John Edmundson at the Redline Blog has explained why Karl Marx would not have supported Trans Activism if he were alive today. He would have supported Trans rights, he explains, but not at the expense of biological women’s rights.
Marx’s most fundamental guiding principle throughout his life’s work was that the material determines the ideological, that the base sets the preconditions for the superstructure. So he first analysed the material base of capitalist production by starting with the commodity. He then went from there to understand how
the commodity is reified through our distorted understanding based on superficial perception. So what is trumps what I think it is or what I feel. What I feel is important but what I am materially must be the starting point for analysis.
In this case, the issue is whether or not the feeling of being a woman makes that person a woman. For trans activists, immersed in the post-structuralism of Foucault, the answer is yes. Marxists, on the other hand, don’t see it that way.
An organism’s biology is not a social construct; it is scientifically testable and verifiable. Women are adult human females – that is what the word means because its definition accords with our scientific understanding.
Gender, however, is a social construct. It describes a set of attitudes and behaviours, collected and constructed through a process of social, historical and economic pressures, and assigned to male or female according to the needs of the dominant economic system prevailing at any given time. Postmodern inversion of these two, where biological sex (what my body actually is) becomes a social construct and gender (what I think or feel) becomes “reality”, is not Marxist.
It is, well, postmodernism. And it is not transphobic to prioritise scientific fact over postmodernist invention. Women are oppressed in class society because of their sex, their biology, not by what they think they are.
While I disagree with the idea that I am oppressed because I am a woman I am thrilled to be able to find common ground with a Marxist when it comes to prioritising scientific fact over how people “feel”.
This is why it is important to be open to a variety of point of views. We may disagree with each other but we can also find common ground. At the moment we need to find common ground with people who differ from us politically if we are to have any chance of defending the free speech of the majority. At the moment minority activist groups and tinpot local body dictators are succeeding in shutting down free speech in New Zealand
The Trans lobby are at the forefront of this battle and they are successfully suppressing the free speech not only of people from the majority, but also those from the minority Rainbow community, whom they label as TERFs and transphobic because they are defending the rights of biological women.
How crazy is it that putting up a poster that does nothing more than give the literal definition of the word woman has been described by Police in the UK as “hate speech” and “transphobic”!
Activists holding signs reading, “Your vagina does not make you a woman” are simply wrong. It actually does, and any Marxist should be able to understand that. Oh, and “lesbian” trans women with penises who only want to have sex with “actual” lesbians do actually fully understand this.[…]
Marxists want to support the oppressed. That’s how most of us found our way to Marxism. But we should never simply uncritically accept what anyone who is oppressed says without testing their claims and their understanding of these. […]
Current trans orthodoxy (not supported by all trans people by any stretch of the imagination) looks to move into women’s spaces. Trans activists claim that any opposition to that asserted right is “transphobic”, representing not merely a fear of trans people but, more sinisterly, a desire to eradicate trans people as a group, render them invisible or drive them back into the closet. It does not. The gender critical position is that trans people need their rights protected but not by eliminating the reality of sex, and not by the denial of women’s existence as a group – let alone the removal of their hard-won rights.
[…] Genuinely frightening is that a whole layer of trans activists frequently employ misogynistic messages that no other conservative political current, short of the far right, would dream of. I’m sure you’ve all seen them. Rape threats against “Terfs” and against lesbians who won’t date (ie have sex with) a person with a penis. Death threats for “Terfs” are de rigeur [sic]; memes showing a gibbet with “of course we should give TERFs a platform!” is one of the milder.
Trans activists have violently assaulted women attempting to attend meetings to discuss how to find a way forward – violence that would be condemned by any self-respecting left group in any other situation goes unmentioned, let alone criticised. Indeed, since when is violent misogyny a characteristic of a genuinely progressive and emancipatory movement? And why are so many on the left so prepared to turn a blind eye to the violent misogyny that is as relentless as it is brazen? (After all, we are not dealing with “a few bad apples”.) […]
hrdln.wordpress.com/2019/10/17/womens-rights-trans-ideology-and-gramscis-morbid-symptoms/