Fighting Transphobia – new and updated edition

The third edition of rs21’s pamphlet on Fighting Transphobia is now available, with lots of new content about the escalating transphobic oppression in Britain and internationally. This is an edited version of the introduction by Lotta P, a trans-feminist activist and rs21 member who has been involved in organising some of the biggest recent trans protests in London. 

We put the first edition of Fighting Transphobia together in a time of fast-rising transphobia in Britain in 2023. We originally started it as a practical guide to tackling transphobia in trade union spaces, which many of our comrades in rs21 have personal experience with. As we wrote and met to discuss the pieces, we started to feel that it was wrong to separate the practical and the theoretical. So the pamphlet aims to sketch out a theory framework for fighting transphobia in Britain in the 2020s, share practical experiences and lessons we’ve learned doing this ourselves, and lay some foundations for a revolutionary socialist understanding of the link between trans  liberation and class struggle. 

Buy the pamphlet here.

Since then, the attacks on us have gotten worse, but the appetite for material on how to fight back has been massive – the first two editions sold out. The third edition of the pamphlet is out now and includes new material which covers the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling and new case studies talking about responses to the ruling. 

The dynamic in Britain today is that transphobia is the sharpest edge of all LGBT oppression – it’s the more acceptable and debated form of queerphobia, so the future of queer liberation will depend on the outcomes of trans struggle. In Britain, ruling elites have lost all sense of a  strategy for managing British capitalism, instead prioritising ‘culture war’ to distract public attention away from the social crises their policies have  generated. Over the years this culture war has taken on a life of its own. Our enemies main weapons are ideas: racist ideas about migrants and transphobic ideas about threats to women and children. At the same time they are making more use of their physical weapons: police repression, designed to silence and control protest in a political context where popular discontent grows daily, and the weapon of law and policy about gendered spaces and institutions that has both ideological and physical impacts.

But even outside the specifics of what’s happening now in Britain, I believe that trans liberation is one of the most important things to focus on, because it stands at the crossroads of many issues that we should all care about: our control over our own bodies, struggles over access to healthcare, the fight against patriarchy, and our freedom to experiment collectively with new ways of being in the world. 

Culture war is an effective way for our enemies to mobilise against us, because in a culture war the game is about what fears you can play on, what divisions you can sow or widen among sections of the working classes. In a culture war, an act of self-defense can be framed as an act of violence, and acts of violence can be framed as freedom of expression. The logic of the culture war suggests that trans people, Black people, Muslims, migrant  workers, and other groups are all individual groups without overlap, with competing needs that have to be balanced by a government to keep the peace. But that is not the reality – trans people are in every community, ethnicity, and class. It suggests that the only way for us to find allies and win anything is through liberal reforms begged from those in power.  But this approach has never been effective – and, with oppression getting worse, it can never be enough. 

Trans people are a small minority atomised and scattered across the  country. We have to constantly defend ourselves online against vicious  attacks, and fight a losing battle over our legal rights in courts. We have to lobby MPs to represent our interests in parliament while almost every mainstream party has become increasingly hostile to us. We have to constantly react against an ever-shifting array of transphobic talking points as thin as air but played through the megaphones of mainstream media while our voices are drowned out. Even if we did gather all our strength to battle it out on those terms, it would never amount to true liberation because an end to the most obvious types of transphobia will not make us free. Your landlord getting your pronouns right on an eviction notice is not much consolation. Proper trans healthcare on the NHS still won’t be enough if the NHS continues to exclude migrants. Trans liberation is meaningless without Black liberation, without disabled liberation, without feminist liberation, and without working class liberation. We cannot only fight the culture war. To win our freedom and to survive, we have to fight the class war.  

Queer people new to socialism might  ask: what do Marxism and class struggle have to do with me getting attacked in the street, being denied the healthcare I need, and being afraid  to have children because I would fear for their safety? 

Class struggle and beyond 

Fighting oppression, if we’re doing it right, brings us into conflict with the power structures of capitalism and the state. It is a part of class struggle.  We need unity between movements for liberation and class struggle  organising to overcome divisions at every level and build sufficient power to smash capitalism. 

Trans liberation is also linked to class struggle because it is part of a  broader feminist fight for gender liberation: it is a battleground for our bodily autonomy, but also for the way that gender shapes how care work, childcare, and other ‘gendered labour’ is divided in society. Control over gender norms and ultimately the patriarchal structure of society are key ways that capitalism is able to continue functioning, so any struggle for real freedom needs to confront capitalism. There is a reason why the right sees trans people as a threat, and it’s not just pure bigotry. We are a threat! To the rigid world the pro-natalists, the rich fundamentalists, and the manosphere influencers are fighting for. Precisely because we are showing completely different, free and life-affirming ways to do gender.

Gender liberation is a key part of a revolutionary fight against  capitalism because gender is structurally embedded in capitalism. From the gender pay gap to gendered jobs and the exploitation of unpaid domestic labour in the home, gender is shaped by capitalism and serves to reproduce  it. Liberals might point to the social shifts away from a rigidly gendered  divide in society, but there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that this will ever lead to complete equality – in fact at the moment we’re seeing a backlash and reversal of what feminist movements won over the last 100 years. 

To destroy capitalism and build a new world we need to be thinking much  wider than workplace struggle. Let’s take the example of healthcare: racist  practices, ableism, and queer- and transphobia are all well documented in healthcare, and it is also a site of struggle for healthcare workers. Queer and trans people, anti-racist activists and disabled people have demanded reforms of the healthcare system, and there is increasing interest in an abolitionist approach to the current healthcare systems we have. Care is vital to all levels of revolutionary struggle, and rather than saying ‘wait until after the revolution’, the abolitionist approach is about finding, building  and fighting for alternatives today, whether we’re talking about prisons and police, mental health incarceration, or the modern healthcare industry. 

Gender liberation is not just about the right for individuals to change from one gendered position to another in society, as is the legal limit of transition in many countries today. It’s about smashing the structures, both physical and ideological, that dominate all people, cis and trans. As Angela Davis said on a livestream in May 2020:  

We support the trans community precisely because this community has taught us how to challenge that which is totally accepted as normal. And I don’t think we would be where we are today, encouraging ever-larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame, had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively  challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So: if it is possible to challenge the gender binary then we  can certainly effectively resist prisons and jails and police. 

Some people think that just by being queer or trans we are radical, and  so we don’t need to do anything except fight to survive. That’s not what  Davis is saying here – she is saying that the political struggle of trans and nonbinary people is challenging the gender binary that is a foundation  of modern capitalist society. And while that alone is nowhere near  enough to bring down the ruling class, it is demonstrating a possibility  for revolutionary change. 

Trans liberation raises the stakes for Marxist feminists – it goes beyond  reform of the gender binary and towards smashing it. Me and all the comrades who have worked on this pamphlet hope it can help more people understand the connection between trans struggle and class struggle, resource everyone  fighting transphobia today and help build the movements that will destroy capitalism and patriarchy. 

Summary of Contents – for more information (and the pamphlet) see here.

Shanice McBean’s contribution in chapter one delves into the theory of why Marxist revolutionary thinking needs to have trans liberation at its core. In the following chapter, Lisa Leak examines how gender-critical forces in Britain have deepened their hold on the political establishment over recent years. In chapter three, DK Renton unpacks the decision of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland to demonstrate how the law is used to oppress the trans community. Chapters four and five contain case studies that outline how rs21 comrades have fought against transphobic elements in traditionally left spaces: among workers in Glasgow, and in the PCS union. In chapter six, Gus Woody examines transphobia in environmental movements. In the final chapter, Connor Liao looks at the current battlegrounds of trans liberation and sets out where the movement needs to go next.