elections, his rhetoric whipped up a feverish climate of hate that encouraged the murder of Mestre Moa do Katende, an important capoeira master and a tireless activist against racism. The campaign also coincided with the murder of two trans women. He is well known for controversial statements such as telling a woman member of Congress: ‘I won’t rape you because you’re too ugly’, and ‘I’d rather have my son die in a car accident than dating another man’”
You can fill books with the terrible shit this guy has said and done. He’s currently caught up in a child sex trafficking scandal, because in a recent address he talked about having “chemistry” with fourteen year old girls and following them into a bawdy house full of teenaged sex trafficking victims.
“After his election victory, femicides and transfeminicides have increased exponentially. Perhaps the most brutal was the murder of Quelly da Silva, whose heart was torn from her chest.”
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
“these murders have gained an air of legitimacy under the presidency of a man who says that people are queer because they were not beaten during childhood.”
Ah yes, child beating, the trans cure. Then how do you explain all the trans people who were beaten as a child hmmm? (which, by the way, is statistically significant. Trans people have staggering amounts of abuse as children)
Gonna start smacking the straightness and cisness out of people
“To borrow from Gramsci, elements of organic crisis are at play: this era has been characterised by an economic crisis, a crisis of traditional political parties, and the emergence of ‘new’ ways of thinking. Yet despite intense moments of national protest surrounding flash-points such as the 2014 World Cup, this crisis has developed without ever reaching a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation. We can trace the roots of the crisis to the millions who took to the streets in June 2013 when the self-described progressive Workers’ Party ordered bus fare hikes. The youth that took to the streets broke the paralysis of the masses, expressing the mounting disaffection with the PT’s narrowly ameliorative administration. This street resistance highlighted the contradiction between, on the one hand, the aspirations of the working class for economic and social progress and, on the other, the limits that constrain it under capitalism in a semicolony. It was in this context that the US began a campaign of subversion and naked interference in the political affairs of Brazil.”
“However, while revolutionaries certainly can and should run in elections, the PSOL has demonstrated its own strategic limits by putting electoral victory at the centre of their political practice. Vote-winning became an end of its own, rather than a means for building class struggle”
Electoralism will never upend capitalism. This is an important thing to stress. When revolutionaries participate in elections, it is to spread a message, to gather support, and to have a platform. It is not to win the election and hope that you can legislate capitalism away.
Revolutionaries having a voice in legislature can be a positive thing, for sure, but it should never be seen as the goal and the victory.