We enter Pride month during an unprecedented array of attacks on trans people and LGBTQ+ people in general. Below we print a version of a June 8 talk by Clare Fester, a resident of Glendale, Los Angeles, where anti-trans forces recently clashed with supporters at a local school board. She discusses the transphobic movement from mainstream politicians to fascist groups, and notes what is needed for a stronger resistance.
Pride month has a different tone this year compared with years past. The attacks on trans people have become so acute that the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ organization in the country, recently declared a “state of emergency” — something it has never done before. From New York to California, a shocking number of Pride flags have been vandalized this year. We can expect the crisis to continue as we get closer to next year’s election, as both Trump and DeSantis have made it clear that transphobia is going to be a rallying point for the Republicans.
I live in a relatively liberal area of LA and earlier this month my local school board in Glendale held its regular annual meeting to recommit to their Pride curriculum. Transphobes, the Proud Boys, and other right-wing forces orchestrated a protest against the vote. The crowd included local parents, but the group was largely made up of people who neither live in the area nor have children at schools in the district. They are essentially professional transphobes who tour around disrupting LGBTQ+ events and initiatives.
There was a lively counterprotest supporting the vote, and lots of parents and community groups have now popped up to defend the curriculum, which is encouraging. The neighborhood is about a third Armenian and some conservative families in this community are a potential audience for arguments that claim being transphobic is a way to protect children. Hearteningly, Armenian LGBTQ+ people and organizations in Glendale are fighting these ideas inside their community and pushing back against the right’s misinformation.
Nationally, Target pulled their Pride month clothing line in some parts of the country because the right were not only threatening to boycott the store, but were physically threatening Target workers as well. Around the country drag storytimes are being disrupted and protested by the right — this has even spread to New York, where some of the counterprotests/story hour defenses have been led by United Against Racism and Fascism, a group that some Marx21 members helped found.
There are many transphobic propaganda campaigns, protests, laws, and violent events happening around the country, but these few examples are important for two reasons: they tell us that the transphobia is not only isolated in right wing enclaves in red states, it is happening more broadly. Even if it is a small minority showing up in New York and LA and they don’t represent a mass movement at this time, this is not an issue that can be ignored in blue states. Second, the attacks on the Target Pride product line and things like drag storytime in public libraries, or Pride content in schools, is not only a single-issue attack on trans people (which would be bad enough), it is an attack on LGBTQ+ rights in general. The right was calling to remove all the Pride items from the store and the curriculum. For them, transphobia is a wedge they can use to open the door for a wider attack.
The making of the conservative transphobic movement
After same-sex marriage was won in 2015 the right went looking for a new issue to re-energize its base, both in terms of votes and donors. They started with a handful of attempts at bathroom bans — in 2016 North Carolina infamously introduced the first transphobic bathroom bill, which in the end backfired. The legislation garnered a backlash not just from the left but more broadly, with many celebrities and corporations making a public fuss about it. They had to rescind the bill.
Conservatives went back to the drawing board again. They polled people to see if and how transphobia could be used as an effective mobilizing tool, hoping to avoid the pitfalls of the bathroom bill. The polling found it was significantly more popular to attack trans girls in sports, especially if framed around boys competing in girls’ spaces. Much contemporary transphobia is integrated with paternalistic ideas about protecting women and children — as if the right cares about that in any other context! The hypocrisy is obvious whenever there is a mass shooting — the right is silent about children being murdered, yet they are vocal about trans kids.
In 2020 Nebraska became the first state to ban trans girls participating in women’s sports. This is the same reason the issue has become such a flashpoint in public libraries and schools: the transphobia is primarily concentrated around children. Most moral panics have an element of this, with overtures at protecting young, impressionable people from perceived deviant, society-destroying practices. In fact, today’s transphobia shares many features with an earlier period of homophobia, including false ideas about the grooming and sexualization of children, or ideas about queer people trying to “recruit” school-age children.
The transphobic movement amped up even more when Trump lost the election. With the Democrats back in charge of the House, the right grew yet more defensive. Since then at least 20 Republican states have passed laws attacking medical care, sports teams, drag storytimes, and how gender may be discussed in schools. In 2021 Arkansas passed the first law preventing access to gender affirming care for minors. More than 150 bills to restrict trans people in some way were filed in state legislatures last year, the highest number ever in American history.
The legislative attacks are horrifying both because they have real, measurable effects in terms of accessing care and resources, and for the exclusion and stigma they entrench. A Trevor Project survey last year that found more than half of trans young people in the country had seriously considered suicide.
What is striking about this creation of a transphobic voting and donating bloc is its cynicism. Although its architects are already sexist and homophobic, this coordinated attack is not primarily rooted in deeply held or felt popular ideas about gender — which could be argued with on scientific grounds about the diversity of biology and the falsity of binaries. These conservative politicians will attach themselves to any hateful persecution of a vulnerable group, even if that issue is not central for them, if they think there is capacity to cultivate a movement of votes and donors that can benefit them. They are now contributing to and being pulled rightwards by a visible far-right.
Far-right and fascist transphobia
The mainstream right’s creation of this transphobic base is becoming increasingly dangerous not only due to what is being handed down in state legislatures, but because it is now manifesting as more serious intimidation and violence in the streets that is led by more extreme elements — including fascists.
Socialists understand that capitalism regulates and controls gender. This is rooted in forcing one gender to do all the unpaid domestic and care-related labor. Everything that falls outside the gender binary — like queerness or transness — has to be policed in order to keep the system running. Sexism and homophobia have evolved in different ways over time and struggle from below has won many concessions. While still relying on sexism, large portions of the ruling class were happy to placate the women’s movement with legal abortion, while simultaneously making it difficult for poor women and women of color to access. Similarly, as popular attitudes changed, the establishment was willing to accept same-sex marriage to appease activists and integrate a layer of middle-class gay people into capitalist normality.
But these changes were never accepted by a far-right minority. For them, transphobia is a tool to recruit to a much bigger project. Fascist ideology is based on extreme and naturalized ideas of hierarchy. To grow up with a clear and unequal gender dynamic underlies their entire mythological belief system justifying inequality and oppression. Indeed, the fascist focus on gender has precedent. Many of the books burned in Nazi Germany came from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Jewish sexologist whose Institute of Sexual Studies was the first clinic in the world to provide gender affirming surgeries.
Today there isn’t a mass street movement of fascists committing transphobic violence. Although the Glendale school board meeting had a Proud Boys presence, it was thankfully a handful of well-known members who did not appear to be recruiting layers of new people in the area. But we can’t afford to be complacent. By the end of 2022, anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations nationally had doubled since 2021 and participation in them from far-right groups like the Proud Boys or other militias more than tripled.
The stronger the more mainstream right wing transphobic movement becomes, the bigger platform they give the fascists. The fascists can use this opening Republicans have made to say: “look, we all agree that trans people are dangerous in bathrooms and sports and schools, let’s go protest that. And, here’s what I have to say about how a cabal of Jews controls the world as well.” For the fascists, what starts out now as “I’m protecting girls in sports” then becomes “I’m bringing a gun to drag storytime, and the school teaching Black history, and the immigrant neighborhood, and the synagogue.”
Normally these ideas are confined to the fringes of society, but they come out of the woodwork when two conditions are met: the mainstream gives them an opening and there is a polarizing crisis in society. We live in a very unstable time wracked with economic crisis, war, disease, and climate catastrophe looming. Fascism feeds off this kind of misery as people look around for answers. It remains to be seen whether the far-right will have the monopoly on answering those questions or if our side will.
Resistance
There have been high profile protests to defend drag storytime and there are many debates about tactics similar to those in the antifascist movement more generally — how secretive should the movement be for safety reasons vs. how much should it try to bring other people in? While security measures are important when dealing with people as dangerous as fascists, our best weapon against them is strength in numbers, which requires open meetings and welcoming new people into the movement.
Encouragingly, there have been student walkouts at schools over transphobia — and not only in big cities. This year students have walked out in Arkansas, Virginia, Nebraska, and more. While the transphobia feels as though it is becoming more generalized across the country, the resistance is as well. Those kinds of actions need to continue and grow, and everyone needs to show up wherever there are counter-demonstrations.
Because this is such a live issue in schools, a central site of resistance is in teachers unions. They can step forward and set a standard that transphobia is union business, it is a working class issue. Comrades in our sibling group in Australia helped lead an inspiring campaign not in schools but in higher education, they fought for dedicated paid leave for gender affirming care enshrined in their union contract — which they won! This is a model worth looking at that not only works to protect trans students, but also trans people as working people.
In American schools, education unions passed pro-trans resolutions five or more years ago when the bathroom bans were the bigger issue. They created trans-affirming toolkits for teachers and they fought to protect teachers’ rights not to out trans and non-binary students to their parents non-consensually. UTLA, the quite left-wing teachers union in LA, put out a statement condemning what happened in Glendale earlier this month. But we are yet to see a groundswell from teachers unions responding to the most recent attacks. Individual teachers report that this heightened climate of transphobia has renewed conversations around the issue, particularly because there is now a California court case claiming that teachers have a first amendment right to out trans and nonbinary kids to their parents — which would roll back a hard-fought policy.
If we can draw together pro-trans labor initiatives, emerging parent and student advocacy, and community counterprotests that outnumber the transphobes, our side will have a fighting chance at beating back the fascists and the mainstream right that feeds them. In that process we can look to a world where our gains are not temporary, and that allows us all to explore and live out the fullest range of genders and sexualities possible.
This article was adapted from a Marx21 branch meeting for Pride month, where Clare Fester talked along with Alex Adams, a Canadian trans activist and socialist in our sibling organization, the International Socialists. An audio recording is available here.
Further Reading:
Marx21 US 