Liberation For the 99%
from rebelling against the bourgeoisie structure that it represents. The act of sex is
not initiated for the purpose of pleasure but rather as another form of alienated
labor since its ultimate goal is reproduction.
Nevertheless, queer, trans, and non-binary persons also face compulsory
heterosexuality, alienation, and because our existence itself is a form of rebellion
against the gender binary perpetuated by the capitalist ruling class since it actively
rejects the nuclear family’s goals, marriage, private property, and the reproduction
of the working class.
Gleeson and O’Rourke, in their book Transgender Marxism , discuss how
trans- women are also oftentimes excluded from “class consciousness -raising
wome n’s spaces , ” making it more difficult especially for trans -women to ever be
included in an intersectional proletariat revolution:
The figure of the trans woman interloper, disrupting otherwise stable and harmonious relations within the community of women, functions to relieve radical feminism of the indignity of acknowledging the incoherence of the feminist project as such. Conveniently, the trans woman as pest distracts from long- running doubts around feminism’s claimed ability to speak for, represent, and defend the sanctity of women-in- general: women’s rights, women’s interests, women’s spaces and women’s knowledge. Here, the grit of trans women is abraded into the pearl of a rear-guard defense of female universalism. What the earlier feminist movement had sought to destabilize now becomes anxiously reasserted. If one is inclined to wonder how successfully the predominantly white, professionally-trained, and well-off ladies who have always dominated feminist ‘leadership’ might serve in that role, those self-appointed representatives find themselves with a readymade riposte: ‘Well, we will at least do a better job than males’ by ‘males,’ of course, they mean trans women. 15
Gleeson and O’Rourke highlight how trans women face violence and discrimination
from both cis-men and cis-women because of capitalism. Television shows and
pornography fetishize women, queer people, and trans-women by perpetually
televising and fetishizing violent sexual acts, and capitalists prefer this state of
15 Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, eds., Transgender Marxism , (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 25.
Volume VI (2023)
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