Social reproduction and the roots of transphobia

Submitted by AWL on 13 September, 2022 - 11:28 Author: Zack Muddle
Trans rights protest

Substantially longer version of this piece here


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. 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 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. It is also a reality in which trans rights are not in conflict with the rights of (cis) women.

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.

Reproduction of society

All societies require human labour. People labour to create things which satisfy human needs and desires — “use values”. The capacity to do this work we call “labour-power”.

“Social reproduction” refers to all the processes whereby a society reproduces itself. Workers need to eat, sleep and rest, and to be looked after when sick. As well as the day-to-day things we do to meet our needs, such as eating and healthcare, 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 make up the “reproduction of labour-power”. One aspect of this is biological reproduction, including pregnancy, childbirth and (historically) breastfeeding.

Humans are to first approximation sexually dimorphic. Sex isn’t a simple binary, however, and human sexual dimorphism isn’t as tidy as many people think. Crucially, 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 further still.

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 gendered division of labour.

Class societies

In class societies, the ruling class controls both the raw materials and the tools we need to produce things. 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.
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. And so the reproduction of labour-power incurs both short-term costs and long-term benefits to the ruling class.

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 tend to take greater responsibility for providing material goods for them when they are less able to work. These individuals are disproportionately people whose reproductive biology precludes them giving birth or breastfeeding: generally, men. In theory, these biological differences 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, and built into family structures.

Genders of people are constituted, reconstituted, and reinforced on the basis of 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 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.

Women disproportionately take responsibility for all types of domestic and carework, while men generally provide more material requirements for these processes — food to be cooked, shelter, and other goods or the money to buy these. Men, therefore, acquire more of the means of subsistence directly through work for the exploiting class, while women often rely on male family members for these 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. Where women demand more, they stake a claim to part of the ruling class’s spoils. 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.

Capitalism

Under capitalism, the ruling class’s drive to increase profit propels it to organise production under its direct control. Historically, this led to the division by which wage-labour takes place in the workplace and domestic-labour in the home; a division that continues to create rifts between the two forms of labour — performed at different times, in different places, experienced differently. It has also led to a deep-seated ideology surrounding two “separate spheres”: domestic vs. wage labour; private vs. public; family vs. work; “free time” vs. working time; women vs. men.

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.

Capital’s profit motive and cut-throat competition demands dynamism and readily available workers who can be deployed in whatever the latest profitable sector may be. In theory all workers should be equal — or equally exploitable — but this conflicts with capital’s need for a divided working class, hence anti-migrant, racist and other politics designed to sow division.

At the same time, capitalism cultivates ideologies proclaiming human equality and democratic rights. Mismatches between false promises of equality and reality — and sexist ideas to justify this mismatch — intensify the experience of oppression. As such, gendered oppression can sometimes appear more severe or fundamental than class exploitation, as class exploitation is ideologically built into the promise of equality under the guise of “equal opportunity”. And so capitalism lays the ground for movements for gender equality to emerge; these have often won important steps forward.

Fundamentally though, the costs of eliminating domestic labour are too great, and it will remain in the ruling class’s interest for domestic labour to be disproportionately performed by women. 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.

Queer oppression

The advent of capitalism and 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.

As we’ve seen, however, it suits capital to maintain and regulate gender roles to ensure social reproduction and maximise profit. So, as non-conforming gender minorities came into view, it precipitated a host of restrictive legislation and moral panics. And, on the one hand, we see the emergence of a new, gender-policing social order, but, on the other, new gender identities and resistance were also emerging for the first time.
“Heteronormativity”, too, emerged via attempts to regulate the queer lifestyles inadvertently permitted by capitalism.

Heteronormativity makes specific forms of intimate relations, family, gender, and the gendered division of labour all seem natural, eternal and necessary.

Workers “own” our bodies and “freely” choose or consent to wage-contracts, but are systemically compelled to sell our labour-power to survive. Workers are compelled to work as a means to an end; they do not control 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 from their work, from themselves and each other.

Sexuality, too, becomes associated with compulsion and dispossession; alienated and a means to an end. It is often used instrumentally as a form of escapism, or to obtain sustenance, companionship, shelter, and sometimes money.

Trans oppression

Under capitalism, then, both sexuality and gender are instrumentalised, and heteronormativity makes this seem natural. Heteronormativity does this by promoting (biological) “gender essentialist” assumptions: that 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 biological sexual dimorphism and neat alignment between individuals’ biological 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 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 is one of the basic categories of many of these.

This creates institutional erasure: 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 a 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 this 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. The promotion of over-simplistic ideas about biological sex, and shoe-horning of individuals into two neat biological categories helps to neutralise the threat to a rigid biological binary world view.

These oppressions 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 by maintaining a restrictive and oppressive gender order.

Trans equality?

Capitalism’s systemic potential for greater equality, and ideologies and movements proclaiming human rights apply to LGBTIQ 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. 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.

Capitalism continues to drive processes which limit sexual freedom, however, and while heteronormativity has expanded 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, most significantly around the ability to be “family people” — via gay marriage, for instance.

With this, sexuality-based and gender-based identities and oppression have increasingly diverged. From the origins of 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, if not acceptance. We have faced — and are building the struggle against — more specific, and often heightened, oppression and discrimination. This includes attempts by the 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 their subjugation 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 at the foundation of contemporary society into view.

Forms of subjugation

To maintain their hegemony, the ruling class must perpetually take away workers’ control of their bodies. 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. This is intertwined with heteronormativity. Compulsion combined with ideas of two “opposite” genders helps to polarise men and women 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 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 underpaid and disproportionately undertaken by women, especially women of colour and migrant women.

The different types of activities and work we do affects our sense of our own and other people’s (gendered) bodies. In the UK men comprise 90% of “process, plant, and machine operatives” and people in “skilled trades occupations”, while women work 78% of “caring, leisure and other service occupations” (ONS, 2017). Within “office work”, “administrative and secretarial occupations” are disproportionately done by women, while “associate professional and technical occupations” are disproportionately done by men.

In unpaid work, UK women perform more than twice as much child care and laundry as men on average, and approximately twice as much housework and cooking (ONS, 2016). 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. Of parents with dependent children, fathers are disproportionately in work, not homeworking and without special working arrangements.

Men experience more wage-labour, and in the domestic realm have more of their bodily requirements cared for by others, and the same time as spending more time subject to work-discipline. Men are by the same token disproportionately directly dependent on wages, and spend more time subject to work-discipline, keeping working-class men disempowered.

These specific forms of alienation mean that 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. Women perform more caregiving, so tend to know sexuality less narrowly, 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. 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. Sexual assault occurs both so that these groups remain disempowered and because they are disempowered and more vulnerable to it.

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 gives rise to reductive and instrumental conceptions of gender. Our bodies are reduced to (intertwined) sexuality, power, and labour. Differentiated across gendered lines, these constitute the essence of gender. The acts of transitioning and not conforming are often perceived as a means to an end in one of these three areas. Due to biological essentialism, being trans — overstepping the lines of sexuality, power and labour, and thereby violating the gender order — is seen as something that trans people choose to do, whereas the behaviour and identification of cis gender-conforming people is perceived as inevitable and natural. This contributes to the sexualised, violent 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.

Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl (2016), views transphobia as psychologically motivated by insecurity — about the pressure 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.

A rise in transphobic violence is occurring in a context of increasing numbers of openly trans people, widespread anxieties about masculinity, and the growth of the far right.

Trans women are seen to want to be objects of desire for men. The fact that women have less power and are otherwise disadvantaged, but are seen as existing for men and men’s desires, makes this seem the only plausible reason why trans women would have chosen to transition. Sexualisation, combined with perceived male traits, means they are seen as intentionally threatening men’s heterosexuality, by deception. 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.
Falling outside the heteronormative binary, trans people are often portrayed as sexually undesirable or as sexual deviants, and marginalised, persecuted, attacked, or subjected to “corrective rape”. Transphobia and homophobia are intimately related in that transphobia is often motivated by perceived (deviant) sexual orientation.

Being perceived as or attempting to be women further legitimates violence, objectification and sexual violence against trans women — “choosing” to be women is seen to be “inviting” that. 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.

People who don’t fit into or transgress traditional genders are widely excluded, facing serious poverty and isolation. This can be seen in the exclusion from 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.

Trans women as women

It is clear that although on a systemic level women’s oppression latches onto women’s reproductive biology, on an individual level 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.

Capitalism and heteronormativity reinforce differentiated and easily identifiable gender categories with associated practices and presentations; this in turn restricts and oppresses people according to the box they have been placed in, their gendered behaviours, and 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. 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” — taking on characteristics associated with women — reinforcing perceived superiority of masculinity and maleness over femininity and femaleness. 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.

Through identifying as women and often embracing some associated behaviour and ways of presenting, trans women face most of the oppressions cis women face — including individuals who do not always “pass” as (cis) “women” — as well as transphobia. This means that trans women are victims of more harassment, violence and poverty than cis women, trans men or nonbinary people.

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.

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