Question: To what extent is the capitalist system intrinsically hostile to trans people’s rights…

Question: To what extent is the capitalist system intrinsically hostile to trans people’s rights and existence?

I felt like I was answering someone’s Marxist reading group homework here, and to be absolutely clear, I do not consider myself a Marxist. All the same it’s a question I’ve answered a few times and never anywhere that sticks around.

So, my answer

Capitalism is a system which maximises wealth extraction via labour value. It’s a machine which is intrinsically hostile to most people’s rights and existence, but the ways this plays out is different for different types of people. The trans community is very small and therefore cheap in terms of pinkwashing capitalism. So superficial trans rights reforms are a common way of buying good publicity for the ruling class.

Of course these don’t help most trans people (especially those who are still exploited under capitalism in various ways), but our mainstream charities aren’t in a position to acknowledge that, because that would put fundraising via the state or via wealthy philanthropists at risk.

We saw this cynical and short lived championing of “Trans Rights" with eg the Theresa May Tory party attempting to use GRA reform as a cheap win in 2016, before immediately throwing it out 2 years later when brand testing with anti trans reactionaries made it less cost effective in terms of effort versus bad publicity (despite the public overwhelmingly supporting trans rights reforms).

Readers with a longer memory will remember that Theresa May was known for having voted against LGBT rights many times in the past — it’s not plausible that she really cared about bringing in trans rights reforms — and at the same time the Tory party was in a great deal of controversy for the apparent deaths of over one hundred thousand disabled people in connection with their welfare reforms under austerity. Additionally, many trans people have pointed out that our most urgent problems are things like the appalling underfunding of NHS gender identity services (and around 2015/2016 there was a notorious rash of trans women committing suicide in prison, some after multiple incidents of being sexually assaulted in prison). Gender recognition reform was a cheap way of ethics washing the Tory government.

However the next 2 years were filled with agitation from anti-gender groups who now had the support of domestic and international evangelicals whose attention was no longer taken up by gay marriage struggles, and an ascendant alt right populist tendency in social media and in politics. The cost-benefit calculation for backing GRA reform had shifted and the government promptly put the breaks on, stalled and started consulting with the anti gender groups instead.

Fundamentally the things that trans people really urgently need are things that Capitalism is systematically failing to provide or undermining for a lot of people:

• radical improvements to the NHS,
• better social housing availability,
• protection in education environments and support,
• labour rights/protection,
• refunding specialist DV/SV support.

These things were not on the cards for trans rights reform because they hurt the extraction capabilities of the ruling class, requiring taxation and funding or wide scale restructuring of property (housing for instance). That’s the extent to which capitalism is hostile to trans rights and existence.