First published at What Is To Be Done? (Canada)
Across the English-speaking world, trans rights are under attack. In the U.S., Donald Trump signed a flood of anti-trans executive orders, forcing trans women into men’s prisons, banning trans women from women’s sports, and cutting funds to gender-affirming care. The states are enacting their own anti-trans bills, such as bans on trans people from using the bathroom of their gender identity, and licenses for doctors to discriminate against gay and trans people. Recently, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The budget reconciliation bill currently before Congress (dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill”) could ban Medicare funds for gender-affirming surgeries and HRT, effectively detransitioning 275,000 trans Americans unless they can come up with hundreds of dollars every month to cover the costs themselves.
In Britain, the Supreme Court ruled that your gender is defined by your sex assigned at birth, essentially legalizing (and in some cases mandating) discrimination against trans people. The National Health Service has entirely stopped providing gender-affirming care to minors. Even for adults, accessing HRT is becoming increasingly difficult, and publicly-funded surgeries are almost completely inaccessible.
We might feel safe here in Canada, but a few provinces have already enacted anti-trans legislation, and the federal government may be next. Notably, Alberta banned trans women in women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors, and both Alberta and Saskatchewan are forcing teachers to out trans students to their parents. Quebec recently announced plans to sort prisoners on the basis of “anatomical sex.” While no anti-trans legislation has been tabled federally so far, Mark Carney agreed with a far-right “journalist” when asked whether “biological women” should have the right to their own spaces. When asked how many genders there are, he responded “in terms of sex, there are two”. While Carney generally tries to avoid these “culture war” topics, such a weak answer indicates that he won’t try very hard to stop anti-trans legislation if the Conservatives table it.
All over, trans people face discrimination in housing and employment, daily harassment, and rampant hate crimes. Our testimonies are rarely taken seriously, as was the case with the recent murder of Jonathan Joss, who famously voiced John Redcorn in King of the Hill. His husband Tristan Kern de Gonzales (who is trans) testified that it was a hate crime, but the San Antonio police denied it. These horrifying stories are leading countless trans people and allies to wonder why decades of progress seem to be unraveling, and what we can do about it. Even the previous legal protections were insufficient, so the question isn’t how to return to the old status quo, but how do we advance forward to full trans liberation?
Why Are These Attacks Happening?
Clearly, these attacks aren’t about protecting children’s health or women’s safety. Study after study shows that gender-affirming care is a safe and effective way to treat gender dysphoria across all age groups, and forcing trans women into men’s bathrooms or prisons increases the chance of violence. As we’ve argued previously, the idea that we can make sports fair by forcing trans women into men’s leagues is illusory.
In reality, capitalist governments are advancing these discriminatory policies for two reasons. First is to sow divisions in the working class and trick cis people into blaming trans people for their problems instead of wealthy capitalists, who’re making record profits while most people can’t keep up with the rising cost of living. With such debilitating costs to higher education, especially in the U.S., sports scholarships are one of the only ways millions of Americans can afford to go to college. Only a few athletes get these scholarships, so demagogues blame trans athletes for “stealing” opportunities instead of tackling the more fundamental issue of rising tuition fees. They also use the anti-trans panic as a bludgeon against teachers’ unions. In some jurisdictions, teachers might face discipline for not outing trans kids. Demagogues accuse teachers of “corrupting” kids with “woke gender ideology” as an attempt to worsen public opinion of teachers, reducing opposition to funding cuts and making it easier for the employer to crush teachers’ strikes. More generally, the anti-trans panic weakens all strikes that involve trans workers, because demagogues are able to sow distrust in one’s trans coworkers, dividing the picket line and clearing the way for cuts. The struggle of workers and the struggle for trans rights are intrinsically linked, so dividing one against the other hurts the entire working class.
However, perhaps the more fundamental reason for the anti-trans panic is the crisis of the bourgeois family. Under capitalism, the ruling class relies on individuals, usually women, to raise the next generation of workers for free. Capitalists have an interest in maintaining rigid gender roles, namely, the expectation that boys will grow up to be productive labourers and girls will grow up to be nurturing mothers. Conservatives have long pushed back against perceived threats to this setup, from the entrance of women into the workforce, to the rise in acceptance for gay and lesbian couples, and now the idea that girls are being “corrupted” to become men. Of course, many trans men give birth, but the idea that gender is more flexible than Victorian-era “common sense” would have us think, and can include nonbinary genders, throws a wrench in the rigid gender expectations capitalism relies on. Attacks on abortion rights, the rise of “pronatalist” conservatism, and growing ostracization of trans people are all attempts by capitalists to reassert the expectation that a girl’s role in society is to reproduce the next generation of workers for free. In this sense, the interests of women, trans people, and workers are all united. The struggle for trans rights must be a feminist struggle, and one that unites workers of all genders against our common enemy, the capitalist ruling class.
Liberals Can’t Be Trusted
While liberals sometimes talk a good game on trans rights, their reforms never go far enough, and their unwillingness to address the problems of working people opens the door for subsequent administrations to roll back those half-measures. Even though Canada has relatively strong legal protections for trans people, gender-affirming care is limited by budgetary considerations. The waitlists for mastectomies and genital surgeries often span multiple years, and other surgeries are scarcely covered at all. Even HRT can be difficultto obtain due to the outdated education and unwarranted caution of many family doctors. And this is when times are good. If there’s a budget crunch, gender-affirming care will likely be the first to go, because public education about its life-saving qualities is weak at best, making it easy for politicians to cast it as a “luxury.”
Generally speaking, liberal politicians like Carney wish to avoid “divisive” questions like trans rights so they can focus on their main goals like cutting taxes for the rich. They might support certain trans rights under mass pressure from trans people and allies, but will roll back those rights if there’s more pressure from the other side. Either way, the politician’s individual views matter less than the balance of forces on the ground. For example, last December when public opinion on trans issues was swinging to the right, Joe Biden scrapped plans to protect trans athletes, and signed a bill stripping gender-affirming care from soldiers’ children. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris declined multiple opportunities to defend trans rights, simply replying that “we should follow the law.”
They thought that by avoiding the “culture war,” voters will keep them in power, but they underestimated people’s willingness to try anything to dig themselves out of a bad economic situation. Only a minority of Americans oppose anti-discrimination protections for trans people, gender-affirming care for minors, or the right of trans people to use the bathroom of their gender identity, yet widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden administration led most Americans to either stay home on election day or vote for anyone they perceived as “change.” In this way, Biden’s unwillingness to tackle the capitalist roots of workers’ problems paved the way for Trump. Even though most workers’ livelihoods worsened during Biden’s administration, Harris’s election message was essentially, “stay the course.” With no one pointing to the big capitalists profiting off people’s misery, Trump was able to point the blame at oppressed people, particularly immigrants and trans people. A mass movement that unites workers on the basis of shared class interest could cut across people’s prejudices against trans people, but lacking such a movement, demagogues like Trump have free rein to divide and conquer.
Workers’ Action to Defend Trans Communities
Trans rights aren’t won in courtrooms, parliaments, or corporate boards. The rich and powerful might respect trans rights on occasion, but only when there’s mass pressure from below. Strikes, sit-ins, protests, blockades, and mass assemblies have made great progress advancing rights for workers, women, racialized people, and gay people, and have the potential to advance trans rights, too. Even right-wing politicians like Doug Ford have been forced to backtrack on anti-LGBT attacks when there were large protests and walkouts from students. Which capitalist party is in power has little to do with it. In the UK for example, Theresa May’s Conservative government was less bad on trans rights than Keir Starmer’s Labour government, not because May is a progressive champion, simply because political pressures changed.
Unlike the capitalists, who have an interest in dividing workers against each other and upholding restrictive gender norms, workers have a common interest in our collective emancipation. In the labour movement, there’s a slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” expressing the fact that all workers, regardless of background, have an interest in fighting for each other’s rights. The same profit motive that drives capitalists to cut costs on gender-affirming care and gender-neutral facilities drives them to cut wages and benefits for everyone. The same cops who harass trans people and turn a blind eye to anti-trans hate crimes also break up striking workers’ picket lines and arrest labour leaders.
This shared struggle against a common enemy has given significant sectors of the labour movement an intuitive sense of solidarity with oppressed people, including trans people. This solidarity came to the fore when transphobic bigots organized their “1 Million March 4 Children” in 2023, and the Ontario Federation of Labour called on workers to join counter-protests to prevent the bigots from intimidating LGBT communities. Unions like the USW, CUPE, and OPSEU mobilized members in support. It was an impressive show of force, with counter-protestors outnumbering the bigots 10 to 1 in some cases. Unions have the potential to use this tactic more often, for example mobilizing members to defend Drag Queen Story Hour. Unions can even set up workers’ self-defence committees to patrol working-class neighbourhoods and defend marginalized people in a way police neverwill.
However, to get the labour movement to the point that it’ll organize such actions — and for the LGBT community to trust their union siblings with their protection — it’ll take lots of patient rank-and-file organizing. The Canadian labour movement is largely guided by an “I’ve got mine” mentality, where workers look out for their own direct needs instead of the interests of the working class as a whole. Workers will need to learn from experience that our interests are united, and the conscious intervention of socialists can help drive home this point. Especially with so many capitalist news outlets spewing anti-trans bigotry, it’s more important than ever that workers have our own outlet and collective voice that can counter their narratives.
At the end of the day, transphobia needs to be targeted at its roots: the capitalist system that divides people into marketable demographics, keeps us fighting each other for scraps, and relies on binary gender norms to reproduce the next generation of workers for free. While fighting for reforms in the here and now, we should set our sights on overthrowing this rotten system and replacing it with a system of workers’ democratic control of production. Under socialism, trans people would be able to live our lives in freedom and dignity, with full healthcare coverage, full access to gender-neutral facilities, and full protections against discrimination. No one would have the incentive to whip up anti-trans hate, and those who do would have the full force of the workers’ government against them. We could mobilize the educational resources to grind transphobic prejudice out of existence, and people would worry less about “fairness” in sports because no one’s livelihood would depend on athletic competition. We would relate to each other not as competitors for scarce jobs or rungs on a corporate ladder, but as fully human.