cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/258745
There are a lot of self proclaimed ML’s online who have mostly agreeable politics but are also very socially reactionary. They often post something decent like ‘NATO provoked the conflict in Ukraine’ and at the end randomly say ‘this is similar to when liberals pretend trans identities are valid’ they talk about trans identities as part of western societal decay etc. (One thing I have noticed is that they praise tomboys but condemn trans women or even cis men in dresses). How does one expose their lack of materialism around this issue? I honestly think some could be swayed.
I’d be wary about wasting your time on them. People can change over time, but hyper reactionaries like this are pretty far gone.
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Lol tons of libs are transphobic too, nazbols aren’t really that special with their reactionary social opinions
Nazbols/strasserites are infinitely closer being good comrades than libs ever will, it’s such a waste to easily give up trying to explain to them
Libs might actually be the furthest gone. How do you win over someone who aggressively defends the status quo?
A bullet.
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This is definitely the best way.
I find this way satisfactory
For those who are marxists you can pull out the scientific papers that show that trans identities are valid. I forget the names of these papers, but from memory the papers conclude that trans men/women have similar(Its actually complex, but for now this should do) brain patterns as non-trans men/women. I apologize for not having them on hand. If i can find them i will link them in another comment later today
So I found a general overview condescending the past 25 years of research as of 2020(2 years ago) its this one https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/nf-2020-0007/html The research is not conclusive, but there is a trend to what I said prior. I do apologize for my wording in the previous comment it was written during a lunch break. This paper is free for the public and can be downloaded as a pdf. I would advise you to read through the whole thing and take some notes. Considering it was published in 2020 it is possible that new studies have come out supporting one hypothesis or the other. There is the problem of just not enough research being done, but again there is a trend among the research to show that transgender people exist. This paper cites the studies I was remembering so look through them to see what they actually say as well. Sorry for the ramble comrades I hope this helps in some way.
A good video summarizing the science (and actually features a trans person) with sources in the description: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=MitqjSYtwrQ
Nice addition comrade.
(Are they equating gender identity to blackface?)
To play devil’s advocate, many of these people probably think that acknowledging transgender people’s experiences means ignoring biology, since they very likely don’t understand that “sex” and “gender” are not equivalent (not to mention that there are more than two possible sexes for humans)
W.r.t. arguments, maybe mention that not all cultures had/have gender roles corresponding to the biological sex, so there’s nothing inherently “correct” about the “traditional” Western concept of gender (unless they’re also racist and think Western culture is inherently superior)
I’ve done that before and it went ok
Makes sense. It’s probably easier to convince a Marxist than a liberal, but difficult either way
I like this path
Another thing to try would be to ask them why they care about denying transgender people’s identity
Even if they don’t understand it, being trans doesn’t hurt anybody and there’s literally no downside (at least as far as I can tell, who knows what transphobic people think) to just going along with it and respecting their gender identity
Reactionaries believe that being trans is harmful. To women, to children, to society. The same way homophobes believe being not-straight is harmful.
I have thought a lot about a solid pro trans argument. Transphobia is morally wrong but… also scientifically. To start, I’ll ask you, what are you? WHAT… ARE… YOU? You would answer human, okay; what is a human? An ape, what is an ape and yada yada yada. Here we start realizing that biologically, we are not too different form other organic life. We are just a certain combination of chemicals and nutrients that makes us humans. That’s it, we didn’t pick it evolution did. Evolution also didn’t pick Trans individuals to be inferior. The reason we have happened over time to have two main sexes, is because that is what our specific biological history found was the most efficient way to reproduce, with one half as nurturers and the other half as “pollinators”. But keep in mind, genes and chemicals are not set in stone, if they were, we would never have left the single cell stage. Male clown fish transition when populations of females are low. With the development of society and the difficulty of passing on our genes lessen, and so two will the need of binary sexes. I have more for this, but I gotta go, hope this helps.
Transphobia is also anti history and colonial. This is the crux of the matter imo. They dont acknowledge decolonization is instrumental to socialist development. Similar with the patsoc types. They reduce class down to its simplist parts and weaponize it for colonial sensibilities.
You have it one the nail there. But it’s so exhausting to see people screaming “It’s not natural”, like apparently we are all Darwins over here. Religion also plays a part, and with what you are saying.
Its like race science. It was made to justify colonialism.
The “natural” is political. Its a dogwhistle.
I get asked “What are you?” and apparently it’s about my ethnic background ???
Are they even worth wasting time on? I don’t know about the U.S., but here people like that are basically an online vocal minority.
I would have them read Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to learn how internal racism within the CPUSA broke the movement in the US. I find transphobes also tend to be implicitly racist even if they claim not to be. But my thesis in reading about these sort of events is that the most marginalized people in society are the most radicalizable, in agreememt with Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, and in disagreement with Marx. IMO pulling from the marginalized will generate the revolutionary energy needed for things to snowball. When Browder ignored the needs of the majority of CPUSA members who were poor/black, he basically killed their spirit.
PatSocs and Nazbols want to appeal to people who look and think like them. They have no creativity. And tbh that’s why I don’t think their movements will ever get bigger than little conspiracy-theory groups because their tendency only works on specific subsets of a class that’s normally comfortable in liberalism. What we do have to worry about is the spread of their ideas into other communities through osmosis. I very often see posts with Nazbol/Patsoc adjacent talking points (“what if we dressed like nazis?” “What if we adopt nazi memes?”) without the person identifying with that group themselves.
They need to be educated that being uncreative in your thinking isolates you to your own social class. In order to appeal to multiple classes and subclasses you need a universalizing ideology that accepts them all as they are and hope to make them into their best selves.
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The problem is that they don’t believe the identity is valid. If they did it would be easy to say that.
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for some reason they make the dumbass thought that trans people are a “reactionary part of capitalism”
Exactly. It gets call “bourgeoisie decadence” by these ghouls.
Its grossly ironic really…
the term nazbol is so useless, some random political party in Russia that disbanded after like a year. Call them transphobes and move on
