By Elise Grage
So far in 2023, 492 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 47 states. 26 have passed, 422 are active, and 44 have failed. These bills range from bathroom bans, bans on drag in public, and banning trans youth from accessing life-saving medication. This sudden rise in hatred and systemic violence while seemingly random, has long historical roots, and understanding transphobia’s historical and material context is extremely important today to move towards trans liberation.
The origin of transphobia is a complicated matter because we can’t find the exact moment in history it came about. However, some of the best work to date on the subject has been done by Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg was an anti-racist, white, working-class, Jewish, transgender, revolutionary communist who worked tirelessly to fight for transgender liberation, and working-class liberation through community organizing and hirs analytical work. Feinberg was the first person to push forward the concept of transgender liberation and zie has inspired the trans community endlessly through hirs work. In Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors, zie slowly unfolds the web of transphobia in history, showing that people who exist outside of today’s white supremacist bio-essentialist binary have always existed throughout dozens of cultures and points in history. Not only have these people existed, they have occupied extremely high points of respect in their respective societies, being priestesses, religious leaders, cultural leaders, revolutionaries, and folk heroes.
Unfortunately, trans people have been pushed out from their positions of respect within society and to the periphery because of the development of private property. When private property and the family gained power in history, it led to the overthrowing of matrilineal leadership and control in favor of patriarchal control. So, ruling-class men began to accumulate more capital, while pushing women out of their positions of power in their communities, consequently moving them to positions within the family where they could be isolated from the support they had in their community. Patriarchy relies on the division between men and women and the idea that men and women occupy “opposite sexes” and that these two groups are immutable, and cannot be changed, crossed over, or blurred. This is central to the metaphysical dogma of patriarchy which manufactures and exaggerates differences in genders and sexes to naturalize itself. The problem for the patriarchal ruling class thousands of years ago was that there were people who were highly respected who clearly showed that men and women were and are not oppositional groups, and that, in fact, they overlap greatly. This meant the ruling class at the time needed to oppress and outlaw transgender people, crossdressing, homosexual activities, and enforcing strict gender roles, to separate men and women. Today, the patriarchal ruling class works endlessly to maintain and uphold oppositional and traditional sexism through transphobia and transmisogyny to belittle, degrade, and further push trans people into the margins and towards death. As private property and its owners have grown stronger from slave societies to feudalism, and now through capitalism, transphobia has been used more and more to stoke reactionary ideology in working-class people to convince them they should be afraid of trans people and not the bourgeois ruling class and that working-class people benefit from oppositional/traditional sexism and transphobia. Through this, the ruling class further enforces gender roles and binaries to divide men and women, further resulting in the exploitation of women by casting them as the “inferior sex” and men as the “superior” one. As the bourgeoisie grows in power, so too will transphobia, because it is a tool of the ruling class to divide the working class and increase bourgeois control.
In America, we see that the divide between classes and the control of the ruling class has been on a steep increase for over 30 years. This increase in crisis is stemming from the economic turbulence of capitalism. In an unstable, constantly fluctuating, and constantly collapsing economy, the ruling class is required to respond by influencing the state to support them through increasingly fascistic and classist policies. Recently, 2600 pages of emails were leaked from conservative lawmakers, expert witnesses, and anti-trans hate groups showing a coordinated national campaign to attack trans rights and incite genocide on trans people in the United States. This hatred and bigotry doesn’t come from nowhere, it is directly related to the rise in fascist politics in the United States, and that rise is due to the waning of the American empire. As capitalism spirals deeper and deeper into crisis, and the ruling class becomes more desperate to maintain control, they eventually unleash the most devastating and reactionary weapon they possess: fascism. To counter transphobia, we need more than our rights. We need more than representation, a platform, or legal protection. We need to stop this issue at its root, capitalism’s inherent anti-democratic organization that allows the bourgeoisie to exploit and manipulate our society to advance their private profits, and kill our communities. Until the working proletariat and peasant classes in the United States rise in unity and seize power from the ruling class and stop them from maintaining endless control through increasing state violence, queer people will not be safe from the fear of genocide, and neither will anyone else.
