Read a substantially abridged version of this essay here (or in Women's Fightback 27).
As revolutionary socialists, we fight for the expansion of freedom and human flourishing, and seek to rid our world of oppression and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the downtrodden, champion individual self-determination and bodily autonomy, and organise to empower people to take control of their own lives, and to determine how they socially identify, present, and relate to others. For all these reasons and more, we fight for the liberation of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming people. This struggle flows naturally from our liberatory principles and our commitment to solidarity, combined with our recognition of reality as it is.
That is a reality in which trans people experience widespread and severe discrimination, hostility, harassment, violence, social exclusion and isolation. Trans people face major obstacles in being socially recognised as the gender they identify with, and in accessing the medical support they need. Interpersonal and systemic transphobia profoundly harms most trans people, who disproportionately experience mental health difficulties. Statistical research in this area is particularly difficult and of limited accuracy, but Stonewall’s 2017 School Report found that 84% of young trans people surveyed in the UK had self-harmed and 45% had attempted suicide.
It is also a reality in which trans rights are not in conflict with the rights of (cis) women, or other oppressed groups.
So what drives this transphobia? Marxist analysis offers us insights into how society works and how it came to be this way. It helps us to understand the world around us, the roots of oppression and exploitation — and how to cut these roots and transform society from bottom to top.
“Social reproduction theory” (SRT) argues that the origins and perpetuation of women’s oppression lies in their specific relationship to the social reproduction of class society; a complex but unified dynamic underlies both class exploitation and gendered oppression.
Reproduction of society
All societies require human labour to function and continue existing. People labour to create things which satisfy human needs desires, such as a phone, pizza or lesson — “use values” (Marx 1867/1999, p. 27). The capacity to do this work — “labour-power” — requires various mental and physical abilities (ibid., p. 119). As we work, we expend time and energy, we use this labour-power (ibid., pp. 50, 127).
“Social reproduction” refers to all the processes whereby a society reproduces itself (Bhattacharya 2017, pp. 6–7). Workers, the bearers of labour-power, need to eat, sleep and rest, to be looked after when sick, and eventually we die. As well as the day-to-day things we do to meet our needs, such as eating and healthcare — “maintenance processes”, we need to be replaced when we die, become unable to work, or when greater numbers are required. New generations must be born and raised, or people must migrate from other societies. These processes ensure that there are people available to work, and together make up the “reproduction of labour-power” (Vogel 1983/2014, p. 144).
One aspect of the “generational replacement” (ibid., pp. 146, 189) is biological reproduction, including pregnancy, childbirth and (historically) breastfeeding.
Humans as a whole are to first approximation, and in a limited way, sexually dimorphic. Sex isn’t a simple binary, however, and human sexual dimorphism isn’t as tidy as many people think. Crucially too, it is orders of magnitude less important in determining individual attributes — or social dynamics — than is generally assumed.
The large majority of people — though certainly not all — have either XX or XY chromosomes, roughly the same number with each. Most of these people have sexual characteristics — genitalia, gonads, hormones, breasts, etc. — broadly aligning with two corresponding clusters. We shouldn’t ignore that personal and social factors influence even these biological characteristics. Exercise and diet impact hormone levels. Castration has been practised for thousands of years; the shaving of facial hair for tens of thousands. Modern medicine can shape an individual’s “biological” sexual characteristics even further still.
Much of the thinking about gender, sex and women’s position in society, exaggerates the — supposed — biological characteristics of individuals, and builds their theories from there. We only need to compare gender essentialist views in, for example, Victorian-era Britain, about the immutable qualities and behaviour of men and women, with their actual qualities and behaviour today to see how gender stereotypes are built on sand. Marxism and SRT strip away the parochial focus on a particular society.
What matters here is the rough dimorphism in reproductive capacity: only humans born with certain sexual characteristics can develop the ability to become pregnant and give birth, and (again, historically) the ability to lactate. During the later months of pregnancy, and during breastfeeding, individuals’ abilities to perform other forms of labour is reduced, while their need for maintenance is not, providing a material basis for some division of labour associated with dimorphic sexual characteristics.
Class societies
In class societies the ruling class owns or controls both the raw materials and the tools we — the exploited classes — need to produce things, to create use-values (Marx 1867/1999, p. 119). They permit us to use and consume enough of the things we produce to carry on living, working, and reproducing, while appropriating as much of the rest, the “surplus-labour” or “profit”, as possible (ibid., pp. 152–3, 164). How this appropriation happens is the foundation of class, political, social relations in a given class society (Marx 1894/1999b, p. 148, 576).
The ruling class seeks to maximise profit by minimising the costs of reproducing the workforce and by maximising the amount of work each of us performs. Activities involved in the reproduction of labour-power not only come at direct costs — such as food eaten — but tend to take time that members of the exploited class could otherwise spend working for the ruling-class.
And so the reproduction of labour-power, including generational replacement, incurs both short-term costs and long-term benefits to the ruling class, leading to potential tensions in their interests (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 148–156). They seek resolutions through ensuring reproduction of labour-power whilst minimising its costs in the long term, and their success in doing so, and the particular strategies used, depends on class struggle. It is through these resolutions, and struggle over them, that gendered oppression arises or is recreated.
One way the ruling class seeks to resolve this tension is by taking advantage of interpersonal relationships. Individuals who are linked by kin or sexuality to a childbearing person — but not childbearing themselves — tend to take greater responsibility for providing material goods for them when they are less able to do surplus-labour producing labour. These individuals — in this resolution — are disproportionately people whose reproductive biology precludes them giving birth or breastfeeding: generally, “men”. In theory, these biological differences combined with the ruling class’s needs would only require a limited “gendered” division of labour for a relatively short period in people’s lives. In reality, however, it’s generally much more long-lasting, life-long even, and built into varied “family” structures: for much daily maintenance as well as generational replacement.
Genders of people are constituted, reconstituted, and reinforced associated with individuals’ assumed reproductive capabilities. Emotional, sexual, intellectual, behavioural and physical qualities; ways of presenting, talking, and identifying; and even unequal moral and spiritual worth are associated with these different classifications of people as “women”, “men”, and sometimes other genders.
Both the gendered division of labour and the family itself are more stable if they last for lifetimes, rather than only during periods of pregnancy and breastfeeding. These tight family bonds mean that women and men are more likely to take up their respective roles with greater conviction and fewer complaints, and women and men become “specialists” at their respective roles.
Within working-class families, “women” generally do more work for the reproduction of labour power — taking care of children, preparing food, domestic chores, etc. — while “men” generally provide more material requirements for these processes — food to be cooked, shelter, and other goods or the money to buy these. To acquire the latter, men typically perform more work directly for the ruling class.
Men, therefore, acquire more of these means of subsistence directly while women often rely on male family members for (at least some) such provisions. The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed in 2016 that unpaid labour constitutes 56% of the GDP and that on average women perform 60% more unpaid labour than men, while the gender pay gap was 18%. This dependence facilitates women’s subjugation, which, in turn, feeds into a social system that justifies providing women with less, fuelling a vicious cycle (Vogel 1983/2014, p.153). Where women demand more, they — indirectly or directly — stake a claim to part of the ruling class’s spoils. The oppression of women therefore advantages and is encouraged by the ruling class. The material precondition for women’s oppression is not the division of labour itself, but dependence on men for the means of subsistence during childbearing (ibid., p. 153).
Class-society arose as surplus resources became available, which became controlled by a small proportion of society. The social reproduction of such a society requires a mechanism for this accumulated wealth to be passed onto a small proportion of the next generation, a mechanism for inheritance for the ruling class.
In prehistoric class society — likely from or shortly after the dawn of class society — this wealth came to be controlled by men. Engels views primitive classless societies as having some gendered division of labour, being matrilineal, and with independence or even some supremacy of women based on this division of labour although without systemic inequalities and with sexual freedom (Vogel 1983/2014, p. 86; for modern evidence see Knight 2009). As class emerged, men secured possession of the surplus wealth, perhaps because it developed through activities that they took disproportionate responsibility for (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 86–7), perhaps even partly because they were better able to physically defend it from thieves than women. However early- and pre-class societies were organised, we can infer from ancient history and anthropology that at an early stage in class-society men, or a proportion of men, obtained possession or control of wealth.
To allow these ruling-class men to bequeath property to children and ensure their paternity — that those bequeathed are likely biologically “their children” — they needed to overthrow (or prevent) matrilineal relations and women’s sexual freedom (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 86–7, 153–4). The degradation and oppression of women facilitated this, and men’s control over reproduction as well as production. This gave rise not only to patriarchal and (with time) monogamous families — monogamous for women — but allowed the further development of class-society.
To what extent different gendered and familial relations and ideas were fully created with the advent of class societies, or were merely strengthened and reshaped, I do not know. The literature is often patchy and contested. What we can say, however, is that the ruling class encouraged and encourages their reproduction, reshaping, bolstering.
From distinct foundations the oppressions of women within different classes often leads to similar experiences, reinforces the oppressions of women in each, and gives rise to important though limited cross-class feminist solidarity.
Capitalism
In the capitalist form of class society, the ruling class’s drive to increase profit — appropriated surplus, “surpus-value” — through increased productivity propels it to organise production increasingly under its direct control. This led to and heightens a division between what became “domestic labour” and “wage-labour” (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 152, 159). “Domestic labour” refers to unwaged work necessary for reproducing labour-power, performed outside of direct capitalist control (mostly in the home) (ibid., p. 192). This division creates serious rifts between two forms of labour: performed at different times, in different places, in different institutions, experienced differently. This radically transformed family forms and the position of women. It also led to a deep-seated and partially independent ideology surrounding two gendered “separate spheres”: domestic vs. wage labour; private vs. public; family vs. work; “free time” vs. working time; women vs. men (ibid., p. 152). Such distinctions did not exist in the same way in agriculturally based class-societies, where domestic labour and surplus-production tended to be integrated — but are presented as natural phenomena that have always existed and always will. Gendered oppressions and divisions of labour from earlier class societies have been transformed and strengthened.
Capital has an interest in decreasing domestic labour, so that people can undertake wage-labour instead: through the socialisation of tasks such as education, through technological advances such as the washing machine, and through migrant, slave, or prison labour. This is balanced against other interests, from reducing the cost of the welfare state to maintaining low wages which reduces the ability of people to purchase labour-saving appliances, to encouraging and maintaining division in the working-class through anti-migrant politics.
More favourable outcomes can be won if fought for; capital’s competing and conflicting tendencies and interests makes that doubly true. Inspiring working-class battles have won an expanded welfare state, higher wages and better rights and conditions for migrants, amongst other things. That such victories can have benefits for capital in the medium term can aid the winning of some fights. Even for instance limits to the working day, which our class had to fight tooth-and-nail to win, had some benefits in the longer-term for capital: overworking for short-term profits had been driving workers to an incredibly early grave faster than they could be replaced.
Capital’s insatiable profit motive drives it from one sector to another in constant search of the highest profit-rate. Cut-throat competition demands dynamism and with it a mobility of labour power. If a new sector — say software or e-scooter production — becomes more profitable, there is an incentive for more companies, more investment, more offices and factories employing more workers in that sector. This can be done faster where there is a wider pool of readily available workers, the bearers of labour-power, who can be readily redeployed in whatever the latest profitable sector may be. In theory, then, all workers should be equal — or equally exploitable and redeployable — breaking down barriers to equality (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 167–9). However, this conflicts with capital’s need for a divided — hence weaker — working class, and for gendered oppression, racism, etc. Once again, these tensions are resolved through struggle and there have been serious although limited advances won for many oppressed groups. For instance, openly racist legislation has been successfully fought against, and yet BAME people continue to experience widespread discrimination and institutionalised racist violence.
At the same time as systematically oppressing various groups, capitalism cultivates ideologies proclaiming human equality and democratic rights. These ideologies are partly due to its tendency to equalisation between workers, and partly as a legacy of its fight to overcome feudalism. Oppressions often originated as carry-overs from previous class societies. Mismatches between false promises of equality and reality intensify the experience of oppression and gendered oppression can sometimes appear more severe or fundamental than class exploitation, as class exploitation is assumed in the promise of equality — “equal opportunity”. Capitalism develops strong ideological and institutional processes to reconcile these apparent contradictions, through justifying this domination and exclusion from equality. These sexist, racist, and other “justifications” are an additional oppressive force.
The “equality” advertised is equality as sellers of labour-power, inseparable from exploitation in capitalist production (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 170–2). That is, equality within classes, not equality between classes.
And so capitalism lays the ground for movements for gender equality to emerge, even on cross-class bases; these have often won important steps forward. Advances in equality not only improve the situation of women, but in doing so can help expose the exploitation inherent in capitalism, while reducing divisions within the working class; augmenting their revolutionary potential.
Fundamentally though, the costs within capitalism of eliminating domestic labour are — and will remain[1] — too great for it to be done, and it will thus remain in the ruling class’s interest for domestic labour to be disproportionately performed by women, supported through a system of gendered oppression. Movements for gender equality alone cannot overthrow capitalism, and so will not cut the gendered division of labour and the oppression of women at the roots.
The types of paid and unpaid labour also remain highly gendered. Their most recent research finds that in March 2022, employed women with dependent children spent 52% more time on unpaid childcare and 64% more time on household work than employed men with dependent children. Of parents with dependent children, fathers are disproportionately in work, not homeworking and without special working arrangements.
Queer oppression
As described, the ruling class needs and perpetuates a gender order and gendered oppression. This in turn generates transphobia, a collateral consequence of their strategy for maintaining this gendered order.
Capitalism’s transformation of families and personal life allowed for ways of life and identities framed around erotic preferences (Sears, 2017, pp. 172–5). The shift to individual reliance on wages, allowed sexual minorities the freedom to live outside of heterosexual families. The division of UK society into a distinct homosexual minority and a heterosexual majority began in earnest only in the early 1700s (Cook et al., 2007).
As we’ve seen, however, it suits capital to maintain and regulate a gender order to ensure social reproduction and maximise profit. So, as non-conforming gender and sexual minorities came into view, it precipitated a host of restrictive legislation and moral panics: a rising of both the visibility of and obstacles confronting deviants. Neither majority nor minority could ignore the deviation any longer. This shaped and strengthened oppression and the emergence of a new gender- and sexuality-policing social order on the one hand; and specific identities and resistance on the other. “Heteronormativity” emerged via attempts to regulate the queer lifestyles inadvertently permitted by capitalism. Male homosexuality was only made illegal in the UK in 1533, early in the capital’s rise to power; arrests and prosecutions for homosexual offences peaked after limited legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. Sears writes that:
“[Heteronormativity] refers to the practices and ideas that frame a specific, institutionalized heterosexual orientation as normal, making it the reference point around which all forms of sex and intimacy are assessed… Heteronormativity naturalises and eternalizes culturally and historically specific forms of sexuality, framing particular household forms and divisions of labour as products of human nature and as necessary foundations for a healthy human society.”
Sexual freedom within capitalism is shaped by the “combination of consent and compulsion” of labour relations. Our bodily practices and our transformative “work” in creating objects, concepts and interactions shape our lives and identities, our experiences and sexualities.
Workers “own” our bodies and “freely” choose wage-contracts, but are systemically compelled to sell our labour-power to survive. Workers are compelled to work as a means to an end; not controlling the processes, the product produced, or their part in this process. As such, work, a defining and core aspect of life, is “alienating”; it is demeaning, and appears as a means only to continue existing. Individual workers are alienated both from the product worked on and the labour of producing that product; and so from themselves and each other (Marx 1932/2000, p. 28).
Sexuality, a bodily and creative, personal and social practice, thus becomes associated with compulsion and dispossession, alienated, and a means to an end (Sears 2017, pp. 175– 189). It is often used instrumentally to achieve sustenance, companionship, shelter or escapism; or sometimes money. Capital’s shaping of workers’ lives, embodied identity and sexualities, also and in turn shapes their relationships with their own and others’ bodies and gendered (or otherwise) identities, presentation and practices.
Sears could be read in an overly deterministic or over-simplistic way, even squeezing out the space for individual agency. I instead read him as sketching some strong influences and forces among many. I now tentatively delineate how capitalism drives transphobia.
Trans oppression
In capitalism both sexuality and gender are associated with compulsion and seem instrumental; heteronormativity, meanwhile, makes this instrumentalisation as well as specific sexualities and genders seem “natural”. Alienation of workers from their labour, their choices and from others and correspondingly from their sexuality, gender and embodied experiences — experiences of their own body, how it can interact with the world, how it feels — estranges them from social factors and aesthetic choices in these. Heteronormativity’s “naturalising” erases these factors and choices, which justifies and is reinforced by this estrangement.
Ideas about gender in previous class-societies were transformed, strengthened and widened into specific conceptions of specific gender as natural. In naturalising gender in this way, heteronormativity erases the huge variations in practices and understandings across and within societies. Naturalising culturally specific genders, sexualities and their associations through heteronormativity makes them seem unquestionable because they are inevitable, which is crucial for regulating and reproducing a specific, restricting and oppressive gender order. To achieve this, heteronormativity promotes (biological) “gender essentialist” beliefs and assumptions: that practices or qualities associated with gender and sexuality can be reduced to innate (normally biological) facts about people.
The ideology of “separate spheres” reinforces gender binarism, and this, coupled with gender essentialism, encourages the idea that there is both strict and tidy biological sexual dimorphism and neat alignment between individuals’ biological sexual characteristics and their identity, behaviour and presentation. These assumptions come into direct conflict with the existence of nonbinary, intersex, trans binary, and gender nonconforming people.
The growth of separate spheres ideology has led to the segregation of the two supposedly opposing and incompatible genders. “Men’s” and “women’s” toilets, for example, are a relatively recent phenomenon. State and corporate bureaucracy has increasingly both segregated spaces, and put individuals in boxes. From our birth, through education, health, relationships, employment, licences, bills, finances, and citizenship records and certificates, and even our death certificates, we are followed by an ever-growing deluge of paperwork. Gender — or a gendered title — is one of the basic categories of many of these.
The beliefs and assumptions sketched above — gender binarism, strict sex binarism, biological essentialism in gender category, biological essentialism about gendered appearance and actions — shape how people are divided and boxed. This creates institutional erasure or oppression: nonbinary people can often find no toilet which explicitly permits their entrance, no box or title on forms or documents for them; trans people struggle to be reclassified from their categorisation at birth; intersex individuals are often shoe-horned into one of two fairly narrow medical or elite sports categories. And of course, on top of institutional erasure, the same people face much interpersonal hostility and social discrimination.
Talia Mae Bettcher, in 'Evil Deceivers and Make Believers' (2007) and 'Trapped in the Wrong Theory' (2014) argues that in the dominant gender order, individuals’ gendered presentation euphemistically represents that person's genitalia, or “innate” biological sex. In cases where these appear misaligned or “misrepresenting” — whether by a trans person who hasn’t had surgery, or by a cis person’s gender non-conformity — this is threat to the dominant gender order. Transphobia kicks in to enforce that essentialist gender system, to reassert the euphemistic representation. In doing so it maintains and naturalises the gender order.
This fosters tropes of trans people being either deceptive or delusional, and hence potentially dangerous. These tropes feature prominently in mainstream, far-right and “left” transphobia and serve as a backdrop to transphobic violence, marginalisation, subjugation, and murder.
The conflict between gender binarism and nonbinary people fuels similar issues. Nonbinary identities are erased and dismissed; nonbinary people are interpreted as delusional and treated as binary; and oppressive treatment serves to punish attempted transgressions.
Intersex “correction” surgery aims to enforce the neat and narrow sexual dimorphism as ubiquitous and inescapable, when it is anything but (Adkins 1999; Warnke 2001). The promotion of over-simplistic ideas about biological sex, and shoe-horning of individuals into two neat biological categories helps to neutralise and erase the threat to a rigid biological binary world view.
These oppressions (schematised in footnote [2]) occur not because the presence of a comparatively small number of trans people are a serious threat to capitalism’s existence and profits, but as a result of the wider context, in which capitalism seeks to regulate social reproduction and maximise profit by maintaining a restrictive and oppressive gender order.
Trans equality?
Capitalism’s systemic potential for equality and ideologies proclaiming human equality apply superficially, and to some extent meaningfully, to trans people, just as they do to women: cutting — to a limited extent — against the oppressive drives described above. Capitalism’s contradictory tendencies clear the way for potential advances in LGBTIQ rights when fought for. A proportion of the ruling class can support LGBTIQ rights, be LGBTIQ or even “co-opt” parts of the LGBTIQ movement. This is compounded by the fact that children who become LGBTIQ are born into families which are dispersed roughly evenly throughout class-society, unlike, for example, people of colour. The relationship between capitalism and the oppression of trans and nonbinary people is likewise not mechanical and linear, but dynamic and contradictory, allowing for working-class and social movements to intervene.
Capitalism continues to drive processes which limit sexual freedom, however, and while heteronormativity has been forced to expande its scope to allow some LGB rights and visibility, it remains very much in force. This has given rise to “homonormativity”. As narrow forms of lesbian and gay practices and identities have become more normalised and accepted, other types of LGBTIQ identities and gender-nonconforming practices are stigmatised.
Acceptable identities are those which emulate the practices or ideals of heterosexual relationships, or around the ability to be “family people” and therefore facilitate the reproduction of labour-power — via gay marriage, for instance.
As narrow forms of “homonormative” lesbian and gay practices and identities have become more normalised and accepted — limited victories of gay struggle — sexuality-based and gender-based identities and oppression have increasingly diverged. From the origins of the “homosexual” identity in Molly-houses over three centuries ago, where “gay men” dressed as women, until recently, the most prominent queer identities and communities encompassed gendered as well as sexual deviation.
Trans, nonbinary, intersex, and genderqueer people have gained some visibility — as the less acceptable branch. We have faced — and are building the struggle against — more specific, and often heightened, oppression and discrimination. This includes attempts by the hard and far right, the religious right, populist politicians and newspapers, and even some on the ostensible left, to stoke up transphobic hate. This serves transphobic aims; builds culture war currency; divides the left and working class; and promotes a conspiratorial world-view that hides the real sources of oppression, misery, sexism and gendered violence.
As with women’s oppression, the experience of severe and pervasive trans oppression is intensified by its mismatch with false (or limited) promises of human equality. This is compounded by ideas and institutions attempting to reconcile this contradiction, by justifying why this equality doesn’t apply to trans people on the one hand, and by denying that they are subjugated on the other.
Capitalism’s contradictions set the context against which movements for the liberation of working-class and LGBTIQ people and women can fight and win. Important victories have already been won, and these need to be defended, for obvious reasons. Moves towards equality, no matter how limited, can reduce divisions within the working class, uniting us and making it easier to wage new, offensive struggles. Exposing the promised “equality” as equality in exploitation brings the class exploitation — not a conspiratorial “trans agenda”! — at the foundation of contemporary society into view. As capitalism encourages the oppression of women, trans and nonbinary people, and the reproduction of oppressive gender relations, confronting and overthrowing capitalism is vital for “full” trans liberation.
Forms of subjugation
The ways women are subjugated under capitalism — in particular the prevalence of sexual assault, coercion and violence — is dictated by the ruling class’s need to disempower workers, the effects gendered division and valuation of labour have on experiences of and attitudes towards our own — and others’ — bodies, and wider gendered power dynamics.
To maintain their hegemony, the ruling class must perpetually take away workers’ effective control of their bodies (Sears 2017). Degradation, silencing and violence against women — as well as more naked projects, like the rolling back of abortion rights — deprive women of control, creating vulnerability and dependency, and subjugating both their labour and reproductive functions to reproduction of labour-power as needed by capital. This is intertwined with heteronormativity. Compulsion combined with ideas of two “opposite” genders helps to polarise these genders into compellor and compelled, buttressing women’s oppression.
The gendered division of labour impacts — and is impacted by — the way we value different kinds of work. Caregiving (for example), is often unpaid, is seen as “women’s work” and systematically devalued. This is true of caregiving even when it’s done as paid work; it’s undervalued and underpaid, disproportionately undertaken by women, especially women of colour and migrant women. It is seen as less important or skilled because it is done by inferior people; they are devalued for doing such work.
The different types of activities and work we do affects our sense of and our attitudes towards our own and other people’s (gendered) bodies, and what we can and should do with them. Men disproportionately experience certain types (and longer hours) of wage-labour, and play as children to prepare them for this. Management strategies sometimes evoke masculine pride grounded in the ability to endure difficult, painful and tedious work and in providing for dependent family members. People develop very divergent senses of their bodies through engaging in caregiving or heavy industry: still extremely disproportionately done in the UK by women and men respectively. For example, in the UK men comprise 90% of “process, plant, and machine operatives” and people in “skilled trades occupations” (which includes a large range of technical jobs), while women work 78% of “caring, leisure and other service occupations” (ONS, 2017). More subtly, within “office work”, “administrative and secretarial occupations” are disproportionately done by women, while “associate professional and technical occupations” are disproportionately done by men (ibid.).
In unpaid work, UK women perform more than twice as much child care and laundry as men, and approximately twice as much housework and cooking. UK women aged 26–35 perform on average over 34 hours of unpaid labour per week, almost equivalent to a full-time job and twice as much as their male counterparts. Mothers on maternity leave perform almost 60 hours of unpaid work per week and lower-income individuals do more than higher-income individuals.
Men experience more wage-labour, and in the domestic realm have more of their bodily requirements cared for by others. As such — Sears argues — they tend to be more alienated from their physical and environmental existence, thus knowing and experiencing the world more abstractly. Men are likewise disproportionately directly dependent on waged labour, and spend more time subject to work-discipline, keeping working-class men disempowered.
These specific forms of alienation mean that from the dominant male gaze sexuality is abstracted from wider social and bodily interactions, reduced to a lust for a particular sex-act, penile-vaginal penetration followed by male ejaculation — the one necessary for generational replacement. Women perform more caregiving — paid and not— so tend to know sexuality less narrowly than simply penetration and ejaculation, but heteronormativity portrays that sex-act as the biological driving force behind sexuality.
Gendered power relations and relations of dependence frame sexual consent and coercion. Women sometimes — and disproportionately — have undesired sex because they feel a sense of implicit pressure or obligation, and don’t feel they have a choice or know how to refuse. Women’s sexuality and sexual agency is diminished by heteronormativity, and broader power relations both sustain and naturalise sexual coercion and assault.
Rape has widely been used to reinforce domination: against women, under slavery, by invading armies, or against LGBTIQ people. Heteronormative masculinity is tied to a two-way identification between sex and conquest. Sexual violence and coercion is perpetrated disproportionately against more disempowered groups and women, such as the racially or colonially oppressed, working-class, disabled, gender-nonnormative, and children (see ONS 2018). Sexual assault occurs both so that women and especially women from these groups remain disempowered and because they are more vulnerable to it due to disempowerment.
But with systematic degradation, sexual assault and attempts to remove control of women’s bodies comes resistance, as we’ve seen with recent movements against sexual harassment and gendered violence in recent years.
Trans subjugation
Alienation within capitalism and naturalisation by heteronormativity gives rise to reductive and instrumental conceptions of gender. Our bodies are reduced to vessels for intertwined sexuality, power, and the labour of social reproduction, whether waged or otherwise. These are differentiated across gendered lines, coming to comprise the essence of gender. As such, the acts of transitioning and gender nonconforming are often perceived as a means to an end in one of these three areas. Due to biological essentialism, this is perceived as both chosen and transgressing for trans people, the opposite of cis gender-conforming people, for whom it is inevitable and natural. Trans people are perceived as overstepping the lines of acceptable combinations of sexuality, power and labour and in doing so violating the gender order, and violating others’ combinations of these three characteristics. This contributes to the sexualised, violent, debasing and marginalising nature of much transphobia.
Trans men, gender nonconforming and lesbian women, and women entering traditionally male areas or workforces are therefore often seen as threatening male power. Violence, sexual violence and degrading treatment seeks to punish them and restore their status as disempowered women, as with the rise in rape and violence against women in India as women enter male-dominated workforces (Bassi 2016; Kapur 2012/2021).
Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl (2007/2016, pp. 11–15) views transphobia as psychologically motivated by insecurity about the pressure and desire to live up to gendered practices and ideals, heightened by doubts cast on these ideals through apparent subversion. By belittling the authenticity of trans or nonbinary people, transphobia asserts the cis perpetrator’s gender as real and natural.
Significant rises in violence against trans people happen in this context: an increasing proportion of the population are (openly) trans, combined with pervasive anxieties about masculinity, the growth of the hard right, and the disorientation of some on the left. Such anxieties are partly driven by women entering traditional male spaces and by jobs or pay becoming more insecure which undermines the possibility of fulfilling “male breadwinner” ambitions. As with transphobia, similar oppression can apply to cis gender-nonconforming people: for example very feminine or female-presenting cis men, despite their not identifying as trans. As with cis women, rape, violence or debasing treatment are easier to commit because of the disempowerment of trans people, while such treatment serves to reinforce their subjugation.
Trans women are seen as aiming to be sexualised as objects of desire for men. The fact that women have less power and are otherwise disadvantaged, but are seen as motivated by, behaving or even existing for men and men’s desires, makes this seem the only plausible reason why trans women would have chosen to transition (Serano, pp. 4, 253–271). Trans women are thus seen as challenging the glorification of masculinity and choosing to be sexually objectified by men (ibid., pp. 5,15–20). Sexualisation, combined with perceived male traits, means they are seen as intentionally threatening men’s heterosexuality, by deception (ibid., pp. 4, 14–15, 36–38). Euphemistic “misrepresentation” of genitals condemns trans women (as all trans people) as deceivers. This is the case whether a trans woman “passes” as a (cis) woman initially and are later discovered to be trans, or whether she doesn’t pass and is instead perceived to be failing in her attempt at pretending to be be a woman — although the exact experiences of harassment can differ.
The recent far-right and sensationalist media campaign against “Drag Queen Story Hour” built on such transphobic tropes to portray a drag queen as a paedophile and a child groomer. She was DBS-checked, reading non-sexual but LGBTIQ-inclusive stories to children, while wearing a sparkly, silly and non-sexual costume. They ignored this reality: why would anyone cross-dress if not for sex?
Heteronormative understandings of sex assume two cisgender people. Falling outside the heteronormative model, trans people are often perceived and portrayed as sexually undesirable or as sexual deviants (ibid., pp. 38–9, 44, 154), and marginalised, persecuted, attacked, or subjected to “corrective rape” for their assumed sexual deviations. Transphobia and homophobia are intimately related, as are queer sexualities with gender non-conforming presentation and trans or nonbinary identities. Stonewall (2017) found that 18% of trans people experienced hate crimes due to “perceived or actual sexual orientation” within the previous year. In nineteenth century western cultures women and men with same-sex attractions were categorised as “sexual inverts” with physiology, behaviour and “souls” of the “opposite” sex. Comparable ideas have appeared across many contemporary and historical societies. While this was superseded in the late nineteenth century by conceptions of “homosexuality”, it was not until the 1940s that identities based on deviant sexuality and on (other) gendered practices and identities began to diverge (Sears 2017).
That trans women are perceived as being or attempting to be women further legitimates violence, objectification, and sexual violence against trans women; “choosing” to be women is seen to be inviting sexual objectification, harassment and assault (ibid., pp. 4, 253–271). The lust for penetration is understood by large swathes of society to exonerate men of harassment and assault, something we can see in the way that perpetrators of violence against both trans and cisgender women are often treated by criminal courts, and the courts of public opinion. Men are understood as innately driven by sexuality; women as sexually manipulative.
“[S]ex-negativity paired with sexualisation” within neoliberal capitalism creates obstacles to “positive sexual experience” (Sears 2015), particularly for women, LGBTIQ people, and especially trans women — as well as contributing to their wider oppressions.
As the labour of social reproduction is strongly differentiated and valued on gendered lines, people who don’t fit into or transgress traditional genders, such as nonbinary or trans people respectively, are widely excluded, facing serious poverty and deep isolation. This can be seen in the exclusion from and difficulty faced by many trans people in traditional sites of both profit-making for the ruling class, work; and performance of domestic labour, families.
Exclusion throughout the labour-market combined with sexual objectification disproportionately pushes trans people and especially trans women towards sex work, a more risky type of work than most. In sex work trans women face particular dangers from heterosexual men — many of their clients — as social stigma encourages transphobic violence to reassert these men’s heterosexuality.
Trans women as women
Although there is commonality in the experiences and struggles of all trans and nonbinary people, they are discriminated against in different ways and for different reasons, with trans women often treated even worse, experiencing strong commonalities with the oppression of cisgender women. It’s important to understand this specific form of oppression, both to tackle it and because it is central for understanding the relationship between trans and women’s rights, for example concerning women’s spaces.
I now briefly recap the dynamics behind the oppression of women. Within capitalism, women perform disproportionate domestic labour and the labour of generational reproduction, while men perform disproportionate wage labour and the labour of creating the ruling-class’s profit. Thus men provide more material requirements for domestic labour within the family context. Systems of oppression are encouraged which disempower women and prevent them from directly making demands of men which would indirectly make demands of and diminish the ruling class’s profit. These involve debasing treatment, discrimination, violence, institutional oppression and sexual harassment and assault. Differentiation of type and organisation of labour reproduces ideas and experiences of men and women as fundamentally contrasting types of people doing different types of activities in separate spheres, behaving, presenting and identifying differently.
It is clear that although on a systemic level women’s oppression latches onto women’s reproductive biology, on an individual level the pivots, the aspects of the person that the oppression acts upon are varied and are generally not (directly) biological sex or genitalia — either at that moment or at birth. Often, differential treatment and oppression are based on perceived or actual gender, gender identity, gendered practices and gender presentation, or some combination of these. These may be associated with a particular biological sex, but such perceptions are often inaccurate and oversimplify reality.
The necessity of some division of labour on the basis of roughly dimorphic biology for a brief period during generational reproduction is used to construct wider systems of differentiation and oppression which benefit the ruling class: biology of women as a group facilitates their oppression, but it is not the root cause or central drive. As explained, the core drive behind women’s oppression is the ruling class seeking to maximise appropriated profit: division of labour, specific family forms and women’s oppression are a resolution of contradictory interests in their drive to do so.
Biological differences are a material precondition for women’s oppression, differentiation and gender construction, as well as a direct factor in these, but cannot be considered abstracted from wider social-systems such as particular class societies (Vogel 1983/2014, pp. 147–8). The timespan around pregnancy (and breastfeeding) is comparatively short, but it is advantageous for the ruling class if division of labour is extended further, so functioning reproductive biology cannot directly be the means through which this differentiation and oppression happens. Instead, people are organised into gender categories based on or associated with assumed reproductive biology. In most cases individuals keep the gender initially assigned on this basis, broadly conforming to gendered expectations, and initial categorisation of their reproductive biology is “correct”.
Capitalism and heteronormativity encourage construction of differentiated and generally easily identifiable gender categories with associated practices and presentations; this in turn treats, restricts and oppresses people according to the box they have been placed in, their gendered behaviours, or how they appear.
Cis women are very diverse, and women’s oppression is both an imprecise composite and most beneficial for capitalism if it has a wide scope, applying to all or almost all women. As such it does not precisely and decisively target all and only women on any single basis: potential reproductive capabilities, genitalia, chromosomes, or hormones. However, women who are infertile are still oppressed as women; facing discrimination, harassment and violence, despite individually lacking a material precondition for the development of society-wide gendered oppression. Likewise, women’s genes, hormones, genitalia or birth certificate are not generally known or checked before men sexually harass them or employers discriminate against them.
Men, women and nonbinary people are victimised on the grounds of “femininity” (feminine presentation and behaviour), reinforcing perceived superiority of masculinity and maleness over femininity and femaleness (Serano 2007/2016, pp. 6–7, 14–16). Feminine boys are bullied much more than unmasculine (but not feminine) boys, and trans women are disproportionately targeted amongst trans people: femininity is a central reason for their oppression beyond and distinct from transgressing gender norms (ibid., pp. 3–4). Cis men working in traditional “women’s jobs” face worse pay than in “men’s jobs”, even if they tend to be paid better than women in the same job (ONS 2017). Even when not perceived as women, in all these cases people face oppression for taking on characteristics associated with women. Likewise, transfeminine people — including individual trans women who may not generally “pass” (i.e. be perceived as cis women) — face most of the oppressions that cisgender women face.
The oppressions of working-class and ruling-class women develop strong social and political components from different economic foundations. These intertwine and develop a life of their own, oppressing women from any class background. Similarly, while the reproductive biology as a whole of those gendered as women is a material precondition for this oppression, the oppression develops significant independence and oppresses all women — and those perceived as women or feminine — irrespective of specific biologies.
Through identifying as women and often embracing some associated behaviour and ways of presenting, trans women face oppression as women — including those who have had no medical support in transitioning — as well as transphobia. Trans women are victims of more harassment, violence, sexual violence and poverty than cis women, trans men or nonbinary people (Serano 2007/2016, pp. 14–16).
Understanding the roots of gendered oppression gives us the tools to build an inclusive and broad movement for our liberation. Feminists, gender non-conformists and trans activists have a strong basis for common cause in the struggle against oppression and the fight to overthrow capitalism, something that we can only do together.
Footnotes
[1] See Vogel (1983/2014, p. 176). It is sometimes believed that technological advances of capitalism will do away domestic labour, or indeed all labour, through automation. Vogel (ibid.) does not engage with this, although it is discussed by Thomas and Postone (2016), albeit with a focus on wage-labour. Technological advances, in increasing the productivity of a given quantity of labour-power, reduce the costs of production and consequently the cost of both reproduction of labour-power and sustaining individuals partaking in domestic labour. Therefore, it is still profitable for the ruling class to make use of both wage-labour and domestic-labour.
[2] Schematic of some key causal relations behind different forms of gendered oppression.
A → B means that A is an impetus behind the rise or recreation of B: double-lined arrows are central impetuses, in most cases necessary condition for B to come about, while dotted arrows are less significant but still comparatively powerful factors. There are many more causal relations than could be conveyed on here. In most cases, and especially with central impetuses, A (e.g. capitalism/sex binarism) recreates B (e.g. women’s/intersex oppression respectively) largely to reinforce A, and thus there is weaker reverse causality, or dynamic two-way relations. (A notable exception is that heteronormativity comes about because capitalism facilitates increased sexual freedom, largely to regulate and thus decrease sexual freedom: A causes B and then A and B cause C which serves to undercut B.)
