The Rise and Fall of Transgenderism
By: Aphra
1 July 2024
We cannot grasp fully the spectacular rise of transgenderism, as a social and political movement, outside of an understanding of capitalism’s recent, and still current preference for the ideological over the overtly coercive when it is dealing with domestic threats to its economic and political dominance.
We will not understand the possibility of an equally spectacular fall of transgenderism, unless we see it as an essentially distracting and dividing movement, and one whose usefulness to the people in suits may now be over.
We will not be able to take steps to mitigate the wider effects of transgenderism’s demise if we are doing hyper-capitalism’s bidding, and tearing out each other’s throats.
– – –
The tactic neo-liberalism has used, and to devastating effect, is to ideologically distract, divert, and divide the domestic opposition, with the option of crushing it with force kept in reserve.
The shift into neo-liberal, hyper-capitalism from the 1980s saw the international ruling class begin to deal with its domestic middle class more ideologically, while it stepped up its coercive measures against sections of its domestic working class and tightened the screws on workers internationally.
In Aotearoa-New Zealand in the mid 1980s, the hijacked Labour Party handed out indigenous, women’s and gay rights with one hand, and it used the other to dismantle workers’ rights and to help corporations and individuals asset strip the state to an extent and at a speed unparalleled anywhere else.
In the west, the powerful, albeit not wholly sororal, women’s liberation movement split into one of the two main streams – radical and lesbian separatist, and so-called third-wave, liberal feminism. The once powerful strand of socialist feminism slipped into the service of women within wider movements or into such slots in the academy that were still open to socialists.
As identity politics, which had its roots in the interest group politics of the left, burgeoned, women’s studies in universities became gender studies.
The gay and lesbian liberation movement was marshalled into so-called queer theory and praxis, which dovetailed nicely with third-wave feminism.
Civil rights, anti-racist, and indigenous liberation movements, already weakened (in the US especially), by coercive measures such as assassinations, targeted incarceration, and the calculated saturation of working-class communities with drugs, were side-tracked, in part by identity politics, and in part by the emergence of a middle class with a financial and social stake in the economic and political status quo.
System-approved scholars proclaimed the end of the grand narratives, i.e., Marxist economics, historical materialism, and the international class struggle.
While hyper-capitalism went full globalist, its compliant governments promoted forms of hyper-nationalism which are now tipping into extreme right-wing nationalism and ethno-nationalism of the sort that has poisoned Israeli society.
Within nation states, the ideology of the Self-centred individual, helped in breaking down collectives already under stress from wider social, economic and technological changes.
To help maintain the illusion of democratic governance and of free choice and opportunity, hyper-capitalism’s compliant governments created a buffer zone, a mix of managers, professionals, technocrats, and celebrities – the administrators and maintainers of the system who are also major beneficiaries of it.
That zone acts as a largely non-permeable layer allowing the bulk of profits to flow to the very top, regulating what comes back down to the very bottom, and most importantly, it obscures the real holders and wielders of power from view and from any form of accountability.
It’s obvious that people are much less likely to want to destabilise a system in which they and theirs are doing very nicely.
If such people can latch on to social issues which objectively do nothing to put the wider system at risk, but which serve to assuage their social consciences, they will grab them with both hands, and they are likely to get angry when someone tells them their politicking is reactionary, or opportunistic, or infantile.
– – –
It is a fact that most current women’s and indigenous rights, and all LGBT rights in the west, have been granted by Neo-lib friendly or fully compliant governments.
That could only happen because those rights are forms of conditional equality within capitalism, i.e., formal and social rights which pose no immediate threat to it and may even be an opportunity. If the granting of such rights does result in conditions which pose a real and immediate threat, the rights would be rescinded, or key movements and individuals, crushed.
These rights, in essence, are both nominal and conditional, for example, the formal right to vote is meaningless if there are no readily accessible ways to register and to cast a vote, or if there is no political difference between the parties. (1)
In a deeply competitive, highly stratified and often nepotistic world in which an increasing number of people are economically precarious, the formal right to equality of employment opportunity is the right to compete in an inherently skewed and inequitable system. The right to equal opportunity in employment becomes obviously hollow when there are no jobs at all.
The right to same-sex marriage has less relevance if both parties are so impoverished, they cannot afford to set up house together. Similarly, the rights for gay couples to adopt kids or to use a commercial surrogate are meaningless to those who are homeless or who can’t afford to buy the necessities of life for themselves, let alone a child.
The right to female-only services and facilities becomes meaningless if the services and facilities themselves are disappearing or being privatised and priced out of the reach of many women. (2)
Legal rights within capitalism are hugely important but they are not and must not be the end goal because they are always conditional and are necessarily reflective of the inherently inequitable system which grants them.
That same system can and will rescind them in a heartbeat – if and when it suits the people in suits to move back to the overtly coercive and rigidly stratified.
That is what is being signalled at present, and trans rights are the canary in the coal mine.
Transgenderism had its roots in the USA, the home of neo-liberalism. US cultural hegemony is still such that its influence in the initial spread of transgenderism across the anglophone world, and the motivations behind it, must be acknowledged if we are to prevent the backswing of the socially conservative opinion pendulum from wiping out far more than just trans rights.
If there is one lesson history and current events should teach us, it is that when anger and fear mix with disgust and create feelings of revulsion, ordinary people can be propelled into committing or enabling or turning a blind eye to the most extreme atrocities.
Never forget, life for those committed to neo-liberalism is cheap unless it’s their life or the lives of those they value or need.
Here in Aotearoa-NZ, right-wing politicians are applying a crude cost-benefit analysis to saving native species from extinction. It is but a small step to applying that same crude, self-interested calculation to human beings.
If you allow yourself to be distracted, diverted and divided by any single issue at this horrifyingly dangerous point in history, you are complicit in a looming catastrophe.
Notes
- As a case in point, the Democratic Party, which can only be called left-wing in the context of right-wing US electoral politics, is split between extremist hawks who would tip the world into all out warfare in defence of neo-liberal capitalism, and progressive liberals obsessed with the issue of free choice in respect of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. The latter are so immersed in the mire of the Self they can’t see who created the mire or whose interests it serves.
- The right for women to be imprisoned only with members of the female sex becomes an empty, opportunistic mantra in the mouths of those who are opposed to gender self ID, if those people are not also committed to wider action to stop the state imprisoning a grossly disproportionate number of poor women and women of colour.
Share this entry
1
reply
Contact Us
womensliberationaotearoa@gmail.com
Please email us for membership details, essays you’d like published or anything else you’d like to bring to our attention.
Very well explained. I agree with most of it, especially the main outline of historical developments. I strongly agree that neo-liberalism has “to devastating effect”, ideologically distracted, diverted, and divided the domestic opposition.
I also agree that neoliberalism has siphoned off the aspects of feminism and LGB campaigns that suit its purposes, while removing the revolutionary attempts to completely change both capitalist and patriarchal systems in order to create a more equitable society.
Where I disagree, I think, comes down to me seeing capitalism and patriarchy as 2 separate, but interacting and overlapping systems. These 2 systems are both present in current liberal democracies. In my view, feminism is for the sex class of the female sex, and struggles against patriarchal systems because they delegate females to secondary status.
So, while transgenderism has been divisive and complicates the current oppressive operations of neo-liberal capitalism, I don’t see the outcomes as necessarily being the original intention. Certainly, I think capitalists, and right-wing conservatives have latched onto the already emerging and strongly spreading gender ID ideology and used it for their own purposes.
As Jane Clare Jones has shown in ‘The Political Erasure of Sex’, embedded in the first developments of transgenderism is the intention to erase natal sex as a political category.
However, I also agree with Aphra that both anti-capitalists and feminists need to attend to, and struggle against, a lot more issues than solely focusing on transgenderism. Furthermore, Aphra’s saying that,
“Legal rights within capitalism are hugely important but they are not and must not be the end goal because they are always conditional and are necessarily reflective of the inherently inequitable system which grants them.
That same system can and will rescind them in a heartbeat – if and when it suits the people in suits to move back to the overtly coercive and rigidly stratified.”
I add that within patriarchal systems, any legal gains for females are also conditional, as we are now seeing. In the case of the home of transgenderism, the USA, the legal gains for females have always lagged far behind those gained in other liberal democracies.