A chairdre! I’m leading a discussion group on this collection of essays, and I thought this might be of interest to some of my Internet comrades.

Firstly, the essay collection in question: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf

Alright, so I’m reading through this in order to prepare some notes for my discussion. Thought it might be fun to have a few discussion threads here. This first thread is for the lengthy editors’ introduction. I will make a separate thread for each essay as I read them.

I’ll grab some quotes, type up some thoughts, hope I can spark a discussion! If not, that’s fine, I at least hope someone will benefit from having the link to the PDF.

I’ll edit this post with links to the subsequent posts (though I’m only going to be doing the intro and the first essay today, I’m a busy lady).

Edit 1: The discussion for the first essay by Noah Zazanis is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/396403

Edit 2: The discussion for the second essay by Michelle O’Brien is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/397671

Edit 3: The discussion for the third essay by Rosa Lee is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/401480

Edit 4: The discussion for the fourth essay by Jules Joanne Gleeson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/402441

Edit 5: The discussion for the fifth essay by Nat Raha is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/408500

Edit 6: The discussion for the sixth essay by Virgínia Guitzel is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/412487

Edit 7: The discussion for the seventh essay by Kate Doyle Griffiths is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322

Edit 8: The discussion for the eighth essay by Farah Thompson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/417377

Edit 9: The discussion for the ninth essay by JN Hoad is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/424986

Edit 10: The discussion for the tenth essay by Zoe Belinsky is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/437038

Edit 11: The discussion for the eleventh essay by CAACD is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/444545

Edit 12: The discussion for the eleventh essay by Nathaniel Dickson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508468

  • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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    91 year ago

    “The role of this collection is not to birth a new perspective: clearly, Transgender Marxism exists already. For those minded to find it, marginal publications and private accounts have fostered this vein of thought for years. It does not fall to us to bring into being a coupling of transgender theory and Marxist politics. Transgender Marxism is already a flourishing field, if one that has found itself confined to the most esoteric and fleeting outlets.”

    I uh, need to find these esoteric outlets please

    • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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      71 year ago

      “Transgender life is harsh enough that many are easily led to conclude that our conditions are beyond redemption; that no centre-left party or Third Sector trend can be relied upon to truly loosen the grip of oppression”

      this also speaks to the deep co-option of representation politics by liberal parties that offer only tokenization and coerced assimilation without any real liberation or protections

      • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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        1 year ago

        “Already, through this unsteady process of parallel analysis and reinvention, an array of trans people have deployed historical materialist approaches to gender. Our struggle for political emancipation has become understood as one progression within a broader process of class war, and our transitions as reshaping the demands of social reproduction.”

        We had started talking about this in reading Caliban and the Witch, that gender as a class construction is built around controlling the means of reproduction. That by virtue of existing, queer bodies are divorced from an inherent reliance on reproductive relations

        • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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          81 year ago

          “Civic identity is always selectively extended in its official form. . . and then tacitly undermined by structural dispossession. This tension is one that confounded emancipatory movements of the twentieth century: formal emancipatory processes generated new constituencies willing to ‘quit while they were ahead’, and retire to private life, rather than press for more contentious ‘structural’ transformation, or through to social revolution”

          We see this a lot with Pride movements. Despite the Stonewall riots being instigated by trans women of colour, once equal rights for cis gay men were enshrined, much of the radical nature of the queer liberation movement sputtered out. White gay men saw themselves as having secure their liberation, and rather than risk losing that protection, often turned away from the wider queer liberatory struggle. In this way we have corporate Pride events that celebrate white cis gayness, attended by banks and cops, while Black trans women still face disproportionate violence and an overwhelming lack of social and medical care

          • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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            71 year ago

            "“The ‘mainstream’ of trans activism has focused on smoothing over the process of transition as it runs through institutions, including those belonging to the state. Our domination by state bureaucracy, by landlords and employers, is often enough treated as a given, to be reclad with sensitivity training workshops and pronoun go-rounds.”

            Pronoun go-rounds is killing me here. Ohhh, your boss doesn’t give you bathroom breaks and pays you pennies on the dollar for what he extracts from you? Well, at least HR gave that talk about pronouns. Good luck finding a trans inclusive shelter when you’re evicted next month though, hopefully they won’t misgender you when they kick you out.

            Liberal trans activism really does see such incredibly floor level acceptance as a rights victory though. Like nah, that’s not liberation, that’s just the bare minimum for you to talk to me.

            • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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              71 year ago

              “those groups, self-styled as ‘communities’, that are clearly riven by the divided class positions and interests of its participants. Too often we have found ourselves expected to set aside questions of exploitation or modes of production, to quiet that part of us that might detect any differentiation within the commonality. The consequence is always the same: it will always require a dose of bad faith to maintain the conceit that all transgender people share precisely the same interests.”

              This is what gets me most. When affluent white women speak on behalf of “the trans community” as if their interests or experiences provide a framework for the totality of transness. When one of the largest struggles for trans liberation is escape from exploitation, poverty, violence and lack of medical care, then having Charlotte Social Clymer the US hegemon-pushing military babe speak on behalf of the “trans community” is absolutely void of meaning.

              It’s a complete reduction to bioessentialism. That there is anything that ties a Black trans woman living on the streets, or a nonbinary Iranian whose entire way of life has been decimated by the very US interventionist military Social Clymer works for, to her beyond that they were all born with a penis?? Truly wild, and the absolute limits of what can be gained by “representation politics”

              • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                1 year ago

                "“There is no thoroughly anti-capitalist politics that does not include a critique of the household as a social unit of capitalist governance. There is no critique of value that succeeds without becoming queer”

                You heard it here first folks, anti-capitalism is the gay agenda.

                But from a more serious perspective, it’s true that the construct of the household is built around reproduction of labour forces, and also competition between discrete family units rather than a wider community-focused value system

                Edit: and don’t even get me started on the way that the Fordian nuclear family is used to prop up American banking through demanding every individual household assume debt through mortgage, car loan and credit lines.

                • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                  31 year ago

                  “Capital and its mediating categories do not just direct distribution of a social surplus. They are actively productive of the ways of understanding and behaving towards which it leads us. The motions of capital link subjectivity with objectivity, form with content, abstract with concrete, universal with particular. They do this through the racialised and gendered processes of making demands on time and surplus labour, organising speculative operations into contractual bonds, underwriting the differential extension of credit and life chances to various classes and strata, apportioning labour between sectors and households, and demarcating certain modes of comportment and expression as socially valorised and compensated – or as demonised, excluded and open to intense forms of socially-validated violence”

                  socially validated violence is one of the prime methods through which capitalism enforces itself in our daily lives. The exploitation of the global south is built around the demonisation of the entire national character of those countries which are most ripe for resource extraction, manufacturing our consent and complicity.

                  The prison industrial complex thrives on the dehumanization of its victims. The valorisation of cops coupled with the immediate attack on the character of the so-called criminals is an integral part of crafting a social acceptance of modern-day slavery, a concerted effort to divert our attention from the ultimate failure of emancipation.

  • Catradora-Stalinism☭
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    1 year ago

    Comrade, does anyone remember the discourse on Bridget? Like the trans woman from that one japanese game?