Casey Forsyth looks at why the right is so obsessed with gender and how transphobia is part of maintaining the sexist and oppressive gender roles in the family
Donald Trump and the far right globally have launched a wave of attacks on trans rights. In his inauguration speech, Trump declared, “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
The Trump administration has brought in a flurry of executive orders attempting to erase trans people from every aspect of social life.
All passports and identification must now be in accordance with the sex assigned at birth. The US State Department has ordered permanent visa bans for anyone trying to enter the US who is “seeking to misrepresent their birth sex on their birth certificate”, as well as orders to restrict or ban gender-affirming care, banning trans women and girls from sports and removing references to trans people in government data.
But the attacks against what the right calls “gender ideology” are coming from across mainstream institutions. Last month the UK Supreme Court declared “sex is binary” and that those who change their legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate cannot be considered as their affirmed gender under the UK Equality Act.
The UK Supreme Court ruling is already impacting trans lives, with the Equality and Human Rights Commission releasing an interim guidance calling for organisations to ban trans people from single-sex spaces in light of the ruling.
This follows the British Labour government’s decision last year to ban the use of puberty blockers and hormones for under 18s after the appalling Cass Review into trans healthcare.
We’ve seen echoes of this here, with the recent ban on puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy for under 18s in Queensland. Labor’s response—to call a review into this essential and safe healthcare while refusing to oppose the Queensland ban—is a worrying sign they will capitulate to further attacks.
Sex, gender and biology
Underpinning this wave of transphobia is the assumption that being a man or a woman is hardwired into our biology.
There are clearly physiological differences between the groups we categorise as women and men. Humans have two sets of physical traits on the basis of our reproductive system.
But sex characteristics are not the simple binary issue that is often assumed. Physical characteristics that are associated with one sex, such as physical strength, body hair and hormone levels, vary between members of both sexes.
Some people develop a mix of male and female characteristics where, for example, they have female sex chromosomes but some male characteristics—what we call intersex.
This includes at least 30 different conditions that altogether are found in around 1.7 per cent of the population. Intersex people are either forced to undergo surgery at birth or to “choose” life as male or female.
These examples show that male or female characteristics are not just a biological question. They are also a social question that determines how we are perceived and how we perceive ourselves. They connect us to a set of assumptions, about both our physiology and our social roles, beyond what has been determined by our biology.
This flies in the face of the dominant thinking about gender, that women and men are fundamental opposites and that this is hardwired into our biology.
One popular book on this topic, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has sold more than 100 million copies. Scores of scientific studies have been dedicated to understanding the differences between women and men. They have instead revealed just how similar we are.
There is a whole field of study, “evolutionary psychology”, which seeks to trace social differences, such as those between men and women, back to evolutionary instincts. The effect has been to popularise the idea that everything gendered, from men cheating on women to women being “better” at shopping, is biologically programmed.
The effect of this ideological onslaught, connecting our gender to our biology, is to make the role of women as primarily responsible for caring for children and families seem natural and inevitable.
But we know that the socially accepted gender roles of women and men have differed significantly across different societies. Gender roles are far from fixed.
Reproduction
The biological processes of human reproduction take place in a distinct social setting.
This is not a mindless process determined by our evolutionary instincts but a result of the kind of society in which we live. The ways we organise the making of food, shelter, clothing and other social needs has a fundamental impact on the ways we organise sexual relations and the raising of children.
For the majority of human history, from the emergence of our species some 300,000 years ago until the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, children were raised collectively, and people lived in egalitarian societies.
This was because societies were generally kept small and mobile, and it was in everyone’s interests to share what was produced. As a result, childrearing was not the responsibility of only two people, separate from society, but of society as a whole.
Women could therefore play a leading role in societal affairs, were sexually free to have multiple partners and did not suffer the continual subordination to their husbands and a male-dominated society that has since become the norm.
At the same time, the evidence we have strongly suggests that trans people, gender variant and non-binary people as well as various sexual orientations have existed in most if not all human societies, and there is an abundance of evidence of different forms of gender transitions in these pre-class, egalitarian societies that were accepted and even revered.
Gendered oppression came as the emergence of class societies led to a re-organisation of the way we raise children.
This transition was based on the creation of a surplus in agricultural societies so that people could accumulate more than they needed.
Over time, this created a set of people not directly engaged in productive activity, who safeguarded this surplus on behalf of society. This group developed an interest independent of those working, relying on their exploitation to maintain benefits the rest of the population could not enjoy.
It is in this process that the ability to give birth developed an increased importance, because societies that produced larger numbers of children and a larger population could increase agricultural production and wealth. The introduction of heavy ploughing also meant that those who carried babies were excluded from production for long periods.
In addition, the transition to private property and the potential to pass that on to the next generation meant that ruling class men wanted to control their wives’ fertility and ensure their children were their own.
For the first time there arose a division between productive labour, labour spent in society producing a surplus for a ruling class, and reproductive labour that was spent raising the next generation of workers.
It is this division that entrenched the subordinate position of women in society and created systems of gendered organisation that required a strict division between men and women’s roles.
With the emergence of capitalism, this division appeared under threat as factory work drew in men, women and children alike. Conditions at work were so brutal that they threatened to undermine the ability to reproduce the workforce needed for the capitalist system.
The capitalists excluded (most) women and children from work and encouraged the ideology of the nuclear family, with women’s role in the home at its centre.
This promotion of gender roles helped guarantee the reproduction of a healthy workforce.
Outsourcing the reproduction of the workforce to women in the home is integral for capitalism. It would cost the government about $570 billion a year to pay for the cooking, cleaning, raising of children, caring for the elderly and all the other domestic labour done mostly by women, academic Dr Leonora Risse has estimated. That is 70 per cent of the federal government budget.
As well as the cost for the system, the family provides a place of love, care and sexual satisfaction that helps to reconcile its members to the harsh reality of capitalism, as well as to discipline them against taking risks that could jeopardise the family unit.
Central to justifying this are ideas about gender roles that match the division of labour created by the family. Women are to be submissive, caring, empathetic, willing to put others above themselves, interested in making things pretty and clean and to love children with all their hearts, while men are tough, insensitive, in pursuit of “things” more than relationships, resilient and suited to the hard world of work and exploitation more than the world of love and care.
Trans people undermine the assumption that this division is natural, which is why the right see us as such a threat.
For the ruling class, this is not simply a question of enforcing gender roles. It’s about making our bodies, as well as our social roles, conform to the gender binary and the needs of the nuclear family.
For this reason, trans liberation and women’s liberation fundamentally go together—both are a struggle against biology determining our destiny. Both are a fight for bodily autonomy against right-wing forces that would restrict women’s rights to abortion and contraception and trans rights to medical transition.
But to get rid of transphobia and sexism we must do more than challenge bigotry and hatred. We need to build working-class power behind demands for trans rights, to open up access to all spaces and services trans people need to live in their preferred gender.
We must fight to reduce the burden on the women and the family that is the source of sexist and transphobic ideas, by fighting for equal pay, universal childcare and aged care to make reproductive labour the responsibility of society as a whole.
Ultimately, this will require overthrowing the capitalist system that uses transphobia to help justify women’s oppression.
