Ignorant Pseudo-Leftist Idiocy: An Existential Threat to Women
I feel the need to vent a bit about threats to my community. Right now, the people of my community are facing existential danger from the American right, and there are elements with political affiliations similar to my own who seem so entirely focused on one particular injustice overseas that they feel compelled to encourage blindness to that existential danger, and expend all their rhetorical effort attacking the figurehead of an unjust system rather than focusing on the system itself, and it saddens me.
When I say my community, I suppose I owe clarification. I am a woman. I am a trans woman. I am a recently homeless person who is experiencing extreme financial precarity. I am a resident of a shelter for women and families. I am a citizen of a pretty typical small-ish American city. I’m a socialist. And if you ask me which of these communities is under existential threat, all I can say is, “yes.”
And before I talk about my more specific communities, let me talk about the existential threat to part of my human community; the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel, with US aid, against the Palestinian people. As an American, this sickens me. But as an informed leftist American, I also know that it’s not new; it’s an intensification of an explicitly genocidal project that has been going on since long before I was born. The violence being perpetrated in Gaza today is the logical conclusion of the violence that started in 1948 when an explicitly colonialist project called “Zionism” was granted statehood in Palestine. The primary difference between what’s been going on for decades an what’s happening today is that today the ongoing genocide in Gaza is being livestreamed.
Some of you may see antisemitism in that previous paragraph, but there is none. Millions of Jewish people around the world, including many in the fascist state of Israel are horrified, and vocally so, about the genocidal policies of the Zionist state. I have no ill feelings towards Jewish people, nor do I wish to be in community with anyone who bears such feelings. Antisemitism is abhorrent to me, and you won’t find me engaging in the practice, at least not unless you define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and if you do, I beg you to read better books.
If there were a meaningful way for me, as a member of an American community to vote against Israel’s genocidal policies this November, I would do so. Sadly, the American system of government and politics will not allow that vote. That’s why, as I write this, there are thousands of American students in camps on their college campuses, occupying space in protest of those policies, and the American support of them. I stand in solidarity with those students.
But I also stand in solidarity with the women here at the shelter where I live and work, and all of us are under existential threat right now, too. All American women are under existential threat by a political party that has expressed clear intent to criminalize not only abortion, but also birth control pills, creating an environment where women can only choose between celibacy and servitude to men. Some on the political right have even attacked the concept of no fault divorce. Anyone who still doubts the Republican party is waging a war on women is complicit in it.
The current furor over so called “gender ideology” is simply a false front they have presented in their war on women. To understand this, one need only set aside all the deep theory regarding gender and trans people, and simply examine the logic and the consequences of the policies they propose regarding trans people. Most notably are bans on trans women in sports, and in women’s spaces.
Before I get into that, let me openly admit how much this particular set of policies would affect me, as a trans woman who lives in a women’s shelter. If Hair Furor and the Republicans seize autocratic control of the US Federal Government, which is their stated purpose, my existence will come under direct threat. The noisome minority here in my local community who feels comfortable yelling slurs at me, and that is a tiny, tiny minority right now, would feel empowered to show up at the door of the shelter here with pitchforks and torches, demanding I be burned at the stake for “invading a women’s space.”
Let me be clear: I belong in women’s spaces. Women, as a rule, treat me as a woman. There are exceptions, but the vast majority of women in the area where I live understand that trans women are women. I am clocky, haven’t had any bottom surgery yet, and need wigs to cover my bald head, but the women in this shelter do not treat me the way they treat men. They choose me when they need help with issues they would not bring to any man. I really am just one of the girls here, and living this way has helped me in ways I could not have predicted when I was homeless and desperately looking for refuge.
I also belong in the ladies’ room when I am out and about in the community running my errands. I would be in extreme danger in any men’s room, and like any other human being, sometimes I need to use a toilet. I’m not in the ladies’ room because being in public restrooms is some kind of turn on for me; I have to wonder what kind of person imagines it would be. People can tell I am trans; like I said, I’m clocky. The reality is, though, lots of cisgender women are very clocky too. The only way to enforce bathroom, sports, locker room or any other “women’s space” ban on trans women is to police femininity at the entry point. In places with such bans, more cisgender than trans women have their gender challenged.
For every trans woman, there are almost 100 cisgender women. And not all trans women are clocky. If you think you can always tell, you’re just wrong. Trans women are generally able to access HRT at much younger ages now than once was the case. When I was young, there were only two ways an 18 year old trans girl could get HRT; have rich, supportive parents, or prostitution. The only way to get there without following those paths was to gain enough financial independence as a man to fund your own transition, then pay for it yourself, accepting the loss of career and other social consequences of later in life transition, as well as the physical consequences of decades of testosterone poisoning.
As someone who started transition late in life, I can tell you those physical consequences are what left me “clocky.” Even with my particularly unkind run in with adolescent male puberty, I would have been “passing” by my early 20s had I started transition at 18. Trans women who started transition at 18 can and do live “stealth” lives in every city in America. You’ve almost surely met one and not even noticed they were trans, because you can’t always tell.
The political right isn’t coming after us because we are a threat to women; they are coming after us because we are women, and they are coming after the rights of all women. This became clear with the Dobbs decision, and the fact that the party as a whole is still actively supportive of the idea of a federal ban on abortion. Reproductive rights are the women’s issue of the day; not trans women in the ladies’ room. And women know it. That’s why Republicans who run on anti-trans rhetoric keep losing elections in places like Kentucky and Virginia.
As much as the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza sickens me, I bear no illusions about whether that policy will change for the better under a second Trump administration. I know things will get worse for women — all women — under a second Trump administration. Yet for some reason, there are elements of the American left who are so obsessed with the genocide in Gaza that they are openly suggesting that people should not vote for Democrats in November. It’s genuinely sickening.
Voting for Democrats in November does not necessarily mean you are endorsing Genocide Joe’s allegiance to Zionism. It can simply mean you oppose Republican plans to actively infringe on the human rights of all queer people and all women. Their desperate efforts to move the locus of their culture war whinging from abortion to trans women’s access to facilities, and to trans kids’ healthcare is a move of desperation which only affects you if you are a trans woman, a trans kid, or a parent of a trans kid. They know the demographic they are attacking is very small, and terribly vulnerable.
Watching people who claim to be on “the left” abandon us for symbolic protest voting which will not even help the people of Palestine is disgusting and disappointing. There is no vote that will protect the people of Palestine in the US elections this November, but failing to vote Democrat is a vote for the genocide of trans people here in the US, and to entrench the anti-woman policies of the Republican party for a generation to come. It’s not Praxis; it’s pusillanimous public political masturbation that aids only the patriarchy.
If you’re one of these so called leftists, shame on you, really.
