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
From ‘Sexo y revolución’ (1973) by Argentinian poet Nestor Perlongher:
“Genitalization is destined to remove from the body its function of reproducing pleasure to convert it into an instrument of alienated production, by only sexualising what is indispensable for reproduction.”
“While Stonewall looms large in most contemporary accounts, the political movement against sexual repression can actually be traced as far back as 1862 in Germany. Germany had the largest and most influential socialist movement in the world until WWI, and the German Social Democratic Party fought against the persecution of so-called sodomites”
When Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1885, Eduard Bernstein of the Social Democratic Party wrote:
“The argument that [homosexuality] is unnatural says nothing, because it is as unnatural as the capacity for writing. What is natural and unnatural is, ultimately, related to the development of society … Moral attitudes are historical phenomena … Sexual relations between individuals of the same sex are so widespread that there is no stage in the history of humanity that can be said to have been free from this phenomenon”
“Friedrich Engels reflected on the power that this question has in challenging the capitalist order, saying: ‘It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement, the question of “free love” comes to light’.”
“By approving the penal code of 1922, the Bolsheviks had recognised the weight of medical and legal opinions that recommended decriminalising same-sex relationships and had included in the objectives of the nascent revolution the battle for the liberation of sexuality, the abolition of discrimination and limitations based on sex and gender, and the emancipation of women, with the aim of eliminating all repressive laws that were, in their view, ‘contradictory with a revolutionary conscience and legality’.”
Ooooh, we’re talking about the Bolsheviks now, so I am making a prediction that Guitzel, as a Trotskyist, is about to say something about how the USSR went on to rob the workers of their power and thus smother the potential of the early revolution.
“However, those victories in the early years of the revolution clashed with the reality of the isolation of the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. These failures led to the consolidation of a Soviet bureaucracy that usurped power from the workers. In order to secure its privileges, this bureaucratic regime, known as Stalinism, implemented a counter-revolutionary policy that prevented the Socialist Revolution from expanding throughout the world, and which also had the need to repeal many of the rights won by the heroic workers who fought against 14 different armies to secure proletarian power in the Russian Civil War.”
I WAS RIGHT. Nailed it.
LMFAO EVERY TIME
“In 1928 the setbacks had already begun, when Dr Nikola Pasche Oserki defined homosexuality as a ‘potential danger’, and in 1934 it became a crime with an eight-year prison sentence.”
This is something I want to touch on briefly. There are generally two ways in which people will defend the criminalisation of homosexuality in the USSR.
The first is by arguing that in the context of history, most everywhere criminalised homosexuality and classified it as a mental disorder. And while this is true, it ignores the overwhelming science (especially from the GDR) that pointed to sexual liberation being an essential part of ending oppression. It also ignores the context of the Bolsheviks very deliberately decriminalising homosexuality after the revolution.
The Bolsheviks were members of the World League of Sexual Reform, and attended in Berlin in 1921, Copenhagen in 1928, and Vienna in 1930.
Bolshevik delegate Grigorii Bakis said:
“The present sexual legislation in the Soviet Union is the work of the October Revolution. This revolution is important not only as a political phenomenon which secures the political role of the working class. But also for the revolutions which evolving from it reach out into all areas of life… [Soviet legislation] declares absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon—concerning homosexuality, sodomy and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offences against morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly as so-called “natural” intercourse”
Also, homosexuality being banned everywhere doesn’t suddenly make it not anti-queer. There may have been a general understanding (fueled by religious proselytizing and a reliance on heterosexuality as means of worker reproduction) that homosexuality is wrong, but it was still anti-queer, and therefor worthy of criticism.