“Yohohoho, watch me twirl my very real mustache. Do you not know? The natural state of humanity is of struggle that can only entertain the notions of homosexuality and transgenderism if it is in a state of individualist indulgence and moral decay.”
Sigh.
Terf Island
On March 29th, 2023, the Communist Party of Britain released a statement on the on the Scottish Gender Recognition bill, coming out against it. This take was retweeted and used in a semi-celebratory way by noted anti-trans bigot JK Rowling. Their statement against the bill largely attempts to paint a scenic critique that their issue is mostly of administration, a worry of how the bill will conflict and/or interact with British laws. However, in their summary at the end of their statement, C-PoB says,
“Gender as an ideological construct should not be confused or conflated with the material reality of biological sex. Gender is the vehicle through which misogyny is enacted and normalised. Gender identity ideology is well- suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights, enabling and supporting the super-exploitation of women.”
The reason folks like Rowling retweeted this with a level of glee was so that they might have a place to point and say, “See! You can’t call me a conservative for this conservative, hateful social belief! Because there are bigoted leftists too!”
So let’s talk about this specific section of the left, its bigotry, and how it tries to mask it. I will be accepting the self-identity of these posts and calling them leftists, though many on my side will say true leftists are socially progressive. This is because there’s one thing the left hates more than capitalism, and that’s the left.
Let’s get into that paragraph I quoted from C-POB. First, it misunderstands social constructionism. “Gender as an ideological construct” could neatly translates into the well-known phrase, “Gender is a social construct.” That is true. They then go on to mention “material reality of biological sex.” That specific phrase, “material reality,” is important for a few reasons, but before we talk about the root of their ideology, let’s talk about it here. Social construction doesn’t end at “gender” or “race.” As explained in the PhilosophyTube video “Social Constructs (or, ‘What is A Woman, Really?’)”, any categorization is a social construction because we have decided, socially, to say certain traits matter. And assigning importance and a specific type of meaning to a trait is the bare basics of social construction. Another note, something being a social construct has nothing to do with its value. Social construction is a value neutral statement. It’s an observation. You can agree or disagree with that construction independent of recognizing it as a construction. We can easily see, for instance, why grouping certain organs together and calling them the “cardiovascular system” might be useful for the various fields of medicine. So. Gender is a social construct. If you believe in social construction though, so is sex. But they make a division.
So maybe then, they don’t mean that gender is a social construct. They likely mean that gender, as a concept, is a form of idealism, and therefore wrong and bad, because materialism is what they think is Right and Good. But they speak in terms of sex, specifically “biological sex” in a way that doesn’t go into nuance. What is biological sex? Is it chromosomal? There is well documented chromosomal variation amongst cis people. Is it hormonal? The attempt to define sex via hormone levels have negatively affected cis women, specifically cis women of color, in sports. Is it genitals? So then at birth are intersex people sexless or both male and female? Cosmetic genital construction on intersex infants is strongly condemned by human rights organizations. How do you handle them? The “reality” of sex isn’t really a biological one. Biology is complicated, and we out it’s more complicated with every passing year. But. We have decided to look at characteristics, group them together, and say if a decent amount of them are satisfied, then that is someone’s sex. Which is social construction.
Before I continue, I’m going to be honest in a way that’s confusing and say I think both materialism - that things are foremost - and idealism - that thoughts are foremost, are flawed ends of a false-binary and neither really works independently. Thoughts, identity, and and experience of phenomena are important. Science, observation, and so-called “reality” are also important. And objective truth does not exist. So I don’t consider myself a marxist because I’m not a scientific materialist, and I think scientific materialism is flawed.
But speaking of material reality, in an article for The Socialist Alternative, Conor Payne argues that gender represents a material social reality. It’s not that sex is real and gender is merely a made up tool of oppression - gender itself is also a reality which is just plainly observably true in society. Anti-identity polics leftists who are against trans people from the perspective of women’s rights engage in their own form of identity politics, but they refuse to categorize their views as such.
Transphobia and the Left: Bogus Science and Bogus Marxism | Socialist Alternative
In paragraph 17, C-POB complains about allowing people to transition without going through the medicalization process Britain forces trans people to go through. In “I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System,” Abigail Thorne of PhilosophyTube goes into detail about the deep flaws of that system in England and how it’s currently built to basically refuse care to trans patients. In it, she also mentions that some trans people, including herself, don’t believe in or accept the medicalization of gender dysphoria.
They continue to fear monger about men using gender ideology to abuse women, invading single sex spaces. A major problem with that argument for them, though, as ContraPoints points out in her video “J.K. Rowling,” bathrooms aren’t policed by biological sex but rather, in general, feminitity. People use their perception of gender to make assumptions about sex and who should be where, and then use that to enact hate on people they determine are insufficiently female or whatever.
To help them with their fear mongering, they mention, in horror, that people convicted of sex crimes are allowed to transition. Which is interesting to me, because you would expect my fellow leftists to be against using the results of a flawed criminal justice system to determine who is allowed rights and who isn’t. Unless, of course, you understand that these are authoritarian leftists, the kind who long for the days of guillotines and not removing the boot but simply taking it from one foot to another. Side note, no, little reigns of terror, I will not read “On Authority” because I do not give a shit about an old dead man or your use of him to justify your own urges for cruelty. Fuck off, thanks.
Payne talks about some leftists viewing trans rights advocacy as potentially placing furhter stress on institutions or rights already being attacked from the right, almost creating a two pronged force to bear more and more pressure, seemingly arguing that trans rights are too much, that they’ll break the fragile progress we’ve made so far. Abigail Thorne mentions that same sort of pushback trans people might get for critiquing the NHS in that video I mentioned earlier about emailing her doctor. It’s a common critique from all dots on the political spectrum. Conservatives use it to try to keep people in line. Centrists use it to complain about civil rights without admitting to being bigots. Democrats use it to stop progressives from fighting to push them left. Leftists use it to shit on each other. It’s also a line used to pit marginalized groups against each other.
On Twitter and Reddit, you’ll sometimes see people lovingly referred to as class reductionists mention how identity politics and the like are distractions from class struggle and class unity. Pushing against bigotry might divide the working class, so why don’t you just stop your whining about discrimination and oppression and let us pretend economics will fix everything.
C-POB makes that argument in that paragraph I stated. They pit trans liberation against women’s rights. They also say “Gender identity ideology is well- suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as oppposed to collective rights.” So trans rights conflict with women’s rights AND are directly opposed to communism and class struggle. They even refer to being trans as “gender identity ideology,” dehumanizing trans people as “ideology” rather than a type of person. Being trans is the state of having an ideology that benefits capitalist society. In other words, one might call it bourgeois decadence.
Bourgeois Decadence, or Stalin Sucked
On Twitter and Reddit, the sites where all the best and kindest thinkers of our generation rest, you’ll sometimes see posts complaining about some thing the OP finds morally wrong and labelling it as bourgeois decadence. Polyamory, furries, smoking. Despite Cuba’s fast and strong advancement on queer rights in the recent years, some self-described communists, like in the Communist Party of Britain, are against queer rights and liberation. Some of the mask their bigotry in the nonsense of opposition to all identity politics because the gays distract from class, oowoo. Others will go the 20th century route, and talk about how being gay sucks.
There’s a specific version of thought which views acting on homosexuality as indulgence. Individualism, just as they argue being trans is. In a society truly concerned with society, the gays would form traditional family units, have kids, work, and serve the party, then die.
When people point out the problems of the Soviet Union, especially re: gay rights and Stalin’s assent wherein we were recriminalized, they’re likely to point to the rest of the world, which also sucked. They’re not wrong. Most people at the time were bad on queer rights. So was the USSR. So was Stalin. “Other people sucked” is not a defense against criticism. It’s more of an acceptance of it with a pout and a “stop, I want to idealize this dead person who doesn’t fucking matter in my life because I should be able to argue for my beliefs using my words and hope and not hang my beliefs on a dead authoritarian.”
Castro and Guevara were similarly disgusting on gay rights. Cuba has thankfully grown past them. Slowly the world is growing past them.
Yet there’s a very specific type of person who can’t stand any criticism of these people. They’re the same as Republicans who froth at the mouth if you shit talk the founding fathers or Raegan or Confederate slavery-lovers. Their political heroes must be pure and always defended. The ideology needs a pillar to survive, they think. They look at that Moradi quote, “Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters – they’re all fictional.” They see that as a funny dunk, which it is, but then also accept it as that - a good insult, a hard hit. But it isn’t. While Moradi was more talking about military strategy, even socially, it’s a good thing. We should not make heroes or monsters out of men. People are people, nothing more and nothing less. When you make an actual person a hero, you do one of three things: you set yourself up for disappointment, you dehumanize this person you supposedly admire, or you make it so you can bare no criticism, you must transform them into a creature beyond critique, some precious thing always in need of defense, in need of being held onto.
In regards to that, some people merely defend Castro and Stalin. Others go the extra step of adopting their beliefs and assuming, because that’s what those dead guys from decades ago when the world was crueler and we knew less things, that those beliefs must be good and correct. Fun fact: they’re not. You’re just lazy. You see it with some people who want to defend everything China and Russia do now. They look at queer rights in China and things like that law meant to curb effeminate men in entertainment, and they’re like “but they’re the country I like so therefore I must defend.” They see Russia, an authoritarian hellscape that is in no way socialist, and think, “Ah, this used to be USSR, must be good,” despite, you know, Chechnya and the torture of gay men. Their need to have a “good guy” beyond reproach to cheer for prevents them from criticizing those on their team. Doing so might break the system.
There was a semi-viral supposed news item posted on Twitter not too long ago talking about China banning gay adoption. Some people pointed out that this was not actually breaking news and presenting it as such was a form of misinformation. Rather, this was ongoing Chinese policy. Only married couples may adopt, and there is no gay marriage in China. A leftist I follow retweeted it with an eyeroll at people who expect we queers to fully embrace a country replacing the US hegemon when that country is not great on gay rights. A professional China Defender, Calla Walsh, was dropped in the comments. In her response, Calla, rather than taking on the criticism of the CCP’s homophobia, made fun of the OP’s prior failed engagement. Which is, by the way, a cruel and fucked up thing to do, Calla. We should all strive to not be assholes.
Homophobia and transphobia are bad. Dress it in whatever language you want, but it’s regressive bigotry. And if your leftism is bigoted, don’t be surprised when people want nothing to do with it.
The Grifter Class
You’ll see a lot of the more popular bigotry on the left coming through online spaces of influencer types. Hinkle, Haz. People who say they’re left wing but tend to agree with the right on social issues, because, beyond economics, they’re not progressives.
I think the most annoying example of left-wing conservative grifter is anti-vaccine propagandist Jimmy Dore. Jimmy Dore is a supposed comedian and podcast host who you can learn about in the video “Jimmy Dore’s Anti-Vaccine Lies” by video essayist Shaun. In a video posted on The Jummy Dore Show titled “Dems WALK OUT On Video About Gender Affirming Surgery,” Dore says,
“They’re now using the threat of calling you anti-LGBTQ to silence you from saying anything rational about transgenderism or gender affirming operations for minors.”
After comparing this to an increase in talks about racism despite, according to Dore, racism supposedly decreasing, he says:
“It’s because the establishment needs these issues to distract us from the economic war that they’re playing on us… If we keep fighting about racism and trans issues, we’re never going to get a minimum wage raise.”
He then calls racism and transphobia, “things that aren’t real problems anymore.” In this video he chooses to interview fellow anti-vax conspiracy theorist Bret Weinstein, who, as a transphobe, is obviously an unbiased, non-bigoted, even handed view on the subject.
Let’s break down these few bits of the video a bit. Let’s start with the “threat” of being called a bigot. Now, are there people, specifically of the grifter class or of the “is a child” class that will weaponize identity and throw out baseless accusations of bigotry? Sure. But it calls to mind a specific refrain of transphobe JK Rowling, where she mentions women being scared of being “slurred” as bigots. See ContraPoints’ first video on JK Rowling to get a true breakdown of that absurd statement. This sort of statement, to me, a queer person who is hyper aware of things that even hint towards bigotry for the sake of protecting my own well-being, this is incredibly close to the complaints conservative homophobes have at being called homophobic. I once had a woman tell me that opposing gay marriage isn’t homophobic, nor was calling for the Biblical stoning of gay people. She, a straight woman, knows what homophobia is, and I, a gay man, do not.
Dore says that threat of being called a bigot is used against people like him to prevent them from “saying anything rational about transgenderism.” Now, when he says “anything rational” here, he means anti-queer bigotry. “These people will call be a transphobe for saying transphobic things.” Congratulations. You made a wild discovery there. Because when Jimmy Dore says rational, especially in the context of having Weinstein on this episode, he means saying that being trans is ridiculous. He means saying that supposed biological sex is reality. It’s material, while gender is idealist, to put it in terms of C-PoB. You know what cements that? His immediate use after that of the word “transgenderism.” There is no such thing. “Transgenderism” is just a synonym for “trans ideology.” He’s saying that being trans is not a state of being but rather a position one takes, an imagination, a philosophy. If it is an ideology instead of a way of being, people can choose away from it, and suddenly we’re at Kelly Jay-Keen advocating for conversion therapy, which, as Shaun points out in his video “Kelly-Jay & the Neo-Nazis”, will fail and will lead to the state execution of trans people.
Also like C-PoB, Dore goes on to claim that the fight for trans rights is a distraction from the class war. Because class is all that matters. Jimmy Dore thinks there’s too much attention placed on race and being queer because things aren’t as bad as they used to be, so it doesn’t matter anymore. Jimmy Dore, a cis, straight, white man who does not experience racism or anti-queer bigotry, has declared that these issues are distractions. Intersectionality is post-modern and therefore in conflict with Marxism, to the Jimmy Dore types. But, perhaps also the same as C-PoB and many online Communists, Jimmy Dore has no interest in fixing things. He is a professional contrarian who likes to complain. Complaining is his favorite thing in the world. But because he and those like him will not put in the work to enact the policies they supposedly want, like a higher minimum wage, they need someone to blame. And for reactionary bigots, blaming trans people is quite easy. “If you guys weren’t fighting for your rights, we’d have universal healthcare.”
But Jimmy Dore isn’t the only grifter out there in the world. We also have co-host of The Young Turks, Ana Kasparian. Kasparian went viral on Twitter not that long ago when she complained about the term “birthing person.” I want to take a step out and state that Kasparian’s right-wing worry about this term is bullshit. It is not erasing women. There is no movement to refer to cis-women as “birthing person” in mass culture as some sort of Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. It’s dispassionate clinical language. Clinical language often feels dehumanizing. But “birthing persons” is a more accurate term to use because there are trans men and nonbinary people who can give birth. There are also plenty of ciz women who, for whatever reason, might not qualify medically as a “birthing person” especially in mind for specific medical statements. Kasparian took the JK Rowling approach of decrying the trans rights movement by claiming that past civil rights movements weren’t violent. See the ContraPoints video “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling” to get a look at militant gay and womens rights advocates, and read about the existence of the Black Panthers and Black resistance. I’m anti-violence, by the way, I just find her point her stupid.
I also watched the video “Trump Moans At Transgender Athletes In Women’s Sports,” a video uploaded by The Young Turks. I read some characterizations of the video before I watched it, and the video is actually more tame and nuanced than I expected from what I had read. But, that being said, I still think there are some concerning things. There’s some tension between Ana and Cenk over the idea of trans girls in sports in high school, with Cenk basically saying, “It’s children. I really don’t care about fairness in children’s sport, because they are children, and winning is not the point.” Well, he doesn’t exactly make that argument about the purpose of sport, but he does say losing a children’s sports match doesn’t matter, which is true. Ana seems to disagree. Maybe it’s because I view sport as a form of theatre, but I also don’t care about fairness in adult sport either. Cenk and Kasparian go on about how they think trans women in sports is probably unfair and bad even though the evidence doesn’t really point to that. They bemoan the idea of giving trans people all they want when it sometimes goes against what the electorate want. I understand that as a strategy, but I have to say: the rights of people should not be up to convincing their neighbors they deserve to exist as equals. Cenk rightly points out that actually, trans issues are a winning spot for liberals and progressives. But he and Kasparian insist on mischaracterizing the right. The right is not fighting this on the issue of sports and sports alone. The right characterizes the entire existence of trans people as pedophilic. They threw a fit over a small brand deal with a trans creator. They go after the existence of drag as an artform. They are saying that mentioning the existence of queer people is the same as abusing and grooming children. To pretend trans people are focusing on and losing in the realm of sports, where the right wants us to argue, is to entirely ignore where the debate over trans rights is. The downplaying makes trans rights acitivists seem shortsighted and the group upon which the onus of blame should be placed for lost progressive goals. “We won’t have universal healthcare because of the transes.”
Now, I don’t actually think Kasparian and Cenk are grifters. I simply think they’re wrong. Though I did see an explanation from Briahna Gray Joy on why some people might view them as grifters based on Kasparian’s freak out over inclusive language which I think is important to note. But I include them here first to connect them to Dore because of his past with The Young Turks, and to actually highlight the similarities of their rhetoric, even if Dore’s is worse and more obvious.
“Anti-imperialism,” or Globo Homo Scary
Speaking of grifters, there’s another version of anti-LGBT activism on the left that I actually touched on a little earlier. For an excellent case study, let’s consider Danny Haiphong. In late 2022, the FIFA World Cup was hosted by Qatar. Qatar is an Islamic theocratic monarchy. So. Very briefly. Monarchy is bad. I don’t like figurehead monarchies, but I especially dislike monarchies with actual power. I like democracy. Authoritarianism is bad. Religious rule is horrid, I don’t care what religion it is. Any non-secular government is by definition restrictive, anti-human, anti-democracy, anti-liberation. And that, dear viewers, is who FiFA chose to host. It is illgal to be gay in Qatar. They use their religion as an excuse for their bigotry. When criticized leading up to the World Cup, Qatari officials, FiFA officials, and dim witted conservative sports fans alike responded with, “Respect the culture.” The culture, of course, being arresting, beating, and criminalizing queer people. Queer people who exist everywhere across all periods of time. Qatar’s government is a crock of shit that deserves every boycott, criticism, and I hope the people revolt and put in a secular democarcy. That is the future of humanity, not this backwards horseshit. The other important piece of information is that people died making the stadium for the World Cup.
Now, with that background, let’s talk Danny. In an article titled “How does the US sustain hegemony through fake theories” posted on Global Times, an English language Chinese propaganda outfit, Wei Leijie, an associate professor of law, chatted with Danny Haiphong. Wei starts off the conversation by mentioning the Qatari World Cup, saying:
“Some Western countries, especially European countries, on the eve of the World Cup, launched criticism over the so-called human rights record in Qatar, which FIFA chief Gianni Infantino said double standards are behind the critics.”
When asked about his thoughts on that, Danny agreed people in “the West” cannot criticise others. He doesn’t push back on any of that, so let me. Because there’s an important moment here. The professor doesn’t say human rights abuses. He doesn’t specify labor deaths, something an actual communist would be quick to criticise, and he doesn’t mention extreme anti-LGBT bigotry. Instead, he says “so-called human rights record.” Now, this has one of two implications, not excluding that it might be both. The first is that there are no actual abuses in Qatar. To imprison gay people for being gay is perfectly fine. To use slave labor to build a stadium for a sports spectacle is fine. The second is that there is no such thing as human rights. That’s a popular canard amongst a certain section of leftists. “Human rights,” they’ll say, is a capitalist invention. The idea of rights is bourgeois. What exactly they think that means has some variation, but what it comes down to is that they think tracking human rights abuses across the globe 1) doesn’t matter because there are no human rights, and 2) is an endeavor of imperialism. To say, “Killing gay people is fucked up, fuck you, Uganda,” is to go in and murder their population for gold and oil. Because these are very smart well meaning and well adjusted people and not bigoted campist tankies who don’t have any actual beliefs or faith in a better world.
I actually only discovered Danny during the World Cup through a tweet of his sarcastically wondering if Westerners complaining would boycott the US hosting in 2026. So, curious, I searched his timeline for “Qatar.” I searched for “World Cup.” It turns out, this was the only mention Danny felt it worth his time, to scold people decrying the criminalization of queer people and the use of deadly slave labor. This is interesting to me because looking through Danny’s tweets, he seems to generally be, like The Young Turks, a supporter of queer rights. So why then, amidst people decrying obvious human rights abuses, did Danny go, “Ugh, these annoying complainers won’t hold the US to the same standards” without once engaging with the criticism? Why, when asked to respond in his interview with a Chinese state paper that mocked the idea of slave labor and the criminalization of queer people as human rights abuses, did he not once level any critique at the theocratic monarchy?
Maybe we can find the answer in his other tweets. In one, he lists the following as the most progressive world leaders: Xi Jingping of China, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, and Vladimir Putin of Russia.
If you recall back, China does not have gay marriage. This year, the government shut down the Beijing LGBT Center. In 2020, Shanghai pride shut down. In 2021 it was LGBT Rights Advocacy China. In their desire to promote masculinity, China issued media guidance restricting effeminate men. Queer movies and shows have their queer bits edited out for Chinese consumption. A great ally of a country.
Nicaragua is a country without gay marriage but with a violent and authoritarian government accused of criminalizing protest, enacting sexual violence, and disappearing queer rights activists.
How about Maduro? Venezuela recently saw the raid of a gay bar and the arrest of the patrons and owners for being lewd and loud, and, of course, to give evidence of their lewdness, they presented that they had condoms. That’s surely the mark of a progressive. There’s no gay marriage. There’s no transition. There was a bringing in of Evangelical groups to talk about family. There are random arrests of queer people.
Assad. Well, being gay is illegal in Syria. Up to 3 years in prison for falling in love. For having sex with a fellow consenting adult. That’s super progressive. I mean, what else could you expect from the president who bombed his own citizens? Peak Marxism is when you decide the material conditions lead to the scientific conclusion that bombing your own civilians is a cool and based thing to do, obviously.
And Putin. Russia, where gay men were disappeared tortured in Chechnya. Where discussing queer people is criminalized. Putin, who is currently in the midst of waging an imperialistic war on one of his neighbors. Putin, a harsh conservative who employs a Nazi paramilitary group. Putin, who makes fun of queer people existing. Russia, whose embassy tweeted that marriage is only for straights. That’s the peak of progress.
Now. Does Danny actually think those men or their governments are progressive? I doubt it. If he has even half a brain, he can clearly see that. Those capitalist conservative countries are not progressive havens. What they are is anti-USA. And that, for Danny, trumps any other concern, so he’ll pretend that they’re progressive.
I think the same phenomenon is actually what happened with Calla Walsh, who I mentioned earlier. Do I think either of them are anti-queer? Probably not. What I do think is that they cannot bare criticism of their pet countries. They believe that if you put pressure on the system from the left, it will break, and then they won’t get to watch the greatest evil, in their minds, destroyed. For them, the downfall of America is worthy of selling LGBT people in those countries down the drain. “China’s social conservatism is bad,” says person A. “Haha, your engagement failed,” says Person B.
What you’ll see occasionally, like in that thread about China and engagements and adoption, is this idea from supposed leftists that pushing for civil rights is imperialism. Some view being queer as a western export. Those people are just idiots. People are gay everywhere. I’m sorry it hurts your little trad brain to recognize that, but they are. You’re not a progressive. You just don’t want to accept that you’re your boring, cruel, annoying parents. But these people are the ones who will look at uprisings against strict laws around hijabs in Muslim theocracies and call them color revolutions. To these people, there is no agency. There is no changing culture. There is only the US and the based struggle against it. “China is socially conservative, so of course their government will be anti-queer. Respect that,” they’ll say. “Qatar follows this specific version of Islam and so you can’t be gay. That’s their culture. Respect that.” No. Culture is not a defense for being bigoted. Fuck your culture. I respect people, not beliefs. If your beliefs are bigoted, they deserve to die. You don’t deserve to die. Your beliefs do.
The Problem is Materialism
This is my hot take. Scientific materialism is simply an incorrect lens to examine the world. At least, on its own. Materialism, I think, is fine, actually. Idealism is also fine. Somewhere in the gray, in the mix, that’s probably the sweet spot. If you want a intro, you can watch ContraPoints video on Jordan Peterson where she points out postmodern social Marxism doesn’t make any sense as a term because Marxists and postmodernists do not agree on this fundamental level. For the Marxist, there is objective truth.
And they’re simply wrong.
I did some more reading on this after DSA’s recent convention and a socialist I follow commented on a leftist’s response to the convention. DSA mentioned a commitment to an intersectional Marxism. This leftist said that’s impossible, because anything touched by intersectionality simply becomes intersectionality.
And you know what? I think they’re right about that. To recognize class is only part of the picture is to recognize that class is only part of the picture. Perhaps it is to recognize that human beings are not purely logical creatures, and our world is not a purely logical world.
Now, cards on the table, I identify as a social democrat. I strongly believe in democracy. I reject vanguardism. I reject revolution, which, I think, even if I were a materialist, I would toss as idiotic because you will not win against the US military especially when you don’t have the American people on your side and willing to die for you, you fucking morons, stop yearning for violence that you will lose and if you won you’d have to enforce with more violence.
So. What happens, I believe, to the individuals I’ve mentioned today and those like them is that they look at trans people, they listen to nonbinary people, they take a whiff of the concept of gender fluidity, and it breaks their systems. Gender and sex are social constructs. For social constructs to exist, thing have to be able to be constructed via language. That’s idealism. They can’t have that. When some trans people disagree with the concept of gender dysphoria as a medical diagnosis, like with C-POB, it lights a warning sign for them. “Wait!” they say. “Because then it becomes about your personal experience of gender. That’s not something we can test for. That’s not something we know the science of. That’s individualising. That’s deciding experience creates instead of being created by experience.” Though social construction is a bit of a complicated intersection of created by and actively creating.
That’s why they call being trans bourgeois decadence. Because it allows for social construction and it allows for the individual experience to be paramount.
Now. Is that the position of all Marxists? No. Most marxists online are trans cat girls. I’m talking about a specific group of people.
So let me ask the question: why is it that these people can’t allow for experience and language to build, change, and destroy systems? Why must they reduce everything to an experience of class? My argument is that it is part of a human drive to what I call the Cult of Reason. By calling their philosophy science–which philosophy is not, by the way–they can say, “Look! It’s objective truth. It’s science.” It’s almost as if it’s clever branding. As if it’s an attempt at constructionism. And in doing so, they can believe in objective truth. They can believe in reason. That is how they can look at all of the horrors of the world, all of the absurdities, and stay away from even remotely glimpsing at the sea of nihilism. They avoid the frightening potential existential crises bring, the way that they give you that glimpse into nihilism, by entirely rejecting idealism and the very potential of the universe being absurd. They must tell themselves a Big Story, because elsewise they won’t know how to handle existence.
But. I think there’s actually one additional layer to these anti-queer supposed materialists. When you look at people who elsewise support queer people but who then simp for governments who oppress us and avoid critiques of that oppression, you might start to think that the goal is not actually improvement. It’s deletion. When you look at the big story of class reductionism, you see a sort of utopian apocalypse. The workers shall unite and enact their violent vengeances. And then the world will be fine. They hate incrementalism. Many of them hate democracy. Many of them are fine with gross human rights abuses, torture, and discrimination. Why is this? It’s because their politics are not actually driven by wanting to better the world. They are not utopists. They are not utilitarians, wanting the most good for the most people. They have no plans to help in the here and now. They want chaos. They want to complain. They want to moan and for us to moan with them. They want us all to moan. At their core, they are ascetists. Ascetism views the most holy thing to be self-denial. But, when they say self-denial, ascestists don’t merely mean denying indulgence or joy. They mean suffering. They think to suffer is to be holy. That’s why they don’t care about helping people. That’s why they LARP. That’s why they share fantasies of horrid violence. That’s why they don’t mind people being anti-queer or anti-Black or anti-Jewish or anti-woman or anything else. Because they don’t want to ease suffering. They just want everyone to suffer together.
They claim they are materialists. But they aren’t.
They’re American Evangelicals.
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