The right to organise against their oppression
“Socialist workers” forsooth. Trotsky would spurn them. Behold SWP response to letter from Woman’s Place UK.
Trans people are facing a barrage of attacks.
No they’re not. Some people disagree with their belief system, and explain why; that’s not an attack, let alone a barrage of them.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) stands with the oppressed and unequivocally says, “Trans women are women,” and, “Trans men are men.” Trans people have the right to organise against their oppression and the right to protest against it. We stood in solidarity with the trans students and workers at the University of Sussex who were rightly outraged by Kathleen Stock’s views.
They’re not oppressed though. Not believing wild claims about the self is not oppression. The students at Sussex were and are not “rightly outraged” by Stock’s views. (Any bets on whether the SWP knows a single thing about her views?) And what “workers” at Sussex had anything to do with the monstering of Stock? That word is obviously just thrown in so that the SWP can go on pretending to be an actual socialist party.
The attacks on trans rights are pushed by the Tories and the wider right—and go hand in hand with attacks on women’s rights. Our focus is fighting the right wing—and for a socialist society that uproots all oppression.
Again: disagreement with fantasy-based claims about the self is not “attacks on trans rights.” Real socialists would find the whole idea laughably bourgeois and reactionary.
I wonder how many of those who were “outraged” weren’t actually trans at all, but “allies” eager to bully a woman? What better opportunity for beardos, wokebros and handmaidens to get their Right Side of History merit badges?
Presumably this referring faculty members who were ganging up on Stock and joined the bullying. But maybe there was a Revolutionary vanguard of custodial and maintenance staff present, too.
That’s where I get confused. Was the ‘woman’ against whom ‘unacceptable sexist language and behaviour’ was used a bloke dressed up in drag, pretending and/or presenting as a transvestite, or was that same ‘woman’ the genuine 24-carat real McCoy?
Please fasten your seat belts. False consciousness and rough weather ahead.
It all must have seemed so easy. ‘Bathroom bills’ from deranged Republicans, the constant fuming of the evangelicals, some old-school lesbian separatists (Women’s Festival, Olympia Records etc.) who wouldn’t side the the oppressed trans victims? Who always seemed to be homeless teenagers, ejected by their families and surviving by the only ‘sex work’ that isn’t magically empowering.
BUT, with that commitment comes the inability to ask: ‘what about the crackpots, weirdos, and predators?’
Answering that ‘trans women are women…and therefore there cannot be a problem is an almost perfect echo of the old Catholic waffle: ‘there’s no problem for children in Catholic institutions…the clergy identify as celibate.