A speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month called for the eradication of "transgenderism," but said that doesn't mean he's calling for the elimination of transgender people. If we take him at his word about eradicating the category but not the people, maybe he wants to eliminate cis people. Transition for all!
Yeah, you know that's not what he meant. You may have heard that Tennessee legislators recently looked around at the collapsing climate and collapsing banks and exploding trains and raging pandemic and rising hunger and revival of child labor and decided that the important thing to do was to ...ban drag shows?
You will have noticed the enormous number of anti-LGBTQ bills floated in recent years, and particularly the number directed against Trans people--hundreds of them, and the number of bills seems to grow every year.
In Oregon the ACLU is tracking seven such bills affecting healthcare and education.
Clearly, like attacks on abortion access and reproductive freedom, or measures against immigrants, or against African-American Studies (or what Chris Rufo has called Critical Race Theory), these are forms of scapegoating, measures that divide the working class, deflect attention from the dangers posed by the owning class, and help rally a distressed population in the service of a right wing agenda.
Also clearly, they do not spring out of nowhere.
Cultural campaigns are funded by think tanks and dark money, but the messages proliferate not only on alt-right websites and right-wing television, but also in mainstream venues like The New York Times,
which in February received open letters from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and from Times contributors, among others.
Not all of these attacks operate in the same ways, or even perhaps from entirely the same motives, but they all contribute to a cumulative effect of making the world more dangerous for trans people--and for all of us.
Moreover, like attacks on abortion rights, attacks on trans rights and queer sociality
"aim to enforce the bourgeois family by any means necessary." As Noah Zazanis noted last year in Spectre magazine,
"much like the anti-abortion movement, the anti-trans movement situates children’s bodily autonomy as a gateway to sexual abuse and sex trafficking, despite research showing that a sense of ownership/agentic control over one’s own body protects against such victimization. While most children who experience sexual abuse are victimized by someone close to the family, the heterosexual family never faces such “groomer” accusations. “Grooming” libel is not actually about sexual abuse, but instead targets trans and queer adults as sources of “social contagion.” Providing support and historical or cultural context for trans/queer youth is suspect precisely because it models possibilities outside of cisgender/heterosexual expectations. As such, these attacks are a core tactic of right-wing organizing."
But why do the bourgeois family and cisgender identity--forms so very natural and innate that they must be enforced through ideological propaganda and state legislation--why do challenges to these forms generate such panic?
In Feminism for the 99 Percent, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser argue that “Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit." "Social Reproduction" is all the work of "people-making": not only all of the "activity [to] create and sustain life in the biological sense" but also . . . fashioning people with the “right” attitudes, dispositions, and values—abilities, competences, and skills. All told, people-making work supplies some fundamental preconditions—material, social, cultural—for human society in general and for capitalist production in particular. Without it neither life nor labor power could be embodied in human beings."
Under capitalism, this work has been largely separated from the work of profit making, assigned to women, and subordinated to profit-making. "disguised and disavowed."
"Because capital avoids paying for this work to the extent that it can, . . . it relegates those who perform social-reproductive labor to a position of subordination—not only to the owners of capital, but also to those more advantaged waged workers who can offload the responsibility for it onto others. Those “others” are largely female." But they are also often people of color, poor, and immigrant workers, who usually also perform this labor, unpaid, for their own families.
Social reproduction in capitalism is thus an issue of gender, but also one "shot through at every point by the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation."
The work of people making has historically been enhanced by public social supports; the basic needs for food, housing, healthcare, and education are part of social reproduction.
And, you may have noticed, those are increasingly difficult to come by in the US.
Even pre-pandemic figures look bad; according to US government figures, in 2020, 38.3 million US households were food insecure, and on an average night in 2020, 580 thousand U.S. residents were unhoused.
Back in 2006, the Beyond Marriage statement pointed out that
"the Right has mounted a long-term strategic battle to dismantle all public service and benefit programs and civic values that were established beginning in the 1930s, initially as a response to widening poverty and the Great Depression. The push to privatize Social Security and many other human needs benefits, programs, and resources that serve as lifelines for many . . . is at the center of this attack. …All but the most privileged households and families are in jeopardy as a result of a wholesale right-wing assault on funding for human needs, including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, HIV-AIDS research and treatment, public education, affordable housing, and more. [The] broader conservative agenda of coercive, patriarchal marriage promotion … plays out in … a variety of ways – all of which disproportionately impact poor, immigrant, and people-of-color communities. The purpose is not only to enforce narrow, heterosexist definitions of marriage and coerce conformity, but also to slash to the bone governmental funding for a wide array of family programs, including childcare, healthcare and reproductive services, and nutrition, and transfer responsibility for financial survival to families themselves."
But we are in a period of realignment and transition, and the picture is complicated by both the differences and the congruence between what at first sight look like forces of sexual reaction and sexual liberalism. One side want to outlaw what they claim are violations of divine or natural law; the other supports legal rights like gay marriage and military participation.
As Eric Maroney notes in Tempest, "The ruling class and its ideologues do not agree on how to maintain profitability while also addressing the crisis of care."
The authors of Feminism for the 99% likewise point out that "Increasingly financialized, globalized, and de-familialized, capital is no longer implacably opposed to queer and non-cis sex/gender formations. Nor do large corporations still insist on one and only one normative form of family or sex; many of them are now willing to permit significant numbers of their employees to live outside heterosexual families—that is, provided they toe the line, both at the workplace and at the mall."
Thus we have corporations like Amazon, Dow, Shell, Google, and Pfizer signing on to a petition opposing the wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation, in the belief that queer "workers have assimilated into capital and can be conscripted to provide the same social reproductive labor that cis/hetero families do."
So while the "political Left identifies the source of familial precarity as an intentional set of socioeconomic policies, the Right identifies the source as a lapse in values" and, Maroney suggests, the right has some basis, however misguided, for their thinking.
"Not only has the nature and wages of work changed, but that change has also coincided with a corporate identity politics which can be interpreted as undermining the family and traditional sex roles. Neoliberalism is defined as both a set of market policies and a cultural project that disrupts social patterns. Traditional gender roles then become the political right’s antidote to the alienation and individualism of neoliberalism. . . . the anti-gender movement is not a simple backlash to the relative advances achieved by LGBTQ people and cisgender women; it is also bound up in rejection to the neoliberal order wherein “western liberal elites are equated with global economic elites.”
We might speculate, too, that increasing precarity heightens the need for scapegoats even as the scramble for profit means "sexual dissidence finds a niche as a source of ... advertising images, product lines, lifestyle commodities, and prepackaged pleasures."
We might speculate that the New York Times and similar neoliberal forces are willing to go along with some of the anti-trans panic insofar as they interpret it as serving their interests, in the same way that the anger-fueling algorithms of YouTube
or Fox News generate attention, eyeballs, and thus profit.
The ruling class is internally divided, but not so much that it offers any way out. The rollback of Roe v Wade pleases misogynists, for instance, but also,"Regulating and surveilling childbearing bodies leads to greater precarity, and precarious bodies are more vulnerable to both productive and reproductive exploitation." Or, again, extensions of criminalization both divide populations and help fuel the for-profit punishment industries. Attacks on public education and on what children are allowed to read or teachers to teach not only move toward making for a less-educated, more prejudiced, potentially more docile public, but also help surveil and de-professionalize the work of teaching, foster union busting, and create further openings for the privatization of schooling and the extraction of profit from it.
In short, there are some complexities to these attacks and their motives and goals, but we need to recognize that "attacks on transgender and gender nonconforming people are part of the ruling-class offensive against social provisioning."
As Maroney concludes, "Queer liberation is not just about rolling back the most recent legislative attacks, but also about progressive tax reform, state-funded healthcare, state-funded childcare, and elder care. All these material preconditions are required for the bodily sovereignty of all working people, trans-bodied and cis-bodied people alike." Leftists need to support these goals "in a non-reductive way that acknowledges . . . the unique exploitative conditions that trans people face" and we cannot settle "for a politics of representation that situates trans identities in the context of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion campaigns" because that "not only fails to meet the material needs of trans people, but also [may provide] further credibility to the [right-wing] claim that trans and queer liberation are the conjuring of a wealthy elite."
"The far-right attacks on transgender people stem from profound social anxiety over the crises posed by neoliberal capitalism, which ruthlessly privatizes care and imperils ordinary people’s lives. Scapegoating transgender and gender nonconforming people for transgressing essentialist definitions of gendered family values is thus part and parcel of the privatization of social reproduction necessary for neoliberal capitalism to sustain itself. Every fight against exploitation and oppression is thus a fight for trans liberation, and ...trans liberation struggles [are] fundamental to . . . anti-capitalist politics."
