What do we mean when we refer to someone as a working class academic? Why it is necessary to point out that I am a working class academic and not just an academic. Is it because in many ways it appears to be a contradictory concept –because there’s a fundamental disjuncture between the two terms, a lack of fit because the world of academia is, generally speaking, a middle, often upper middle class one?

Encapsulated within the phrase working class academic is a history of struggle, a litany of what Sennett and Cobb called the ‘hidden injuries of class,’ a narrative of displacement not shared or understood by middle class academics from privileged backgrounds. No one feels the need to point out that academics are middle class or upper middle class. It’s not usual to add that description when talking about academics in general. That’s because its unnecessary, because its not unusual- its the norm, its what expected — but by virtue of being working class you are not the norm in academia –you are the unexpected –the ‘other’ in a elitist, rarified world where people like you are few and far between.

One of the paradoxes of being a working class academic is how keen people are to insist you are ‘not working class any more ‘. For them becoming an academic means you can deny your socialisation, your history, your experiences and your culture, in their view all of this can simply be annihilated as if becoming an academic sets the clock back to year zero. Universities exist to reinforce class privilege –to embed and reproduce the hierarchical distinction between manual and intellectual labour, the distinction between the working class and the middle and upper middle classes. When people accuse you of ‘not being working class anymore’ what they are really saying is there’s no place in the university for working class people.

Entering a middle class environment produced for me an increased awareness of how difficult life is for working class people -something I was always aware of — how could I not be — but now — maybe for the first time there was something to compare it with. I have listened in disbelief to people who complain about exhaustion because they have to do two lectures in one day-or they have has ‘back to back meetings’. And I compare them to my dad who worked as a labourer on building sites during the day and then worked the banana factory night shift a few nights a week — the banana factory was local so it was manageable it was just up the road to us. Now its gone -replaced by luxury flats. The factory that was a testament to my dads hard work and which employed local people has been colonised by the middle class gentrifiers and ruthless developers who have swamped south London looking for cheaper real estate. In the process they have pushed the prices up so much its impossible for working class people, some, like my mum, who had been there for generations, to stay in the area.

There is a need to develop a working class narrative one that acknowledges the lack of fit between the two spheres. Working class academics straddle the bourgeois sphere of academia-a space where (in theory) intellectual discussion takes place among equals. A space of well-paid jobs, populated by people from privileged backgrounds who grew up in big houses, who had a bedroom of their own when they were children, somewhere to do there homework –who went to restaurants and on holidays abroad — a sphere which is predicated on and defined by the exclusion of working class people.

And the other sphere of bad housing, overcrowded living spaces, poorly paid work, of never quite having enough of anything, of wonderful loving parents whom hard work and disaffection made dysfunctional — of socially acceptable coping mechanism such as drinking which when taken too far become socially unacceptable and destructive — of dying young because you’re poor and working class — of wanting to escape the world of shit jobs and low pay but at the same time stay in it because its where you belong– of rejecting the values and attitudes of the middle class — who don’t particularly like you anyway because your working classness makes them feel uncomfortable and they don’t want to reminded of how easy it was for them.

My dad was an Irish immigrant who came to England at sixteen — he could not read or write — my mum was from Peckham and left school at fourteen to start work in a local factory — neither of my parents had any kind of formal further education — my dad taught himself to read and write by studying Marx, Engels, Connolly and Shaw — a radical autodidact who constantly told me ‘educate that you may be free’.

But free to do what? And at what cost ? What do working class people lose when they leave their own sphere of knowledge and belonging to make their way in a sphere from which they feel alienated and where the knowledge they encounter often runs parallel to their own –what does it mean to live with this dissonance, this state of inbetweenness? How does that translate into freedom?

I was taught by teachers who despised us because we were working class — mostly the children of Irish immigrants- they told us to keep our hair short so we did not get fleas- they told us to make sure we had two pairs of shoes so that we could change them and our feet would not smell — the head mistress caned us for having opinions –when the careers officer came she suggested two options –hairdressing and bank clerk-no one said ‘you’re bright go to university’.

I left as soon as I could — played truant the whole of the last year-I did four ‘O’ levels at the local further education college and then went to work full time as a library assistant in the local library (long since closed down). I hated it — it was boring, repetitive work.

I left very quickly and then came a series of dead end jobs and by the time I was 23 I was a single parent living on a council estate on benefits.

I wanted to have a decent job and decent income — but it was difficult — I did bar work in pubs and nightclubs –my parents coming to my flat to look after my daughter. I delivered leaflets- even did one day at the butchers stall down the market — I didn’t last any longer because I was a vegetarian and it was like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When my daughter started school I began cleaning the houses of the middle classes –all these jobs were cash in hand so alongside the stresses of being poor was the added one of worrying someone would grass me up and the ‘suss’ would find out I was working and claiming at the same time.

As my daughter got older and we got poorer I got tired of the shit jobs –its no fun cleaning for the middle classes and there’s no future in it. I wanted my daughter to think education was important. I did not want her to end up like me — broke, cleaning, living in a shit flat on an increasingly shit council estate.

When she was seven I started ‘A’ levels at evening classes –when she was ten I went to work part time as a Welfare Rights Officer in the local hospital. I juggled study, being a single parent and working, keeping the cleaning jobs on too

When I was thirty-five I went to university -an old poly -it was difficult. I was cleaning and studying, my dad was really ill, my daughter was struggling at secondary school.

I was amazed at how middle class the other students were, because it was an old poly I had expected them to be less so. But there were men in their 30s whose parents were paying their rent, or who were living in flats owned by their parents — or who were still living a home- people who went abroad for the whole of the summer — people who fathers owned factories in other countries- people who did not have to work and study — it was an incredibly different world to the one I inhabited.

This personal biography is relevant because it makes a mockery of the idea I am no longer working class. It points to how different my background and my trajectory is to most of the people I have met in academia. It points to the difference between being an academic and being a working class academic. The hegemonic conformist values of the middle class academic are alien to me — I don’t want to compete with other people, I don’t want to change cities so that I can get a job, or kiss arse to ‘get on’. I want the beliefs and values that have always defined me to continue to define me –I don’t want to publish obsessively — fly from one conference to another, spend my time frantically networking.

I don’t think it was until I entered academia that I realized how working class I am — how much my values differ from many of the people I have met there — I have listened in horror as a sessional lecturer and PhD student told me her 12 year old child knew not to bother her when she was working because her work came first, I have listened with fascination when I told someone how supportive a fellow part-timer had been and she replied ‘watch your back’ as though I posed some threat to this person just because we worked in the same precarious position as part time ‘visiting ‘ lecturers and must therefore be in competition with one another. Then there was the time when I was being strategically excluded from teaching on certain modules and someone I considered a friend told me ‘ I know I should say something but I have my career to think of’ or another time after a job interview when I was told one of the reasons I was not successful was because I was ‘too loud’.

The cultural and educational map of working class academics is not straight forward — it full of detours — a few dead ends –it leads us into unknown spaces — its is definitely not a privileged middle class map — it’s a map that is mediated by a socio and economic inequality. It creates anger and frustration and any success we achieve is complicated by our relationship to the academy we have worked to join but where we can never truly be a member.

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The issue here is that significant parts of the left have accepted without question and without debate the fundamental claim of trans activists that transwomen are women. And they have internalized transactivism’s immunization from rational dialogue by denouncing everyone who does not agree with this claim, as ‘bigot’, ‘terf’, full of ‘bile’ and ‘hatred’. The idea that trans rights as currently formulated may clash with women’s rights, seems inconceivable to those who have accepted what seems to me a pre-Enlightenment dogma, that transwomen are women. Is it too much to enquire, without being called a ‘bigot’, that maybe, just maybe, trans rights can be guaranteed on a different basis, without making the claim, trans women are women (or trans men are men)? But first a little more about me — that someone who does not belong in left spaces apparently.

I am a Marxist. I was brought up a Marxist by my Irish Republican dad who left Belfast at the age of 16 to work here in England so he could send money home to his mother. As we, his children, grew up he told us many stories about the houses with rooms to rent where the windows had signs in them saying ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’. He suffered racism all his life, from being called ‘paddy’ by people he did not know, to being the butt of jokes about how stupid the Irish are, to being labeled a terrorist and stopped by the police when ‘the troubles’ were on in the 1970’s, for the crime of having an Irish accent.

Both my parents were manual workers; my dad worked on building sites and my mum was a cleaner and then a school dinner lady. I left school at 16 with no qualifications and brought my daughter up on a council estate while claiming benefits and cleaning the houses of the middle classes to make sure we could eat. I know what it is to be vilified, looked down on and wonder where the next meal is coming from consequentially I interpret the world through the perspective of class.

I went to university at thirty five, now have a PhD and have been teaching in the university sector for the last 20 or so years, so I also know what it is like to inhabit the world of the middle classes. I have never been or ever wanted to be fully accepted into that world. I have written about class, made films about class, my politics are class based, I am acutely aware of the everyday injuries (and rewards) of being working class. As a working class woman I long ago rejected middle class feminism as an off shoot of capitalism where privileged women argued for the right to be treated the same and paid the same as middle class men –but whose feminism did nothing to overthrow the structural inequalities that meant their success would still be dependent on the labour of the working class women who clean their houses and look after their children.

I have sketched in these biographical details because I want to make it clear that I have direct experience of oppression and exploitation on many fronts mostly because of my class but also my Irishness and lately my sex. I do not write the following from a privileged position.

My aim as a working class woman has always been to overthrow capitalism (not on my own, obviously), not adapt myself to fit more easily into it. Therefore the concept of a universal sisterhood where I joined with other women on the basis we were all women appeared to me idealistic in the extreme. I considered it nothing more than an abstraction that ignored the very real differences of income, educational achievement, occupational status and life choices of working class women like me.

In fact I have always found I have more in common with working class men than I could ever have with middle class women. We share experiences of hardship, exploitation and struggle. As far as I was concerned the only thing I had in common with middle class women was my biology — the experiences we share are biological ones — menstruation, child birth, miscarriages, lactation, abortions, the menopause etc. (even though not all women experience all of these).

But it is precisely on these biological grounds I now find my self aligning with all women who are gender critical.

It is important to realise how gender relations have always played a role in the reproduction of capitalist society and capitalist reproduction has always depended on the oppression and exploitation of women. But for working class women that oppression and exploitation has manifested itself differently from the privileged lives of middle and upper class women. Understanding how patriarchy manifests in class specific ways has always informed my feminism. The essentialism I witnessed in the middle class version of feminism was simply a strategy that worked to denigrate or ignore the experiences and knowledge of working class women and exclude them from the public sphere.

Although not a class in the way that Marx proposed it, women are, as a biological category, different from men for all the reasons I have just stated but also because of the way in which gendered expectations construct a (classed) version of women –call it femininity — that fits well into the needs of a capitalist society for unpaid labour.

But biological sex allows us to make distinctions based on biological needs as well as recognizing biologically determined capacities. Recognising this in a positive rather than discriminatory way allows society to give women’s rights over their bodies and needs — a struggle which as the recent Irish referendum on the Eighth Amendment shows, is still, ongoing.

Sex is the scaffolding upon which gender roles are constructed. It depends upon both the conscious and unconscious wielding of power reinforced by cultural norms that are both personal and institutional. The idea that one can individually and on the basis of feelings opt out of these realities is an extraordinary basis for left politics as far as I am concerned.

Biological women have certain gendered expectations imposed on them — in just the same way that men have gendered expectations imposed upon them. And while I would argue it is impossible to change sex it is possible to feel uncomfortable with the imposition of gendered expectations. The imposition of rigid gender roles is never completely and unquestionably successful because variables such as personality, family dynamics and societal influences exert a greater or lesser influence on their development. Boys and men who do not conform to rigid gender expectations of toughness, rationality etc. are not the opposite sex they are men who do not conform to gendered expectations.

Gender stereotypes of women occur when biological attributes are transformed into ‘female traits’. Mimicking these ‘traits’ does not mean it is possible to change your biological make up–it simply means you have learned and accepted some very specific and selective ways in which women are constrained to behave so that they can both please and be dominated by men –that is how gender is produced. People are not born gendered, gender is something they learn — therefore it is possible for men to learn to act like women, to ‘perform’ femininity -but they can never be women.

But rather than define and defend their own rights, as gays and lesbians did, as people of colour have had to do, the trans movement makes an extraordinary and unprecedented move in the history of human rights: they want to claim not the universal rights that all people should have access to but the rights of another group (women) by claiming and appropriating their identities. This means appropriating those rights that have been put in place specifically to advantage or simply protect biological women such as, for example, all women short lists. This then is a question of power — and for an oppressed minority trans women have demonstrated amazing definitional power, persuading politicians, trade unionists, educationalists and even the medical profession that biological sex is a matter of self-identification by conflating and confusing sex with gender.

The transgender movement is neither progressive nor radical because it has no wish to transcend the limitations of capitalism but rather to isolate the signifiers of a socially constructed femininity in order to reinforce and reproduce them. Therefore the potential for a radical rejection of a patriarchal capitalist society is impossible within trans ideology, which works to maintain the divisions that contribute to its continuing existence. Instead of working towards a more androgynous society in which there are not female qualities and male qualities separate and imposed on each gender, the trans movement wishes to sustain the divisions that reinforce the oppression of women and places unrealistic demands on men in relation to the concept of masculinity.

As someone who was a teenager in the 1970s when there was a real and sustained attempt to break down the socially constructed roles associated with gender I have been genuinely shocked by the reemergence of old established and I thought discredited ideas related to how men and women should dress and behave and the talk of such essentialist concepts as ‘lady brains’.

In a hierarchal capitalist society questions of power are essential, the wielding of power means access to advantages, privileges and most importantly profits that those without power are denied. Historically speaking it has been men who have wielded the most power between the sexes therefore I would argue what we are witnessing with the trans movement is a group of men who wish to be treated as women exhibiting the traditional socialized behavioral dominance of the male sex. The acceptance of the trans narrative as a given has resulted in the systemic validation of one group of people at the expense of another. It is only by including the experiences of all groups that we can understand fully the broader social and political ramifications of the trans movement.

It is important to acknowledge that sexism is an historical process that manifests itself differently in different historical epochs. This latest manifestation of the social relations between men and women has much in common with previous ones concerned as it is with the subjugation of biological females, their disciplining and the insistence they conform to the needs of men. It is to all intents and purposes yet another patriarchal strategy designed to keep women subservient to the demands of men by actually erasing the category of women as a meaningful one. Why else would this particular movement demand the removal of sex-based safeguards designed to protect women based on their biology? Why would they wish to remove the strategies that have been put in place to ensure biological women are represented within the public political sphere? Why would children who exhibit gender nonconformity be railroaded into socially constructed gender positions and encouraged to begin medicalization to align their gender (now conceived as fixed) with a sex different to the one they are born with? Why else would they demand a change in the language we use to describe women’s bodily functions such as childbirth and breast-feeding? And why would any nuanced discussion of these things be dismissed with accusations of bigotry and hate speech? Gender relations cannot be transformed while the objective realities of sex and sex-based oppression, are ignored.

Far from abolishing gender distinctions the trans movement has actually entrenched them further and allowed women who disagree with them to be shouted down by men and other women. The insistence on men being accepted as women does nothing to change the conditions of the vast majority of women –particularly working class women, how could it? What we have is the ideological legitimation of men illustrating quite starkly that ‘gender’ relations are not simply about the attitudes men and women have towards each other but the part those relations play in society. The multiple subject positions of left identity politics has fractured the left and allowed the existing social relations of capitalism to remain in place. That is why the trans movement must be situated within the wider context of social, institutional and structural relations and considered from the standpoint of the lived social relations of capitalism. Feminism to be truly effective must be part and parcel of the fight against capitalism.

The deregulation of society that began with Thatcherism and accelerated under Blair — has meant that the cultural, social, economic and moral barriers to individual gratification have gradually been eroded. Rewriting the script of sexed power dynamics not only trivializes the objective reality of the lives of women but also instills liberal banalities celebrating individualism as the ultimate in progressive politics. This as we are witnessing allows for a move away from analysis towards an emphasis on feelings and self-validation.

The rise of individualism and the centering of individual wants as human rights at the expense of collective needs represent both the extension of a consumer society and the guarantee of its reproduction. It means nothing is safe if anything can be appropriated, if anything can be claimed to belong to those who simply want it or feel it, without situating that want within the social relations within which it is embedded.

I began this by talking about my identity and background — but only to underscore that I know all about discrimination, not to play top trumps with my working class Irish identity. We have to get the question of rights, right, for women and for trans people. Non-pathological engagement with objective realities (such as not pursuing practices that make the planet uninhabitable) requires the extension of democracy, including the extension not the contraction of democratic debate. If the left allows the trans militants to silence women, shut us down, make violent threats, nod approvingly every time they pressure venues to close their doors to our meetings, employers to sack them, organisations such as the Labour Party which they are members of, to expel them, then we are heading for very dark times indeed.

Under Thatcher and then Blair and continuing up until our contemporary moment, the working class has seen its culture slowly and progressively destroyed. The change from an industrial society to a service society produced a marked shift in focus from the working class as the backbone of the county to the image of a feral underclass responsible for their own poverty. Correspondingly their collective struggle has been eroded and its place filled by the middle class adherence to the politics of identity –a concentration on single issues that celebrate difference and refuses to recognize or engage with the continuing injuries of class.

One of the consequences of the massive changes that have taken place in working class life over the last forty years of neo liberalism has been the erasure of class-consciousness and the loss of the language of class as an analytical framework within which to articulate and make sense of those changes.

The working class has been cut adrift from any political party who would speak on their behalf and have been abandoned by academia, one of their traditional intermediaries. The middle class who prefers the comfort of individualistic identity politics has rushed into a public sphere that has systematically and strategically excluded the working class and which has narrowed to include only those who share an establishment view-even if their voices are ‘dissenting’ ones. As a consequence radical struggle has been reformulated and the working class rendered invisible as a political category increasingly known only through their appearances on reality TV shows or game shows where they are represented bereft of any history or agency. They serve the purpose of providing a spectacle and reinforcing middle class prejudices while at the same time the political agenda of derision and irrelevance is smuggled in under the guise of entertainment.

This degradation of the public sphere which is now almost exclusively dominated by a privately educated Oxbridge elite who publish each other, podcast each other, interview each other and share each others views, is nowhere more blatant than in this exclusion of the working class. What we now have is a public culture of self serving careerists whose obsession with their own status, individual concerns, personal anxieties and multiple claims to oppressed identities, make it ideologically impossible for them to connect with wider political issues.

The growth of idealism and the denial of material reality have offered for some on the middle class left a pseudo version of political radicalism. For them the struggle for change is no longer grounded in the politics of class nor do they acknowledge the working class as the potential initiators of change. Demands for equality are not rooted in an understanding of how the system operates structurally to deny any meaningful opposition to the current brutal society in which we live. If the people who are considered to be the ‘left’ in public life are mostly privileged Russell group graduates who have never experienced struggle, it is imperative we consider the impact that this will have on the fight for a different world and what that different world might look like. There is evidence of an increasing accommodation to a narrow neo liberalism intent on monetizing all aspects of our lives within a public sphere constantly undermined by a marketing led ethos concentrated on creating groups of consumers and where declaring your ‘communism’ on television programmes is just another marketing opportunity, destined to become a slogan on a tee-shirt to be sold via your website.

In the light of this its difficult not to consider the rapid rise of transgender ideology and its concommitment activism enthusiastically embraced by the middle class left, to be connected to the dismantling of radical politics over the last 40 years and the demoralization and feelings of defeat it has engendered.

Transgender activism has presented the privileged with an opportunity to ignore questions of class inequality while at the same time allowing some the opportunity to perform a superficial radicalism and progressiveness. As a result we have recently witnessed the spectacle of working class women in prison being assaulted by a man with a penis being ignored and in some cases his behavior excused so that the man’s status as a trans woman can be defended. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-44877856. In the process there has been a normalizing of the unequal treatment of working class women and an entrenchment of their marginalisation. There is no starker example of the absolute disdain in which middle class social justice warriors hold the working class. Rather than discuss the injustice of imprisoning some of the most damaged and vulnerable people in our society whose ‘crimes’ are mostly related to their poverty we have the ‘left’ clammering for the right of men to be housed along side them in prison. As for the consequences — working class women are just collateral damage. The callous indifference to the needs of, in this case, working class women is exactly in line with the neo liberal strategy of demonizing and ignoring the unemployed, the disabled, food bank users, those on zero hour contracts, etc.

The transgender movement demands a rejection of biological reality. Any attempt to discuss the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is met with social media bullying, attempts to prevent women meeting to discuss the issue and threats of violence both from those men who demand to be accepted as women and the people who support them in this demand.

It is not the women who toil in the sweatshops of ‘developing’ countries that the transgender activists wish to ‘transition’ to, rather it is the objectified successful bourgeois women that they aim to be. The reality for working class women of negotiating the institutional and personal power struggles in which their lives are embedded is not part of the appeal for men who clam to be women. On the contrary as in all other areas of life working class women are treated as unimportant or ignored as the example of the prison makes clear.

There is something very terrifyingly fragile about our commitment to reasoned debate if we can so nonchalantly cast aside facts such as our biological constitution. There is something hopelessly naïve if we think we can cast off deep socialization processes by a simple declaration such as ‘I’m a women’ by a man. There is something suspiciously familiar, the definite whiff of misogyny, in the determination to deny the violence that men perpetuate against men, and against women and the safeguards that women therefore need against men (who after all is doing the ‘upskirting’?).

If anyone can be anything they want just by saying it, where does that leave us? What kind of foundation is there to build on? If you #arewhatyousayyouare where does that leave those of us fighting for a better world? It leaves us nowhere- social, historical knowledge, institutional struggle and cultural experience becomes meaningless. The way in which our lives are shaped by structures over which we often have little control cannot be articulated or resisted. The propagation of the notion of a female essence renders at a stroke unnecessary the history of the struggles women have been involved in for their right to live independent autonomous lives –there’s no ‘wrong side of history’ when you can just ignore its existence.

There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the question of transgenderism and its impact on women and by women I mean people who belong to the sex class that has ovaries and is able to give birth. The levels of groupthink necessary to keep this ship afloat, the self censorship, the intimidation, the blatant dishonesty, the denial of debate with howls of ‘transphobia’ point to a left in deep crisis. The middle class dominated left has abandoned its obligation to critically engage, to clarify and to lead on the political issues of the day. Instead it has simply accepted the terms of the debate put forward by the trans militants (including their really basic conflation of sex and gender). This failure is rooted in the left’s acceptance of identity politics with its assumption that how a group (or the primary definers within a group) articulates its oppression is the last word in the matter. Yet it is clear that one group’s identity and its claims may easily clash with the claims and identity of another group. Identity politics has no way of negotiating these conflicting claims. In the end the group that can mobilise the most power is the group that will have its claims prevail. In its catastrophic alignment with what is clearly a men’s rights movement, the left has chosen to side with the powerful over the less powerful, men over women, and the middle class over working class women and it is they in particular who will bear the brunt of trans rights as currently formulated.

The closing down of the complexities of this discussion with the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is profoundly undemocratic. In a properly functioning democracy the concerns of everyone would be included in an open and transparent discussion. Instead, critical thinking is relabeled ‘transphobia’, even basic facts are now apparently a sign of Trump leaning tendencies (thereby ensuring that the Right will own this issue, because the left cannot sensibly discuss it). Rather than fighting for us all to transition to a fairer more equal society, the social justice warriors focus on the right of men to adopt the stereotypes that most women have long ago rejected. Rather than fight to create something new, trans ideology recycles old tropes of femininity (‘lady brains’ -really?) and claims them as progressive. Rather than considering ways of radically changing the roles of both men and women, we are being told that the stereotypes women have fought against are actually real and can be appropriated by men to ‘prove’ they are women.

The proposed Gender Recognition Act currently under consultation would allow a system of self-identification where changing ‘gender’ is simply a case of signing a form, so that biological males will be legally allowed to identify as women. Even the very title of the proposed act, demonstrates how our policy makers have made a fundamental conflation between gender (socially constructed characteristics of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’) and biological sex. This in itself shows how deeply controversial the central tenets of trans ideology are and that it is absolutely legitimate and necessary for these ideas to be open to contestation and debate. Unless the left recognizes this, it risks making a historic political mistake.