Against trans liberalism

Antiassimilation versus becoming-heteronormative

The American gay liberation movement originally was founded by communists. And some of the earlier thinkers on trans sexuality in Germany were anarchists. But if you looked to the simpering liberal policy wonks in the gay and trans rights movement today, you would think otherwise. According to Democratic Party doctrine, the highest political currency among both the electorate and the elected is symbolism. The deal we are sold goes this way: if the electorate signals this way, the elected like Biden will symbolically signal trans acceptance and that will make it all real. And this is how it has proceeded , Democrats and their corporate funders march in pride and work with big liberal nonprofits that lobby and Biden declares non-binary day during his presidency. The Deed is done. But anyone who is happy with this situation must be okay with impotence and failure to achieve anything politically. It is just a patron-client relationship in the symbolic arena. And every year offers a new crop of wanna-be trans nonprofiteers eager to pull a nonprofit paycheck and tell themselves they are doing good for the world. When you get paid a livable salary to do your activism, you don’t care if what you do actually changes anything. This is the way of the lgbt nonprofit industrial complex. And, this is the sum total result of decades of lgbt entryism in the Democratic Party.

When this kind of withering symbolic quid pro quo is all that trans people can get out of respectability addled liberal politicians, it is easy to see why Sarah McBride might suggest the Democratic Party withdraw from public support of trans people! There just isn’t any lobbying money in it, unless there are partisan points to score. The first and second order cynicism of first activists and then politicians who know they don’t have to really do anything to get votes and support from the lgbt nonprofit political operatives (and their eager naive cronies among the public) who think there is simply no other kind of politics, then the pressure adds up to nothing. Begging and pleading for symbolic winks and exchanging positive publicity is not any way to motivate real change. This cycle just encourages cowardice from everyone while conservative lobbies make concrete legislation that bans lgbt people from public life.

Instead of being in a self cannibalizing cycle, lgbt people should make real demands from the system and threaten destitution against all the parts of it that don’t serve us. LGBT issues in labor organizing is a step toward this, especially when our issues are used as direct demands of immediate supervisors. LGBT organizers should learn lessons from far left debate about organizational forms and that they don’t and won’t make greater demands shows how many of them do what they do purely for clout and lack a program or vision of actual change. We need as a community to be more than a simpering third rail lobby for symbolic winks and nods that we can sell back to our friends as “progress”.

Gay liberalism has a long history that goes all the way back to the Weimar Republic. Trans liberalism is newer but shares the same DNA. Trans people need to form organizations that will support us in organizing workplaces and apartment complexes. Organizing in electoral politics is doomed. Trans liberals don’t perceive the power of organizing in workplaces and apartment complexes and worship lobbying and politicians. Lobbying has not uplifted trans communities. Forming our own organizations has. Trans anarchists are closer but many of them are concentrated on politicians and the internet and cannot focus on building local organizations. CLR James’ call for black workers to be in a potential vanguard is similar to what should happen with trans workers. Trans workers should form worker power organizations outside the state and in labor organizations . Trans people that continually beg the state for support just hope to be the next token that the US state pinkwashes itself with like Israel did as it genocided Palestine. The western empires that many trans liberals lobby are guilty of many genocides. Do trans people need to assimilate within the capitalist state and be associated with the genocides it’s many incarnations are guilty of? I think not!