Hello hello hello, time for the next 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
The intro discussion with links to all the essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Feel free to join in on the discussion, I hope we all have a chance to learn something new together <3
Today’s essay is The Bridge Between Gender and Organising by Farah Thompson.
Farah Thompson is a Black, bisexual trans woman who lives in San Diego. She advocates for anti-imperialism, LGBT rights, decriminalisation of drug use and sex work, and self-determination of Black and colonized peoples. Her writing is found on longpaleroad.com
Edit: The discussion continues with an essay by JN Hoad here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/424986
“And as far as I understood it, a failed man like myself is still a man. I was still a probable threat. ‘Self-discipline’ could be demanded of me in ways that could never be reasonably imposed on those readily accepted as women. If I was nothing but a failed man with a fucked up voice, a desire for true love and ambitions to boot, then the least I could do was reduce my collateral damage. That was how I understood myself, in relation to my abuser, to my sister, and to any other woman who stood next to me – even in admiration. Maybe I would never be an outright good person, but at least I could try not to repeat the echo of male domination. I could resist the regulatory violence that has defined my past, and still serves as the focus for my neuroses.”
What a bleak view that is often presented to men as the only way to truly better themselves. Not through liberation, but through being forever afraid of their destructive potential, to know that they are always a threat to the women around them, even those they most love. That they can, through vigilance, contain the monstrosity of “manhood” but never be rid of it. An approach not founded in freedom from class hierarchies, not founded through mutual love; rather an approach that seeks to reinforce gender binaries, that seeks to chain women to the role of victim and men to the role of abuser, founded through mutual hatred (the hatred women feel for men, and the hatred men must therefor feel for themselves).
“After all, if I am really a girl or am really a worthwhile, innocent person, I should not have lived like this. I should not have made mistakes like a man, overshared to a friend and had them tell me how irritating I am to talk to, wore the wrong clothes, said the wrong things, used the wrong tone of voice.”
“Poor and Black, I had a difficult time feeling like a person, much less a woman.”
“Alice Walker’s anti-Semitism seems to suggest the same reflex of hostility towards minorities, scapegoating us for society’s ills.”
Holy shit, everyone knows The Color Purple but I was not aware that Alice Walker was like, a David Icke supporter??? Looked that up and just. wow.
“Sometimes I hate myself for not adhering to the performance of what a woman is supposed to be. I find myself falling short of matching an ever-shifting ideal, whether that’s docile or hypercritical, because of a battle between my survival and what wider society allows.”
“I saw in real time how socialist organising gave people frameworks to care for others and advance their interests in a common struggle, from people striking against student debt and crowdfunding for basic/debt payoff, to online communities where sex workers detailed encounters with police who preyed on them in the name of ‘public good’”
Despite the prevalence of online Marxists trying to decry “sex work” as some liberal white woman erasure of the victims of trafficking, it’s important to remember that the majority of Marxist feminists understand that sex work is the ultimate expression of capitalist appropriation of labour and reduction to bodies as a resource.
Especially in queer and Black socialist theory, sex workers form an integral part of the proletariat, and have been at the forefront of radical and revolutionary struggles. As Marx said: sex work is “only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker."
“As marginalised as I am, without people bringing together the totalising nature of class struggle into the streets and through media, I would have been even more isolated. Without class consciousness, my work would be much more limited.”
“While cis people like to parade around us, get some fashion tips and illicit pleasure from us, show support for us in the abstract, we are still treated like either dirty secrets or used to buttress their own egos.”
“Angela Davis in Reflections on the Black Women’s Role in the Community of Slaves spoke of Black women being both gendered and depersonified to fulfil particular roles as ‘women’, but in a manner much different to white women. Their affirmation as ‘women’ was in service of extracting labour from them, for capital and white supremacy.”
“Trans women are often placed front and centre. In the media we’re represented as objects of prurient fascination, illicit transgression, or more often, vilification, and sometimes we’re even invited to do the work. But that is not the same as being seen as human. We serve some purpose which is not our own, proving a point about the experiences of those who do not share our experiences (the more reliably human). And then, we’re gone”
“Expressions that were once tolerated, even cherished, in some pre-colonial societies are now subject to debates about them being ‘Western influences’ by reactionaries”
“The only way trans women can answer all these pressures is by force, force alongside other marginalised peoples, because force is all we are allowed to be defined by. Force from dominant actors sets the limits of our subjugated life. If every step we make forms craters anyway, why retreat? If we displace space and time, and a presumed peace, just by standing around, where can we really hide? In this shifting context, poverty and pathologisation become the only stable things, and from that ethereal ground, we blossom”