Last year during a break in the local anti-war meeting there was a short disagreement about the transgender issue.  The woman could barely conceal her disdain for the idea that men could claim to be women by wearing a dress and lipstick (as she put it).  The man thought that it was an important issue that had to be addressed.

The woman was primarily a Palestine solidarity activist but recognised the war in Ukraine as one in which hundreds of thousands of people were being killed and that had the potential to escalate with catastrophic results for the world.  The man thought the issue had important implications for women’s rights and should be taken up by socialists.

This brought to mind the passage in ‘What is to be Done’ by Lenin ‘that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects…’ 

So, the questions that naturally arise are about the demands that are raised by the trans activist movement and whether socialists should support them. We can start by looking at the Gender Identity ideology that grounds the politics of the movement and their ‘allies’.

Not all trans people support the same demands or Gender Identity ideology, and this ideology has various features and makes dissimilar claims.  What is hardly in dispute however, is that trans people should not be subject to unjustified discrimination or violence, and deserve respect based on our common humanity.  The specific claims of Gender Identity ideology are particular to a certain strain of trans political activism and make claims which go beyond this response.

In a series of articles in the British ‘Weekly Worker’ these issues are addressed, and in the fourth part the author writes–‘I use ‘trans people’ for the present purposes to mean people who wish to live permanently in the gender identity polar opposite to that ascribed to the biological sex in which they were born.’

At first reading this can be taken to mean that the issue is men, for example, who wish to live as women. Except, if this were the issue there would hardly be a dispute.  Few are going to object to men wearing women’s’ clothes, make-up etc. and presenting themselves as women, in so far as they are able, in their everyday lives.

Gender identity ideology asserts much more than this; it asserts, for example, that men are women if they consider – ‘identify’– as women.  As the mantra goes – ‘transwomen are women’.  This is stated, not as a metaphor, but as a literal truth.

This is the main problem with the definition as presented in the ‘Weekly Worker’; if we must assume that the word gender in ‘gender identity’ means something other than what it has (until this controversy) been traditionally regarded to mean – as simply another word for sex.  Instead, it is a word that is employed to substitute for sex and thereby erase it. In the next few occasional posts I will look at the ideology and the claims of the movement, beginning by asking what ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ mean.

Forward to part 2