Before I begin, it is important that we are on the same page about beliefs and definitions of the different movements and identifiers discussed. I will briefly list and define some recurring terms as I use them in the text.
Transgender person: Someone whose gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth, and who takes social and/or medical steps to bring their body into alignment with their gender identity. These steps can include changing pronouns, hormone replacement therapy, and surgery.
Anti-trans: A broad label encompassing opponents of trans identity per se, and those who simply oppose medical transition or legal recognition of gender changes.
Marxism: Difficult to define as Marx lived a long time ago and no one can seem to fully agree on his works. As it is relevant here, Marxism is a method of both socioeconomic and philosophical analysis based on material social relations. Note that Marxists reject reduction of experience either to purely idealistic or purely material details, in favor of a more dialectical approach recognizing the influence material has on ideas, and vice versa.
Anti-trans Marxist Feminists:
Self-described leftists who are against recognition of trans identity on purportedly feminist and Marxist grounds.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way:
With increasing social awareness of transgender identity, political movements on both the left and the right struggle to construct appropriate and ideologically consistent positions on the topic. One sad result of many modern “leftists” failing to read Marx is that many claim completely anti-Marxist positions are, in fact, the correct Marxist evaluations. This is what is happening amongst a new wave of trans-exclusionary “Marxist” feminists. It is my opinion that Marxism properly conceived can in fact be a resource to promote trans identity–and that the effort to use Marx within feminist discourse to undermine transgender validation can only be based on a gross misunderstanding of Marxist thought.
What set my critique in motion was this this exchange of tweets by some prominent figures on the anti-trans left. I include this because I believe it to illustrate the core concepts and flaws of Marxist Feminist (“MarxFem”) ideology. Suzanne Moore is an anti-trans British journalist. You know who JK Rowling is. CPGB-ML (not to be confused with CPGB, CPB-ML, or RCPB-ML) is a small British Marxist-Leninist party.
@suzanne_moore: “God some of these people are thick. Marx was a materialist. When I left the Guardian I described my view as materialism. Marx said ‘social being determines consciousness’. Engels also says ideas don’t determine reality. This is why gender ideology is inherently right wing.”
@jk_rowling: “‘These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.’ Engels”
@CPGBML*: “A pdf copy of our pamphlet ‘ Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT Ideology Taking Us?’ https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3.cpgb-ml.org/TransgenderTrend_read.pdf”*
It is apparent that not one individual or organization in this thread has ever read a word of Marx or Engels aside from what they found on BrainyQuote. If they had done the work of reading, they would not have made the fatal mistake of conflating Marx’s materialism with this odd, physically deterministic materialism. To assert that “gender ideology is inherently right-wing,” that it is antithetical to Marxism, illustrates an obnoxious ignorance of Marx’s actual views.
Marx did indeed assert in 1859 in his A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy that “[i]t is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” But this insight in fact works against these MarxFems’ claim. Social being is not at all the same as biological being. Social being is about how one relates to the world and practically engages with it. If one engages the world fully inside a social construction of gender, that establishes social being and helps determine consciousness. In relevant terms: A trans woman who looks, behaves, and relates to the rest of the world fully as a woman should, in the Marxist materialist view, be considered to be a woman. Her social being, indeed, inhabits womanhood; not “manhood,” whatever her original anatomy.
As Marx opens his Theses on Feuerbach in 1888: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism-– that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” Here, Marx criticizes the very vulgar materialism that these MarxFems claim he represents. Marx clearly embraces a more evolved materialism that focuses on practical function and its relation to the rest of the world, not on physical or biological objects themselves. The MarxFem fixation on biological features such as sex chromosomes or gonads as “material reality” ignores that Marx’s materialism leaves plenty of room for the subjective experience – in this case, of gender – and its practice to be central.
Most fundamentally, Marx at no point claims that social being is inherent and unchangeable. On the contrary, he states plainly in the Theses that “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can only be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.” Although he’s clearly not talking about switching genders here – he’s Karl Marx, and transgenderism was not his primary focus – he is clearly supportive of the idea that social being can and should be changed.
All in all, trans-exclusionary Marxist Feminism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism. Marx’s philosophy, in fact, can and should be used to support the trans community. Ideas don’t determine material reality in the Marxist frame, but the social being of trans people traces to practices and sensuous human activity, which is fully cognizable Marxist materialism.